As the UK leave the EU, this year’s CASE Working With Volunteers event took an intentional focus on institutions harnessing the global power of our alumni volunteers to create a worldwide impact.

Here are some takeaways from the impressive lineup of passionate professionals from our industry.

1. Enthusiasm, communication, and adaptability are essential when trying to strike a balance between a professional, well-managed event with the integrity of a grassroots, volunteer-led, passion project.
2. Co-creating alumni engagement activities with volunteers is worth the effort! Collaboration brings value far beyond what could be achieved ourselves with current resources.
3. Encourage authentic stories from your global community of alumni volunteers to celebrate success, share ideas and model good practice. Genuine and personal stories have the emotional hooks that will encourage more to get involved in volunteering activities and initiatives.
4. Our alumni are global citizens. We want our students (both local and international students) to become these global citizens too. Our global alumni volunteering programmes are ideally placed to build the global competencies for our alumni volunteers and for our students.
5. We should align strategic institutional goals with volunteering. Our alumni reflect the ambitions of our institutions. These are the values our institutions stand for as highlighted in our plans. We should leverage, promote, and strategically remind the key decision-makers in our institutions that our global alumni volunteers are the embodiment of our institution around the world.
6. As we work in institutions that value solid research, our research to show the impact of our global volunteering needs to be solid, empirically sound and evidence-based in order to get buy-in from above. This will enable our alumni volunteering programmes to thrive and grow.
7. How do we measure the success of our mentoring programmes? One of the measures that Dublin City University (DCU) use is the number of mentees who go on to be mentors, which is currently 15%.
8. Universities face many challenges with fierce global competition for the best talent, branding and strengthening their reputation abroad. An engaged, vocal, and increasingly global alumni body is the best way to future-proof your institution.
9. In Alumni Relations, we are quite good at measuring things like the number of contactable Alumni, events and attendees. But there is a difference in counting what we are doing, and the value of our efforts to us and our alumni. Try doing an exercise where people think of one word associated with their volunteering experience. This is great to establish the motivations for volunteers.
10. Manchester University discovered that volunteers don’t want lavish gifts, rather a personal touch. In their presentation, they talked about how creating 150 handmade thank you cards with personalised, messages resulted in extremely high levels of volunteer satisfaction. The impact was amplified by sharing a short video on social media showing the effort that went into their creation.

These are just a few of the things that I learned at this year’s Working With Volunteers conference. This was my first time at this event, however, I have attended a number of CASE conferences in my 10 months in the role and was once again struck by the warmth of the people people who work in our industry. Hearing their incredible ideas, feeling their empathy, and seeing the positive impact they make every day to people’s lives is truly rewarding.

I look forward to catching up with you all again and hope to get to know more of you as I grow in my role. 

About The Author

Andrej Dethlefsen
Marketing & Communications Officer at Aluminati

He is passionate about education, communications and community.

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Article first published: March 2020

Dr Maria Gallo, Founder and Chief Alumni Strategist of KITE:  Keep in Touch Education

I had the pleasure earlier this week to address a sell-out crowd at the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) Working With Volunteers Conference in Manchester, supported by Aluminati. Delegates came from nine countries from across Europe and beyond, and it was a high energy crowd. This is no surprise as alumni relations professionals are relationship-building specialists. Working with alumni volunteers is the ultimate in forging strategic relationships with graduates to offer a mutually beneficial value proposition.

Our educational institutions are becoming more globally-facing, attracting international students, collaborative research projects, exchange programmes, and global internships to name a few.

Engaging our global alumni is more crucial now more than ever. Apart from internal pressures facing higher education related to finance and global competition for students and reputation, our institutions have a unique role to play to challenge the anti-internationalisation discourse. Our institutions, along with global alumni networks, can educate and foster alumni as global citizens while contributing to finding solutions to global challenges.

