In my first year of blogging (2007), I published about twice a week. Since then, I've maintained a weekly schedule, with more than 300 articles and upwards of 750 comments on the site to date. Here and across the internet, Alumni Futures reaches 2,160 subscribers, in addition to 1,625 Twitter followers and 488 "likes" on the Alumni Futures Facebook page. 

I've tried to address "big" topics, issues, and trends, and to do so in depth. I have also tried to expand readers' ideas about what matters to advancement professionals, and how to evolve with changing influences. 

Entering my sixth year of blogging, I plan to shift to shorter, more casual posts, some with a more personal tone. This might cost me a few readers, but as part of the site's evolution my choice is between loosening things up or hardly writing at all!

[I'm using this anniversary as an opportunity to shift gears]

My goal will be to touch on a slightly wider variety of topics in education, and to expand our idea of what is relevant to advancement.

Thank you to all the subscribers, readers, fans, commenters, followers, guest authors, clients, conference attendees, workshop members, and critics who have contributed to Alumni Futures during the last five years. I am truly grateful.

Some additional facts and stats
Since I started tracking visits to the website in January, 2008, more than 88,300 unique visitors have stopped by, for almost a quarter of a million page views. The top countries sending people here are (in order) the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, India, Germany, Singapore, France and the Netherlands. And most astonishing to me is the number of countries represented by visitors to the site: about 175 (depending on how you count them, there are about 196 countries in the world). I think I'm blocked in North Korea...and I'm still waiting for the first visit from Bolivia.

Thank you all....!

Photo of confetti by Andy Shaindlin

At first, I didn't understand the question, because it seemed so obvious to me that the answer is "Yes." Sure, guidance and input from non-institutional representatives is critical to a university's governance. But there are many benefits to having alumni voices heard around the table when strategy and direction are on the agenda.

The article (which one commenter calls "under-researched") focuses extensively on one oddly specific example: Canada's Dalhousie University in the 19th century. It's not a bad example: alumni became "an integral part of university finance" when Dal hit hard budgetary times, about 50 years after the school's 1818 founding. Furthermore, says author Tamson Pietsch, alumni later received tangible benefits from their affiliation, such as library and gym access and of course, invitations to university-hosted reunions. And before 1900, Dalhousie alumni were represented on the university's governing board.

Fast-forward to the early 21st century. Around the globe, but especially in North America, it has long been standard to include graduates in governance. Not only boards of trustees, but visiting committees and a diverse assortment of Deans' councils, advisory panels, assemblies, groups of overseers, and alumni convocations, all provide alumni input.

[Why would alumni be less concerned than complete outsiders
with their alma mater's 'genuine interests'?]

Why this is beneficial? The following reasons come to mind instantly:

• Alumni are the largest institutional constituency in almost every case. As such their potential influence outside the institution is disproportionate to the influence of current "insiders" such as faculty, students, and staff.
• Alumni are the only permanent stakeholders in the success of the institution; one cannot shed alumni status.
• Alumni benefit from the institution's ongoing success and reputation; the value of your diploma increases when your alma mater's prominence rises through its achievements in research and teaching, and its graduates' accomplishments. This is "degree equity."
• Alumni are most likely to argue for rigorous admission standards, disciplined financial management, and high academic quality. 
• Alumni have almost always been the first and most effective fundraisers for universities, and have pursued all these goals as volunteers. 

In fact, alumni associations and university fundraising offices preceded by more than a century the creation of the corresponding modern professions.

Pietsch quotes London Metropolitan University's vice chancellor Gillies as saying that alumni are

exactly the kind of people universities should seek to fill their boards, because they have the "greatest lifelong stake in the institution's reputation and its protection".

[Alumni argue for rigorous admission standards, 
disciplined financial management,and high academic quality]

There are contrary arguments. In the first reader comment about this topic on the Guardian's site, an anonymous naysayer describes alumni involvement as "difficult to achieve." The commenter's views are off-base, and therefore entertaining to quote here. Alumni, s/he says, will be

more concerned with their own standing than any real desire to help. Alumni governance would not be able to avoid this issue and the danger of passing decision making powers to those with agendas outside of the institution's genuine interests would be too great. Alumni participation in HE governance is misleading. It sounds good, but is nothing more than another example of the 'big society' trying to get something for nothing, at the expense of already hard pressed graduates. Instead universities should be looking closely at their own finances and questioning why they exist in the first place

It's hard to know where to begin critiquing this diatribe, but my immediate thought was, "Why would alumni be less concerned than complete outsiders with their alma mater's 'genuine interests'?" In fact, I left a longer version of that comment on the site.

