The funnel is a strategy that informs much of what we do in alumni relations, advancement, and alumni career services. We use it to move people from where they are to where we want them to be—engaged alumna to volunteer, engaged alumna to donor, engaged aluma to mentor.
I will explain how it is flawed by way of comparison. I invite you to consider an alternative metaphor: the engagement web.
Launching new strategies and programs is always daunting. We often feel like we have to have everything ready to go right out of the gate. (Not to mention the fact we don't want our colleagues and supervisors to think that we're winging it.)
But in reality, we have to start with small prototypes, adjust our expectations, and test and tweak our programs to fit our audience before we can scale up. That's how Concordia College, a liberal arts college with 2,500 students in Moorhead, Minnesota, doubled its young alumni giving rate in three years. First it simply began targeting online outreach to young alumni, and then gradually moved into young-alumni-specific events, and eventually established young alumni engagement committees run by volunteers.
Pick a career services professional at any school, and you’ll find that they’re busy. Too many students to help, too little time.
Not to mention alumni. Many career services offices don’t have time to serve alumni, and even those that do often only have one or two people serving a population of thousands—or tens of thousands.
No matter how many one-on-one meetings you have or events you throw, when you’re operating on that kind of scale, there’s no way that traditional methods can help all the students and alumni who need it.
When your ship is sinking, is it better to try to patch the leaks, or to build another boat?
In higher ed, whether we realize it or not, our first instinct is often to build another boat. When our existing programming stops drawing crowds, we look for new programming to bring them back. What we should do instead is ask ourselves, "Why did this stop working?" and then try to fix it.
An estimated 67 million Americans listen to podcasts each month, and 42 million of them listen to podcasts weekly.
So it's no surprise that more colleges and universities are getting into the podcasting game, whether it's to target prospective students, engage sports fans, or build brand awareness.
But starting a podcast can be daunting. It's easy to listen to podcasts, but recording, producing, and editing one is a complicated process. That's one reason it's so impressive that Skidmore College took the leap into podcasting all on its own, without any external production help. Now, their podcast, This is Skidmore, is three seasons strong.
Alumni giving rates are down nationwide, and a majority of Americans say that colleges and universities put their own interests above their students'. Things aren't looking great for fundraising and alumni relations in higher education.
We all have our own assumptions about why it's happening. It's obvious to us, common sense, even if there isn't always the research to back it up. But in the absence of data, there's little we're empowered to do about it.
Fortunately for us, there is some research as to why alumni trust in their alma maters is failing. In this post, we'll break that that research down into five action items.
