Alumni Relations

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The Missing Middle: Advancement and Alumni Relations's Ongoing Generational Deficit

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The Missing Middle: Advancement and Alumni Relations's Ongoing Generational Deficit

Advancement and alumni relations had a formula for engaging alumni that worked for decades. But young alumni these days are breaking that mold.

Their giving rates are lower. They attend fewer events. They give for different reasons, care about different causes, face different economic challenges, and have different perceptions of higher education and its worth than their older counterparts.

Yet for all our self awareness and new strategies, we're still only scratching the surface when it comes to solving the problems underlying the young alumni engagement deficit. The problem lies in how we define "engagement" in the first place.

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How the Black Box of "Mentoring" Tricks Us Into Implementing Failing Strategies

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Mentoring programs for students and young alumni are increasingly popular in the higher education community, but they're not turning out to be all that we hope they are. Mentoring programs promise to tap into the inactive parts of our alumni networks to help students and young alumni advance their careers and engage older alumni at the same time. This promise isn't being realized.

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Manufacturing Legibility: Measuring What Is Easy Is Not Measuring What Is Right

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Manufacturing Legibility: Measuring What Is Easy Is Not Measuring What Is Right

Alumni engagement is amorphous, something we all struggle to define and measure. It's also something we urgently need to measure better to figure out whether we're successful, whether what we're doing works.

So—what should we measure? And how on earth do we measure it?

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Flipping the Funnel: Engagement That Cultivates Giving in the Long Term

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Flipping the Funnel: Engagement That Cultivates Giving in the Long Term

Cracks are showing in our traditional methods for engaging alumni. Alumni giving is down, fewer and fewer think their degrees were worth the cost, and they aren't giving for the same reasons. The fundraising landscape is changing, and so are public expectations of and perspectives on higher education.

In times of change like these, it's important that we examine—and challenge—our core assumptions.

So today we consider the funnel.

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Is What We're Doing Working?: 3 Mistakes to Avoid When Calculating ROI

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Is What We're Doing Working?: 3 Mistakes to Avoid When Calculating ROI

It's a simple question that every industry struggles to answer: Is what we're doing working?

As the public increasingly asks that question of institutions of higher education, those schools are turning to their offices and asking it in turn. We've all felt pressured to answer it, expected to, as if defining and measuring intangible ROI is easy.

But it isn't easy. Many offices aren't measuring their performance at all. Many of those that are are measuring the wrong things. And that makes impossible to answer the question.

Why Do We Treat Our New Alumni So Poorly?

Why Do We Treat Our New Alumni So Poorly?

Our relationships with new grads almost always start off on the wrong foot. They're frustrated with their student loan debt. They hate being asked to give to the annual fund. They give at low rates, don't think their degrees are worth the cost, and don't think their alma maters are doing enough to help them build their careers.

To better understand why alumni feel this way, what we can do about it, and what we stand to gain by improving, let's return to the moment they become alumni. When we walk through the experience of our alumni, starting with graduation, it becomes much more clear why they resent us—and what we can do to change that.

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