It's not all kittens and unicorns, of course. There are instances of alumni undermining their alma mater's image (usually unintentionally). Baylor and Dartmouth a few years ago, for example. But they come to mind so readily because they are prominent exceptions to the many cases where alumni input has kept institutions stable and secure over time. A 2010 report [login required] called into question the conventional wisdom behind alumni representation, but provided the somewhat paradoxical suggestion that "the best preparation for trustees is having served on another college board." 

§

What do you think?

Should alumni contribute to institutional governance? Are the risks too great? Or is the situation different at each institution? 

Please share your views in the comments. 

Photo of a skylight reflecting concrete on the Dalhousie campus, by Walter A. Aue via Creative Commons

I hope they spur your own thinking about some of the issues. Note: I've edited the comments for length in a few spots.:  

I asked: "Is Alumni Relations a Form of CRM?" Keith Lue responded:

In the alumni relations profession we tend to compartmentalize our constituents based on demographics versus psychographics. This mistakenly focuses on who is in the database instead of why people might want to stay connected. Any tool which can help you deepen the relationships between the institution and the alumni should be embraced. Yes, as alumni professionals, we manage relationships or what I prefer to describe as facilitate meaningful connections. 

In reply to the same article about CRM, Andrew Gossen said:

I agree with...the goal of having the user experience of transition from student to alumni be as seamless as possible. A significant impediment to this is often not insularity, lack of creativity, or absence of good intention but the long shadow of FERPA. The most elegant and user-friendly system in the world isn't going to help you any if you've got people in your institution arguing that any and all data relating to any aspect of what an individual did as a student is off limits because of FERPA. Sadly, many American institutions seem more worried about CYA than positive, integrated relationship management.

 

[Keith Lue: We mistakenly focus on who is in the database instead of
why people might want to stay connected]

http://www.linkedin.com/college

and look at the business networking site's "Alumni" function.

LinkedIn launched the service in October 2011 under the name LinkedIn Classmates, but quickly changed the name "to more accurately reflect the importance of exchanging insights with your alumni network." It's possible they renamed it because it sounded like the separate third-party website Classmates.com.

Whatever the reason for a name change, here's a quick look at what LinkedIn Alumni does and how it works. 

What it Does
LinkedIn Alumni connects you quickly with fellow alumni. Why? To quote LinkedIn's director of product management, Christina Allen, "Since you have your school in common, you have a natural connection." (This is subject to some debate, which I wrote about almost three years ago.) If we assume that's a good enough reason for most people to network with fellow alumni, we can next look at how it works.

Screenshot: click image to enlarge. My annotations are in red.

How it Works
LinkedIn Alumni searches for LinkedIn members based on information you listed in the Education field of your LinkedIn profile (institution name and years attended). If you listed more than one educational institution, it lets you select which institution to search for. 

First you will see profiles of fellow alumni to whom you're already connected on LinkedIn. After that, the LinkedIn members listed appear to be those who attended during at least part of the time you did (if you've listed a class year in your profile), and with whom you share at least one connection.

You can pull down the "Years Attended" menu to search by "Graduation Year" instead.

[The service connects you quickly with fellow alumni]

You may choose to see profiles of alumni who don't include their attendance years in their profiles. It is worth clicking the plus sign next to the number of alumni found, to show those with no graduation year listed, which increases the number of profiles returned (bottom left in the screenshot shown here).

Switching to this view dramatically increased the number of visible profiles for me:

• by 45% for my graduate degree alma mater,
• by 95% for my undergraduate school, and 
• by 217% for my high school. 

At the very bottom of the Alumni screen is a button that allows you to search for "your alumni group" with one click. It won't necessarily show your institution's official groups at the top of the results, depending on the name and description those groups use.

"Hidden" Features
The service is interesting at first because you can quickly see the names of people you had forgotten about. But LinkedIn has added granular controls that make the service truly useful. However, they are not obvious at first, because of the site's design. They are:

Search by Employer, Job Function, and Location
Those blue horizontal bars at the top are clickable. For example, select "Legal" and your Alumni results are re-sorted to show those connections who work in the legal professions. And the re-sort includes the Employer and Location listings ("Where they work..." and ""Where they live..." in LinkedIn's user-friendly labeling system).

