"Early and often" is an apt motto when it comes to engaging students with alumni affairs, but putting that sentiment into practice is easier said than done.
Oakland University pulled it off.
Oakland's "Leadership OU" program fosters professional growth among students while highlighting the accomplishments of alumni through a mentoring program and a speaker series. The program won a Pride of CASE District V award for best student-alumni programming in 2015.
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.
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.
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.
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.
From alumni speaker series to alumni networking communities, programs that bridge the gap between career centers and alumni relations offices are proliferating. At Yeshiva University's Career Center, Executive Director Marc Goldman has focused on that synergy for years.
We asked him why it's important for career centers and alumni relations teams to work together, how he accomplishes that at Yeshiva, and what his team's metrics for success are.