Students & Young Alumni

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These Data Explain What Makes Young Alumni's Priorities Different

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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.

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How Career Success Affects Alumni Giving, in 3 Graphs

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We make a lot of assumptions about alumni giving without the data to back them up. To help us test those assumptions, here are three graphs from rigorous surveys with hundreds of thousands of participants.

The data reveal that young alumni give at much lower rates than their more established counterparts— as many of us already know at our own institutions.

They also help us understand how we might improve those giving rates by addressing alumni's frustrations and needs.

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The Challenge—and Importance—of Intergenerational Alumni Networking

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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.

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A Brief History of Disintermediation in Alumni Networks

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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?)

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How Not to Measure the Success of Your Shop's New Engagement Platform

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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.

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5 Reasons Advancement Offices Should Care About Career Services

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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.

"It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are." —Wendell Berry