Search by Dates Attended or Graduated
Tiny pulldown menus at the top right of the main window let you set the chronological window in which you're searching for fellow alumni. Or you can click on "Attended" and select "Graduated" instead, to focus on alumni from a single class year. 

One odd, and presumably temporary problem is that the whole Alumni feature itself is hidden. As of this writing, there is no link or other navigation showing you how to find LinkedIn Alumni from the home page or from your profile. 

[It's not the people you know who have
the greatest potential to help you. It's the people they know.]

Summary
You can use LinkedIn Alumni to find people who attended any of your listed educational institutions, and can narrow the search by years attended, class year, current location, industry and company. This suggests that the service is most useful for those with a specific networking need (as is LinkedIn in general). 

But don't forget about the strength of weak ties. Your immediate connection to fellow alumni makes it easy to reach out to them, and it's tempting to narrow your search using the tools described above. But this is only the start of exploring your network.

It's not the people you know who have the greatest potential to help you. It's the people they know.

For more about the strength of weak ties, see some of the past Alumni Futures stories in the "Related resources" list below.

Overall, LinkedIn Alumni is useful for manipulating existing data according to profile characteristics. Increased access to this kind of data makes our searches more powerful. Only when this happens does LinkedIn increase its value to users. For this reason, I'm guessing that we'll see similar functionality for every kind of affiliation you can display in your profile: places you've worked, languages you speak, awards you've won, conferences you've attended, as well as your skills, groups, and associations. 

Have you used LinkedIn Alumni (aka LinkedIn Classmates)?

Is it useful?

If so, what for? If not, why not?

Leave a comment.

I received responses from several @alumnifutures Twitter followers. Some of them agreed with the idea, while others rejected it. It was also clear that people are using slightly different definitions of CRM.

Here's sampling of reactions from each side:

Some who agreed (or seemed to):

"The alumni relations business needs to spend more effort on data management. Track everything and (important) use it."

This person continued with a follow up tweet:

"'CRM thinking'" adds structure to data capture so that institutional knowledge outlasts the office inhabitants." 

"Read Ultimate Question 2.0 by @rgmarkey for a great answer to why we need to treat alums as customers." 

"It's very much like (if not exactly) CRM."

"AR is very similar to CRM. Deeper, though: Client/Rep, not Customer/Sales (ongoing, not one-time relationship)."

Some who disagreed: 

"Not sure I like the comparison. Relationships, sure, but CRM feels so...automated, not personal."

"Disagree...you can't reduce the alumni to experience to a transactional one (which is a customer experience)."

"That would be like saying Apple should stay in touch with everyone who's ever owned a Mac..."

Elsewhere, meanwhile, CRM is being pronounced "dead" (along with every other popular online tool and service, from email to Facebook).

What do you think are the differences or similarities between alumni relations and CRM – customer relationship management?

Leave a comment.

How do you build and sustain an effective professional network?

Specifically, he asked to hear from

...those who have been in the field [of international education] at least 5 to 10 years re: successful approaches...to building and sustaining your professional connections. Has it become easier or more difficult over time? Do you think the focus and context of our work creates unique opportunities to build professional connections?

This made me think about my own practice in this area over the past decade or so, and here's my answer:

I don't think there's anything unique about my profession's opportunities for building professional connections.

[This made me think about how to build – and sustain –  
an effective professional network]

For me, network-building and maintenance come mostly from the following channels, methods and sources:

1. Speaking at conferences

Presenting ideas and experiences attracts input and collaboration from people with similar problems and interests. 

2. Publishing in the profession

Writing for my peers in journals, magazines, websites, and blogs (such as Alumni Futures) generates global interaction, brainstorming, and debate around shared interests and challenges.

3. Using tools to connect with others

LinkedIn is a perfect example of a tool that accomplishes a traditional function (professional networking) in a new way (online).

4. Serving the profession

As a volunteer leader or as a contributor via professional organizations such as CASE, EAIE and other groups, on organizing committees for conferences, and in other capacities, I have met countless others who share my interest in developing deeper connections and a broader network.

How do you build and sustain your professional network?

Leave a comment.  

Image: Visual representation of my current LinkedIn network, from LinkedIn Labs. Click to view larger.