At the keynote session that started the conference, I presented three key reasons why we need to engage our global alumni now more than ever:

Encourage Storytelling

We need to encourage authentic storytelling from our global alumni. Every one of our international students-turned-alumni and every one of our alumni who move abroad after graduation has a story to tell. These stories can be insightful and of interest to our wider institution’s community. 

Prospective students, current students, academic and administrative staff can learn from these experiences and these global alumni need a platform to tell their story.

Meaningful global alumni volunteering roles are the ideal, formal way to encourage this story. 

To do this, alumni relations professionals need to become global alumni volunteering facilitators of all the volunteering that is happening across the institution. It is tempting to be the “doers” of all global alumni engagement. Instead of coordinating all the work happening across the institution, alumni relations professionals should be the strategic supporters of this work, making sure it aligns with good volunteering practice, stewardship of these volunteers, and, most crucially, identifying and encouraging global alumni to become volunteers across the institution. This will allow for the authentic stories of global alumni to shine.

Why do we need to engage global alumni now more than ever? 

To tell the story of their prior journey during and after graduation in order to inspire others across our institutional community.

Embracing global citizenship

We want our students, both local and international, to become responsible, active global citizens. The global alumni volunteering programmes across our institutions are ideally placed to build the global competence of our alumni volunteers and students. What better place is there to explore intercultural issues, interact with people from different cultures and take appropriate action for our world? 

These are desirable skills for the labour market that has changed dramatically over the past two generations. Additionally, it tackles the greatest challenges facing our planet with 17 Global Sustainable Development Goals agreed by the United Nations.

Go to class and get involved. 

This is how I understood the advice I was given as a new undergraduate student over 25 years ago. It reminded me that subject-specific material was important, but some of the real learning was outside the lecture halls, labs and classrooms.

Fast forward to today and we find our campuses are brimming with diversity and global opportunities. Our institutions are reinforcing a global mindset for students through their teaching and learning, research, and community engagement activity. 

Therefore, global alumni networks, such as the Holland Alumni Network or the Chevening Alumni should not be feared by our institutions but encouraged as part of this global citizenship agenda. These omni-alumni networks offer our alumni abroad a gateway to participation, and, as research suggests, connection with alumni activity and volunteering. 

This may be their point of identity – they identify, for example, as an alum from Ireland, Belgium or the UK, and later through fostering their alumni involvement and identity at their institution of study. The research on alumni identity shows that alumni need to identify as alumni first then they can begin their journey as an active alumni citizen and potentially as a global alumni volunteer.

Why do we need to engage global alumni now more than ever? To foster and contribute to embedding global citizenship in our institutions, encouraging collaborations to tackle some of the most challenging problems facing humanity together.

Reflecting Our Ambitions

Finally, our global alumni reflect the ambitions of our institutions. These are the values our institutions highlight in strategic plans and have emblazoned across their promotional materials. We should leverage, promote and strategically remind the key decision-makers in our institutions that our global alumni volunteers are the embodiment of our institution around the world. We need rigorous stewardship plans to ensure our global alumni are involved in volunteering that is meaningful and aligns with the values of the institution and their own ambitions.

Since we work in institutions that value research, data to show the impact of our global volunteering needs to be empirically sound and evidence-based.  A sound research base – both quantitative and qualitative – is a crucial investment if are to get senior management (many of whom are academic researchers themselves) buy-in. Case studies, surveys or impact metrics should be rigorous, reflective and ambitious.

There is a drive to think global and act local in our institutions. Our global alumni reflect our institutional values. By showing the global alumni engagement value through sound research, we can watch our global alumni volunteering programmes thrive and grow, and, with its success, the impact for our institutions and the wider world.

About the author

Dr Maria Gallo is a Visiting Research Fellow at Trinity Business School at Trinity College Dublin and a Research Fellow with the Community Knowledge Initiative at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She is the founder of the social enterprise KITE – Keep in Touch Education, that focuses on research and initiatives that build alumni connections from life for life. 

