The Alumni Connection: Insights and Strategies from Experts

1. Ask the right questions to define your strategic roadmap

Excerpt from interview with Andrew Shaindlin, Vice President at Grenzebach Glier and Associates.

This might sound absurd, but the most fundamental question is: “why does your institution exist?” In other words, “what are you in business to accomplish over time?” The answer should be defined in your mission statement, and right before you start crafting a roadmap that helps you fulfill your mission, you need to determine what success looks like. 

So another key question is: “what results do we need to achieve to fulfill our mission?” The answers to this question are really the few critical objectives, or goals that contribute to achieving your mission. And for each goal, you then have another question: “what do we need to do to complete that goal?” The answers that you choose form the strategies. And for each strategy, you again ask how can we achieve or execute that strategy? The answers that you generate become your options for tactics.

The whole process of generating your strategic roadmap can be considered a series of answers to questions. At the bottom of the hierarchy, you must ask, “how will we measure our progress towards these outcomes?” And that helps  you choose the metrics you will track to indicate the progress you’re making towards your mission and all these strategic goals you’ve identified.

2. Choose the right metrics to track the impact of your alumni engagement activities

Excerpt from interview with Jenny Cooke Smith, Senior Director of Insights Solutions, Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

What is alumni engagement?

Based on the work and research of its volunteers, CASE defines alumni and engagement as follows:

Alumni:   “Graduates of the institution and others with a prior academic relationship, including non-graduates, certificate and credential holders, distance learners, lifelong learners, residents, post-docs, honorary degree recipients and honorary alumni.”

Alumni engagement: “Activities that are valued by alumni, build enduring and mutually beneficial relationships, inspire loyalty and financial support, strengthen the institution’s reputation and involve alumni in meaningful activities to advance the institution’s mission.”

When you start collecting data, you can quickly feel overwhelmed and think: “So what do we do with all this?”. Start by looking at the goals of your institution. What outcomes do you want to achieve? Once you have this locked in, retro engineer from there.

Institutions often look at data on the percentage engaged by each mode—for example, percentage of alumni who attend an event based on the total of all alumni invited. That’s important, but it is also the top level of the surface because it doesn’t tell us much. You need to ask if this percentage has gone up or down.

You need historical data to make comparisons or correlations and ask questions that will help you give meaning to your data. Many institutions started doing in-person events again in 2022. However, event attendance in 2021 and 2022 has remained relatively flat for many institutions I work with. In this case, institutions need to say: “We started our in-person events, and that didn’t move the needle. What’s happening there? Why didn’t that engage more alumni? Have they become disengaged?”

Alumni Relations departments need to collaborate with colleagues from Marketing, Fundraising, Advancement, and so on. They need to piece information together to tell meaningful stories and think about more significant outcomes.

This is a collaborative team sport. This is not the job of the “data analysts”, and it’s certainly not just the job of the professionals working in alumni relations.

3. Reimagine engagement throughout the alumni lifecycle

Excerpt from interview with Dr. Kevin Fleming, Co-founder and CEO at Prosper Non-Profit Advisors.

There isn’t a lot of research or knowledge about how the life cycle shapes the ways in which people want to engage with their institution and how they find fulfillment.

I think that institutional values should be overarching and appeal to all demographics. Where and how they are enacted can be different for different groups.

Messaging and values should resonate with all, but how people are willing to interact with the institution shifts based on where they are in their life stage.

You have to think about your population. Where are they as students? What are they looking for from their student experience? What are they looking for as alumni?

If you think about traditional undergraduate students, they’re probably younger. Some of those social components of an educational experience become incredibly powerful and formative for them—as much as or even more than the academic experience. But they’re also trying to build their professional path and connect to a robust and fulfilling career. In contrast, people at a community college might be coming back to education in the middle of their careers. Perhaps they’re taking a few classes but not a full one. They’re not a residential student and not living on campus. So their expectations and experiences are significantly different, which shapes how they feel about and interact with the institution as alumni. So the ways alumni connect in terms of the age life cycle are influenced by where and how they enter the relationship with the institution.

4. Define the roles of your community champions

Excerpt from interview with Rob Ellis, Community Manager at Fulbrighter.

Before building your community champion program, you must ask a fundamental question: “What does your community need?”

There are two ways of looking at this question.

Firstly, as an Alumni Network Manager. What do you need? This could be content generators, event organizers, moderators, strategic advisers, group leaders, etc.

Secondly, through the perspective of your community members. Ask them what they need. Perhaps they want someone to start conversations in the online community because they are too shy to make the first post. Maybe they want to see more specialization or localization in the online community. For example, Fulbrighter’s community has over 30,000 members united by their participation in the Fulbright Program. However, beyond this commonality, the community as a whole has little in common. And so our community wants to join subgroups who share passions, identities, and geographical commonalities. Our members want a space for more targeted exchanges and content.

