Back in the day, institutions served as the central hub for students, alumni, and employers.
For lack of a better metaphor, the role that schools played was like that of an old telephone switchboard. They connected people who needed something with people who had something. (Can you guess how we picked our name?)
When your institution is shopping around for a new platform for its students and alumni, the first question on your mind is, "Will this work?"
That question is harder to answer than you might think. It can be tricky to define what the success of your new platform should look like, and to decide which data are relevant when measuring that success.
It's not uncommon for shops to pick the wrong data to evaluate the success of their new platform. Thinking that the platform is performing better than it is, they lock themselves into ongoing contracts that don't actually deliver the results they expect.
In this post we highlight four common mistakes that shops make when evaluating the performance of their platforms and how to avoid making them.
We just returned from the CASE Summit for Leaders in Advancement in New York, where we were struck most by one session—"Colgate Professional Networks: Alumni Affinity Groups Reimagined for Maximum ROI."
The gist: positive career outcomes aren't just good for students and alumni, it's also good for your institution's advancement office.
In their presentation, Michael Sciola (Associate Vice President of Institutional Advancement) and Jennifer Stone (Director of Annual Giving and Director of Colgate Professional Networks) explained how Colgate's investment in professional networks help students and alumni achieve career success.
We thought we'd take a moment to revisit why investing more in constituent career outcomes is a good idea for advancement.
Higher ed professionals face increasing pressure to collect data on the performance of our work, and to use that data to calculate their return on investment. Our directive these days seems to be "All data are good data."
That may be true. But not all data are the right data.
We discussed the topic with some of our customer schools last week at a roundtable hosted by Andy Shaindlin, founder of Alumni Futures and Vice President at GG&A. Andy raised the issue as a cautionary note about our growing obsession with performance metrics.
Anyone even tangentially involved in fundraising is familiar with this equation:
Lower giving rates and smaller populations beget smaller yields.
Small schools, be they colleges or independent schools, have to face the challenge of having a small total population every year. They learn to make the most out of what they have and develop strategies that prioritize depth over breadth.
Noble and Greenough School, familiarly known as Nobles, is one of those institutions. They've created a culture of philanthropy that allows them to be aggressive about asking for support, and they've devoted resources to nurturing individual relationships with their alumni. Their Graduate Affairs Office has also made alumni career services and networking a priority. By building a network on top of an already tightly knit community, Nobles is making its smallness work to its advantage.
We interviewed Greg Croak, Nobles' Director of Graduate Affairs, about Nobles' success.
When college and university offices consider launching a new platform or app for their communities, they’re often torn between the need to provide a service that their constituents want and the fear of paying for one more thing that nobody uses.
Too many offices have worked hard to launch a new website, service, or app for their students and alumni only to see nobody use it. We chalk it up to “platform fatigue,” the weariness we all feel when we have to sign up for another website with another account and remember another password. Members of our community, we think, already use so many platforms, websites, and apps that they don’t have room for one more. That’s why ours failed.
But I’m here to explain why platform fatigue is a myth and why platforms really fail: There’s no such thing as platform fatigue—there are only bad platforms.