We all want to find complex problems to have simple solutions.
When alumni relations and career services offices go shopping for digital platforms—or try to implement other new initiatives—they tend to try just that.
Alumni engagement, alumni networking, helping new grads find the right career—these are all complex issues that platforms can help solve but can't solve on their own.
Software can be a part of your strategy, but it will never be a strategy.
Advancement professionals are obsessed with measuring the ROI of their institution’s fundraising efforts. They crave data that will help them do that.
Those of us in alumni relations are equally obsessed with ROI, though we often have a harder time quantifying the return on our investment than our fundraising colleagues. It’s easy enough to calculate the ROI of hiring a new gift officer or running a new campaign. It’s far more difficult to measure the worth of the number of attendees, relationships, and hires that an alumni relations team generates.
Career Services and Advancement offices have traditionally been separate, neither working together nor reporting to the same leaders. That makes sense, at first glance—what on earth do student services and fundraising have to do with one another?
Well, actually, a lot. That's why some institutions are taking a new tack. These schools recognize that their role in producing positive career outcomes has a major effect on alumni giving down the road. Prosperous alumni are grateful alumni.
Recent changes to LinkedIn groups have suffocated their activity made them strikingly less valuable to the career services and alumni relations professionals who rely on them. The future of groups is still in doubt.
LinkedIn started by slashing group moderation tools in late 2015. This year, they redesigned LinkedIn’s interface, hiding groups behind a dropdown menu and removing groups activity from users' main feed. Though LinkedIn employees deny that groups are going away, the recent shutdown of the groups API further shows the feature is not a priority for LinkedIn going forward.
This guest post was written by Victoria Barthram, a Senior Consultant of Graham-Pelton Consulting, a leading global fundraising and non-profit management firm.
A range of global changes and challenges mean that our leaders have an increased expectation that every institution should be implementing and investing in a comprehensive international engagement strategy, regardless of their team size, budget, and resources.
This is not only understandable, but also admirable – education has a powerful role to play in reaffirming the core values of our global society, and it is right that our leaders are looking for ways to step up and play their part. In fact, I have often referred to international advancement professionals as the ‘diplomatic corps’ of their institutions, with successful fundraising having a direct impact on advancing the mission, ethos, and vision that define our Schools and Colleges.
Switchboard co-founder and CEO Mara Zepeda writes about calculating return on investment for Inside Higher Ed's Call to Action blog this week.