Maria is also a self-confessed serial global alumni volunteer at all five of her alma maters in Ireland, the UK and Canada. To connect with Maria on LinkedIn or visit her web site www.keepintoucheducation.com to sign up to her newsletter for alumni insights and research.

We were proud to be primary sponsors of this year’s CASE ‘Introduction to Fundraising and Alumni Relations 2020’ conference, the annual introductory course designed specifically for those new to fundraising, alumni relations and development services. The event took place in the centre of Manchester and featured two days of inspiring sessions, interactive workshops, and networking where sector experts shared a range of strategies and best practices.

Here are a few takeaways from the event:

Alumni Engagement

• Use Social Media – many advancement offices have a social media manager responsible for developing social media communications and content strategy. Messages can be highly targeted, for example at different generations such as Millennials and Baby Boomers.
• Content such as video and printed publications can be repurposed to social media content and direct communications to encourage two-way communications with your alums.
• Bespoke alumni websites and platforms can provide a trusted, branded safe space for your students and alumni to engage with you and each other.
• Measure the effectiveness of your alumni relations using analytics. Data-driven, measurable outcomes should track impact and inform the best use of future resources.
• Data helps you to segment and target your stakeholders, allowing you to build relationships that provide value to both alumni and the institution.

Fundraising

• Those that are already donating are most likely to give again, but this requires careful stewardship. In fundraising, the thank you is the first step towards getting someone to give again.
• You should embed fundraising into your university. You are not a fundraiser or fundraising department. You are a fundraising university where everyone helps with the mission.
• Traditional revenue streams are being squeezed. Philanthropy will only continue to grow, so investing in a fundraising strategy is key to future-proofing.
• Legacy fundraising is the largest and most personally significant gift an individual will ever give to your institution or cause.

Communicating with International Alumni

• Email is relied on for 95% of alumni communications. However, in certain countries and cultures, it is less effective than others. In China, the University of Manchester found WeChat and Weibo more effective communication channels.
• When sending out international communications be aware of the different time zones.
• Language barriers can be a problem, especially for those alumni who have not had to speak or read English for a long time.
• Local organisers make it easier to ensure events go smoothly.

Conclusion

CASE’s Introduction to Fundraising and Alumni Relations conference is designed specifically for those new to fundraising, alumni relations and development services, but it is so much more than that. It is an opportunity to network, share knowledge, and become more effective in our professional roles.

This is why we have formed a partnership with CASE to support their work and provide the platform for their e-mentoring service.

About The Author

Andrej Dethlefsen
Marketing & Communications Officer at Aluminati

He is passionate about education, communications and community.

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Over the last few weeks, I have written a series of blogs, starting with ‘Should you call your Alumni the “C-word”?’, which tracked the evolving relationship between students and their institutions, considering whether we should also be treating alumni as customers.

In ‘Death by Disruption’, I looked at how fast-moving innovative companies like Netflix and Amazon have fundamentally changed our service expectations and perceptions of value, and what we must learn from this in order not to go the way of BlockBuster. 

In ‘Building capacity for 2020 and Beyond’, I looked at how we can futureproof our large scale engagement programmes by leveraging technology, and recently, I presented UWE Bristol’s Success Story where they used a community platform to dramatically increase alumni engagement and propensity to give.

An evolving vision

In the early 2000s, as a graduate from Oxford, I created PidgeMe.com, an independent ‘Oxford Graduates Email Service’. Myself and other graduates, having for several years coordinated our lives using our university email accounts, were unhappy about losing this critical communications platform exactly at the time we needed it most: to keep in touch after leaving the university.

PidgeMe proved extremely popular and the model was soon replicated at other universities such as UCL and Cambridge.

As an alumnus, I observed not just the strong desire for peers to keep in touch with each other, but how open they were to other alumni that they did not already know.

