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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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How the University of Tennessee Provides Alumni Career Services for 365,000 Alumni

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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.

6 Rules of Thumb to Help Your Mentoring Program Succeed

Mentoring programs are, in part, appealing because they can offer big returns on a relatively small investment of time and resources. Ostensibly, all you have to do is introduce a mentor to a mentee and step back and watch the magic happen.

But there's a lot that can muddle that mentorship magic. When it comes to cultivating meaningful relationships, it's easy to get in our own way.

Here are six rules of thumb to help you stay out of the way of your constituents and make your institution's mentoring program a success.

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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?)

How Northwestern's Mentorship Program Goes Beyond Buzzwords

Mentorship may be today's biggest buzzword in alumni relations and career services, and hundreds of schools across the globe are jumping on that bandwagon by implementing new mentorship programs.

But not every mentorship program is an automatic success.

We spoke to Laura Wayland, Executive Director of the Northwestern Alumni Association, about the steps Northwestern University has taken to ensure that its new mentorship program stands up to the hype. In the seven months since it launched, the Northwestern Alumni Association's program has led to hundreds of new relationships between students and alumni and alumni and alumni.

In our interview, Wayland explained how Northwestern is making their mentorship program a success.

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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.

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