So when determining the community champion positions for your program, you need to find the sweet spot between what you need as an Alumni Network Manager and what your community needs.

We hear the term “community champions” a lot these days, and it can mean different things to different institutions.

Many larger, traditional institutions have formalized community champion initiatives, almost like the chapter structures. This approach requires rigorous governance and employs more traditional community champion positions such as President, Treasurer, and Secretary. But institutions also need to think about how they update those traditional positions to the digital space. Who will be the Digital Communications Lead, the Social Media Lead, or the Virtual Events Manager? For other institutions, you might be creating a more casual structure for your champions program.

What’s critical when you think about defining these positions is how you will give your community champions respect and validation. They need to feel rewarded and formally recognized within the community. So if you want someone to post content every Friday and ask questions in the forum to spur discussions, give them an official title such as Content Manager—something they can put on their LinkedIn profile, and that will make them formally recognized aspart of your community. Because, yes, they’re only words, but creating a title is vital in building that bond of emotional connection and recognition with your community champion.

One thing to keep in mind is that all communities, and consequently champion programs, are different and will have unique particularities.
Don’t create carbon copies of other community champion programs.

Always return to the question, “what does my community need?” and build out your positions (and program) accordingly.

5. Make fundraising attractive to alumni

Excerpt from interview with Brandon Tabor, Senior Director, Annual Giving at the University of Notre Dame.

Growing up, movies, culture, and media taught me that donors are wealthy people. Especially in American politics, we’re told that the people that are really funding political campaigns are the billionaires who are secretly making all these political moves happen. It becomes easy to associate the amount of money in your bank account with your identity as a donor. If you have $200 in your savings account, you may feel that you’re not the kind of person who’s a donor.

We need to separate those things for people and show them that their contributions to a charitable cause matter, they belong to that mission, and they’re an important part of solving problems in the world.

As fundraisers, we have to open that door really wide for people and say, “You don’t have to give much, but collectively, you can make the world a better place. You can support the things that you care about through Notre Dame, or through your university, or through this charity, or through that nonprofit.” When they give, tell them they belong and are part of this community.

Through this practice, you can start to shape an identity where they think/feel, “I am driving change and I can be a part of this community. Whether great or small, I share in this, too, and I matter in this piece of the puzzle.” This is where building and maintaining a community becomes essential in fundraising.

Giving charitably is personally fulfilling when you know the impact your gift has had on someone or something. It’s our job as fundraisers to tell the story of that impact.

6. Ensure the value of alumni relations is ingrained throughout your institution

Excerpt from interview with Martine Torfs, Head of the Alumni Office at KU Leuven.

The university’s leadership must support alumni relations. They do understand why it’s valuable for the university strategy, but it needs to be more than that. Leadership needs to ingrain this value in the structure of the university and spread this message to the faculties, the central offices, the directors, the academics, and the students. Chances are they’re already engaging alumni in small networks. The alumni office, from their advisory and facilitating role, needs to facilitate what these departments could at first consider extra administrative work, so they can scale their work with alumni.

We do this through an inclusive and transparent system of co-creation and internal communication. We have 16 faculties and an equal number of alumni associations for each faculty, plus some satellites around them. We have set up a system where we regularly meet with all of them with three goals: co-creating vision and strategy, sharing good practices, and developing common programs and tools. The meetings are interactive, have a predefined agenda, and involve a lot of input from each participant.

In addition, there is a knowledge base specific for alumni relations and an internal news flash. Transparency is key, so that our SPOC networks are kept informed at all times and can find their way to decisions, tutorials, procedures, examples, templates, and so on.

Another aspect is the alumni platform. We use Hivebrite’s platform to engage our stakeholders, and this is a collaborative effort with faculties, associations, chapters, and academics. It’s really about individuals getting the motivation to go on there to activate their accounts and become active contributors. This is absolutely essential support for our work.

By involving all groups in this way, with a co-created strategy common to all of us, there is a sense of ownership that also carries responsibility for implementing it and building on it. Again the expertise for this is centralized in the alumni office.

7. Engage international alumni as strategic partners

Excerpt from interview with Sandra Rincón, Senior Higher Education Advisor, Hivebrite.

Higher education institutions face common challenges and demands in today’s globalized world where technology’s fast development is continually disrupting the labor market and education itself.

The climate crisis, economic instability, wars, and displacement of people, to mention a few, have brought many uncertainties to our future. Higher education as a public good is responsible to civil society in providing a positive impact and helping to mold a future to benefit all. Institutions, therefore, must invest in innovation to help create a better future and educate global citizens to bring better understanding and collaboration among countries.