This effect, I discovered, had already been formally researched by Mark S. Granovetter of Johns Hopkins University back in 1973. His paper ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’ highlighted how crucial it was, both to the individual and to the community, to maintain relationships with people outside your tight inner circles of friends, family, workmates etc.

A desire to facilitate this giant ‘network of weak ties’ became Aluminati’s mission and led to the birth of Aluminate. Initially, an alumni-only online directory that made it easy for graduates to keep in touch, it soon became much more. With a growing team of talented developers and continuous input from partners and clients, the platform soon became a powerful expanding community that included other classes of members – students, then staff, then external partners, prospective students, placement offer holders, parents, employers. A university community includes a lot of people! 

Innovation and development

As pioneers in the industry, we were innovating and reshaping engagement in every iteration of Aluminate, creating many sector firsts: the first truly peer to peer online mentoring network, the first digital recruitment ambassador programme, the first volunteer-led chapter management facility. The drive to meet the needs of institutions and empower our users led to ever newer versions introducing exciting new modules and integrations, including digital libraries, events, job boards, single sign-on (SSO). With each version of the platform becoming more powerful, despite new competition emerging, Aluminate continued to be regarded as the industry leader – the most flexible and deeply implemented option on the market. 

And then the lights went out. It has been almost 5 years since the release of Aluminate 6.

But innovation had not stopped. Quietly, in the dim glow of dozens of monitors, we were working on something bigger, something that once again would revolutionise our industry and change the face of community platforms as we know them.

The paradigm shift

When we started thinking about Version 7, we acknowledged we could keep building modules and adding ever more sophisticated ways to allow clients to take control over their varying, hyper-targeted, multi-constituency memberships with their own specific and tailored requirements.

What we knew from experience, is that every client is different, and using the same approach as before would mean we would continue to have to build configuration options for each one – meaning a long project, consultation, launch, and then trying to fit that solution to everyone’s slightly different needs with painful and expensive customisations, modifications and extensions.

So we didn’t do that. 

We went back to the drawing board and redesigned Aluminate from the ground up. We decided that the new version needed to break this cycle and take Aluminati out of the ‘engagement innovation cycle’. We provide the technology, but you, our professional engagement partners, provide the genius and inspiration on what is needed, what is being demanded, on the ground. 

Aluminate needed to empower you to take your ideas from conception to launch without waiting a year for your provider to come up with a solution that may or may not be right for you. We knew we needed to retain our most popular features and modules, but those would just be where the magic started.

Aluminate Community Builder was born. With the introduction of the concept of continuously being able to build, extend and develop the platform, we realised that it was time to drop the version numbers.

This Aluminate would be the last platform our customers would ever need.

Our dream is that Aluminate Community Builder will do for community platforms what WordPress did for the web.  

Watch the launch webinar

Over 100 Alumni Relations, Fundraising and Careers professionals attended the highly anticipated launch of our new community platform.

A replay of the presentation is now available.

In my previous post, dramatically entitled Death by Disruption and Alumni Relations’ Secret Weapon, I looked at how a focus on the customer experience is disrupting the commercial world and what we can learn from it as alumni relations and advancement professionals. 

With alumni populations rapidly growing, there is an increased recognition that a robust programme to develop sustainable communities is essential to the future success of institutions.
There are very clear reasons for this, one major factor being fundraising. Annual donations to UK universities passed the £1 billion mark for the first time in 2017 and continue to rise. This number is dwarfed by our counterparts across the pond where giving in 2018 increased by 7.2% to 40.3 billion dollars.

Peter Lock, Alumni Relations Officer at Bournemouth University, told Red Brick research: “Creating an engaged alumni network is beneficial for us because engaged graduates are much more likely to want to “give back” to the University; that could be, for example, by coming back and sharing their experiences with prospective and current students – there are no better ambassadors for your university than your alumni!”

So, how do we maintain close relationships with our growing alumni community and extract value for all stakeholders?

