Many advancement offices give up on soliciting alumni who have been unengaged for decades, but not Chelsea Knowles. Knowles is Regional Director of Development for the Western US at University of Michigan's College of Literature, Sciences, and the Arts.
We asked Knowles to give us a preview of her CASE DV/VI Conference session, "The Lost Generations: The Essential Steps to Connecting Alumni Back to Your Organization."
We all know intuitively that young alumni are different than their older counterparts, but we often lack the data to explain how—or to explain what we can do about it.
Now we have some data to help.
The Alumni Attitude Study surveyed over 500,000 alumni at 200 universities and colleges between 2001–2012. The survey asked alumni of all ages questions about their giving habits and relationships with their alma maters. The data explain why young alumni giving patterns are different than those of their older peers.
Higher education is instrumental in generating economic and social mobility, and networking within higher education communities is essential to that process. Student-alumni networks promote the transmission of social capital across generational and class lines and are often just as important (if not more so) to graduates' success as their degree itself.
Intergenerational connections produce the most worthwhile alumni relationships because they let older alumni offer advice and opportunities to their younger, less established counterparts. Without intergenerational networks, resources can only travel laterally among alumni in the same cohort, and the potential of alumni communities is squandered.
It isn't easy to meet the career needs of the student body of a large public university system—let alone those of its entire alumni population.
It's University of Tennessee Alumni Association's Director of Alumni Career Services Andrew Hart job to do just that. He serves 365,000 UT alumni to help them with everything from individual coaching to access to online job boards and other platforms.
We asked Andrew to discuss the UTAA's implementation of alumni career services five years ago, the success it's seen since then, and its use of online platforms.
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?)