Building strategic relationships with international alumni can support innovation and collaboration through diversity, knowledge exchange, cross-cultural understanding, global networks, and philanthropy.

Depending on the institution’s values, vision, strategy and social impact, international alumni can help show and be part of the institution’s positive social impact as ambassadors, liaisons, and advocates of social responsibility and innovation, study programs, research, and of course open doors for collaborations.

International alumni can also coach and mentor students and recent graduates on navigating the labor market and advise faculty on new competencies and skills needed in their professional sector. They can also help recruit international students and academics, volunteer to help build an alumni and friends community and, become donors or open doors to donors—especially for scholarships dedicated to other international students.

8. Encourage alumni to support institutional social responsibility

Excerpt from interview with Markus Karlsson-Jones, Senior Alumni Officer (Global Volunteer and Networks) at the University of Manchester.

There are two models. One is to work hand in hand with an NGO charity partner that can basically deploy the volunteers in a particular way. For example, in England, there is a shortage of school governors at the primary and secondary school level. These are for voluntary boards that meet four times a year, let’s say, and very often they’re looking for people with specific skills like a background in finance or marketing and so on. Clearly that’s something where graduates really have something to offer. So essentially, we just work with that partner. They have the placements and we have the potential volunteers, so we promote those opportunities to alumni and we facilitate the filling of those places. In a sense, we ‘handover’ the volunteering experience to that charity partner at the point we recruit the alumni to the opportunities.

The other model devolves more of the coordination down to local alumni groups. That’s how we work, for example, Manchester Day of Action. It allows local groups to choose a cause and to either find the charity partner to work with locally, or simply the alumni group organizes themselves to perform the volunteer action. E.g. a beach clean-up can often be organized simply by a willing group of volunteers. This model creates a mix of different projects in different locations. As there are much fewer global, third party partners that could centrally coordinate volunteer placements; that devolved approach is what I rely on in the international context. Also, every region and city has its different needs and challenges. So alumni embedded in those communities inform where needs should be met. There’s a two phase process whereby I invite alumni to propose to us a local volunteer project, we approve it, and then we’ll convene a group of alumni around it.

The advantage of that approach; where we call out for project proposals from alumni, is it gives motivated alumni the opportunity to propose projects they really care about and will look after faithfully. It also allows me, as a volunteer manager, to approach our established alumni groups as part of our regular catch-ups and encourage them to consider putting together their own proposal.

It’s an open invitation to anyone and we have seen alumni pop up from locations we’ve never worked with before. For example, I put a call out in 2019 and I got a group of alumni in Baghdad who all know each other. They have established themselves already as an alumni community in that city and they regularly meet up, but I didn’t know anything about it. Sometimes alumni simply don’t need to refer back to the university. They might meet once a month and socialize but they have no need for the alumni relations team to promote it. But when I invited all alumni to identify a volunteer project – they really wanted to take part – and so they put themselves on my map. Now we have a visible alumni group, with individual alumni in that city who can be contacted by alumni across the global network.

When I say this form of alumni engagement reaches people when other more conventional forms of alumni engagement don’t; those are the opportunities which come up for me as a volunteer manager.

9. Ask the right questions before starting your mentoring program

Excerpt from interview with Karen Cairney, CEO and Founder at Cairney and Company.

There are several questions that mentors and mentees should ask before starting the program to ensure mutual alignment on what the mentee hopes to get out of the program, as well as to assess the “personality fit” between the involved parties.

Before each coaching session with a potential client, we have a “Chemistry Call” to ensure that there is a personality fit and that our values and approach align.

If we move forward after this call, I ask them to share the following with me:

• What do they hope to get out of the time together?
• What inspires them?
• What is important to them?
• What do they enjoy? / What are they good at?
• What do they not enjoy? / What areas do they don’t like spending time on?
• What do they want to improve?
• What is not essential to them?
• What, if any, are their career aspirations?

These answers structure our early sessions, but each session is focussed on what the participant wants to achieve.

10. Choose the right alumni platform to support your alumni relations

Excerpt from interview with Ria Kapluck, Senior Customer Success Manager at Hivebrite.

Before you dive headlong into evaluating platform features and capabilities, you have to understand the specific needs of your alumni first.

What types of engagement opportunities and resources are most relevant and valuable to them? Are they looking for networking opportunities, career and continuing education resources, mentorship programs, alumni club memberships, special events, giving opportunities?

Once you can answer those questions confidently, then you can start to look at what’s available in the market. And if you can’t answer that question, ask your alumni! Engage in conversations, conduct surveys, and gather feedback to identify the specific areas where alumni are looking to engage.

By understanding their needs, you can select an alumni engagement platform that addresses them effectively, and your alumni feel valued and engaged.

Download the full guide for more alumni engagement best practices!