Keeping it personal

As I mentioned in my previous article, institutions hold a special place in the hearts of Alumni, and you have the distinct advantage of having trust on your side when asking for attention. The time spent in education is something that we remember for life, and the vast majority of alumni welcome communications from their alma mater. Decades after leaving, I still welcome the newsletter with updates and enjoy reading about what my former classmates are up to. I also review upcoming events I might wish to attend as real-life person-to-person interaction is what I value most.

For institutions, keeping contact information updated is clearly one key aspect of staying in touch.

Another more complex challenge is to ensure communications are personalised and relevant by having an understanding of the current professional and personal interests of alumni. Alumni means, interests and judgment about the relevance of their alma mater is constantly changing. As a consequence, institutions are having to think ever more strategically to extract the benefits and opportunities that will engage their largest and most enduring constituency.

The value of a network

For alumni, a high-performing connections programme provides key business contacts and opportunities for career progression through a network of inspirational alumni successes, many of whom will volunteer as mentors.

For students, this connection network can lead to work experience, professional networking, and mentoring opportunities that will help them get started with their careers. Engaged alumni also play a key role as ambassadors for an institution, helping students make an informed choice when it comes to selecting their university and specialism.

For institutions, these relationships are vital to future success in terms of fundraising, legacy, and carrying forward their social mission.

So, it is clear that both on a personal and professional level, alumni networks remain extremely valuable to all stakeholders. The challenge is how to ensure that we communicate meaningfully at scale in order to extract value from our networks.

Facilitating meaningful connections

An important aspect of any well-run alumni association is the evolution from simply a ‘provider of information’ to one which forms a genuine relationship that stays with each alumnus for life.
With tens or even hundreds of thousands of alumni on the books, and the number growing year-on-year, it is a tall order for even the best-staffed alumni relations office to personally relate to the majority of their membership.

There are now ways to achieve this using modern technologies and solutions to become a Facilitator of Connection, allowing your community to engage with one another through a peer-to-peer network. This allows students and alumni to appreciate the continued value of their shared educational experience and thus keeps the relationship with their alma mater warm.

This is the concept of disintermediation; taking us away from traditional, institution-centric networking toward decentralized communication. This concept has already changed the way schools, colleges and universities are engaging with their alumni, and it continues to shape that relationship as institutions adjust.

Technology has a big role to play in this change and presents cost-effective opportunities to scale these relationships using communication channels and platforms.

Technology to build connections at scale

With limited resources and a growing alumni population, increasing engagement can seem a daunting prospect. Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin provide solutions for people to stay in touch and even form interest related groups. However, they do have drawbacks. For institutions, these platforms offer limited customisation and autonomy, leading to reduced brand exposure, reputational risk and zero ownership. Additionally, increasing concerns over privacy and misuse of personal data are scaring away an increasing number of users as evidenced by Facebook’s US user base declining by 15 million since 2017.

The solution to this is building your own private, high-trust online space as most of the leading institutions worldwide are beginning to do. This is entirely feasible and is a clever way of creating the right environment for your worldwide alumni community to connect directly.

Over the last decade, the choice of platforms has increased dramatically, although they vary in terms of quality, functionality and flexibility. Our platform, Aluminate Community Builder, is one of the pioneers in this space and is trusted by a third of the UK’s top universities. Aluminate Community Builder has been developed in partnership with institutions to meet the increasing resources and sophistication required of alumni functions and is today recognised as the most flexible and reliable management platform available.

Once built, a high-quality online platform can be run very efficiently, providing a global community that year-on-year helps meet strategic goals including reputational enhancement, student recruitment, improving career destinations, university placement successes and support of fundraising efforts.

This January I will be unveiling the latest version of Aluminate. Sign up for the launch webinar on the 22nd of January to find out why Aluminate Community Builder is the last community platform you will ever need.

 

 

Daniel Watts, Managing Director

Aluminati Network Group