3 years on the Farm: Takeaways from Stanford GSB’s Alumni Board

Over the past 3 years, I’ve had the unique opportunity to serve on the Stanford GSB’s Alumni Board and it was truly one of the best life experiences I’ve had. People have often asked me, “So, what does an alumni board do?” “What do you learn from being a member of a Board?” “What are some ways to think abut alumni engagement?”

I wrote this post to share my learnings and also help alumni looking to reconnect more with their schools, schools looking to engage differently with their alumni, and any entrepreneurs who seek to build technology to help both. After all, Nancy from the Class of 1962 who may engage with her school through magazine letters-to-the-editor is a very different persona than Naina from the Class of ’16 who may engage with her school only via Instagram.

In fact, for most of my professional and academic life, I was hardly an “engaged alum.” Though I have been an alumnus of many systems — an engineering school in the American mid-west, an internet company that’s now Verizon, and the original Garage company, beyond a handful of folks I stayed in touch with, I rarely thought about the power of an alumni community.

My experience volunteering as a member of Stanford GSB’s alumni board changed all that.

(image courtesy: https://pixabay.com/photos/stanford-university-campus-tower-3906631/)

About the GSB Alumni Board

This Board consists of 18 alumni who guide the school in seeking to engage and serve all Stanford GSB alumni. Since inception the Board has focused on supporting the mission of creating principled leaders within its alumni base, now over 30, 000 alums worldwide.

The GSB Alumni Association Board reflects the composition of the GSB student body and the focus areas for the school. The Board has evolved since its beginning in 1960s just as the school has evolved to be a leader among the seven Stanford schools.

How I joined the GSB Alumni Board

Picture Fall 2014. I was living in Palo Alto after graduating from Stanford GSB’s 1-year Masters in Business (the Sloan Fellows program) and experiencing pangs of separation from “The Farm” as Stanford is called. Visiting campus without context just felt like overstaying your welcome after graduation. I wanted to contribute not just get a contact high on campus.

So in 2015, I started volunteering with non-profits in the Bay Area through the Stanford GSB Alumni Consulting Team or ACT, which I wrote about here. ACT connects Bay Area non-profits with alumni volunteers, from recent graduates to alums from Ernest Arbuckle’s time. I’m grateful to ACT for their amazing work and have now served as a volunteer with 3 amazing Bay Area non-profits: Global:SF, VolunteerMatch, and Outward Bound California.

In August 2015, I started exploring how else I could contribute to the GSB community.

Through helpful interactions with Raphe Beck, who till recently was Director of Alumni Relations at GSB (and is now Executive Director of the University of Oregon Alumni Association) and Mike Hochleutner, the Director of the Sloan/MSx program, I learnt about the Stanford GSB Alumni Association Board and how it was part of many advisory boards that alumni participate in. Along the way, other former Board members were also my river guides to learning about the Board volunteering opportunity.

Key takeaways

(1) Alumni engagement can be reframed as a user experience problem

This line came from Michael Lopez who was our outgoing Board president for 2018 and has served on many other Stanford Boards. Michael is a music and technology industry executive and a master storyteller (if you meet him, ask about Springsteen and Miles Davis).

Over time Boards like the Stanford GSB Alumni Board organized and re-organized their internal working groups around different areas. During my time the Board was organized into different committees such as Chapters, Reunions, Communications, and some special topic committees. Makes sense right? Chapters exist in space (thousands worldwide), Reunions exist in time (Spring/Fall), and Communications across both (physical/digital).

While acknowledging these structures, Michael helped us as a Board reframe the discussion around the “alumni journey and personal experience”. We started mapping the alumni journey as a classic funnel and segmenting alumni personas more granularly.

Schools like Stanford offer way more alumni experiences than one can keep track of because of their amazing staff (thanks Maggie Reyes, Cara Hanelin, Leslie Sweat, Coral Hunt (50+ years at Stanford), and Stephanie Frost for your leadership). Activities for alumni range from sharing faculty research and student stories, raising endowment funds, or inviting participation in class activities such as the GSB Executive Challenge — an intense annual classroom exercise involving both alumni and students in high stakes simulations.

However, as alumni go farther away from their graduation years, some stay super engaged, others totally disengage, and many do both at different stages of life. Passionate advocates are very different consumers than reclusive strangers or unreachables who may have a far weaker connection with the school. A majority of alumni have a handful of defining interactions. These interactions can range from attending local events and annual reunions, volunteering, or participating via offline and digital channels ranging from magazines to alumni newsletters and websites to Instagram and Twitter feeds.

(I’m old school. Give me a mag any day. Here are some I collected over the years)

Anyone looking at the alumni engagement problem can take a leaf out of Apple’s book. Unlike every box retailer at the time, which organized their stores literally as they organized departments (think Best Buy) Apple reimagined retail. Mickey Drexler, the Chairman of Gap in fact told Steve Jobs to Secretly build a prototype of the store near the Apple campus, furnish it completely, and then hang out there until you feel comfortable with it. Essentially Drexler and Jobs challenged the game by organizing around the user experience.

I think of alumni engagement as an energy wave that evolves over space and time. It waxes and wanes. To keep this wave more constant, one of the most powerful ideas Stanford has been scaling over the years is the idea of digital lifelong learning for a global community.

Key takeaway: To create a seamless alumni experience, start with mapping the alumni journey (here’s a foundational example for Teach for America) with a lifetime value view.

(2) Inter-generational protocols can create checks & balances and drive continuity

As a San Francisco startup professional, I was once an overzealous fan of the “fail fast and fail often” philosophy and used to get antsy about protocols. I had seen often how over-engineered protocols in a business hindered innovation, bottlenecked communication, and created friction. I’ve tempered my view on this after my own startup journeys.

While not having protocols may benefit early stage startups which are often just trying to figure out how to survive by throwing things against the wall, well designed protocols become important when you are trying to build a lasting organization.

Think about some of your favorite lasting corporate or non-profit organizations. From Colgate and Macys to Red Cross and the San Francisco Opera, organizations cannot sustain long term growth if they don’t have protocols to drive continuity.

So yes, after initial skepticism about Board protocols, I embraced them in the Alumni Board after I started in early 2017. By the time I rolled off the Board in Fall 2019, I was quite convinced that just like in democracies where the interplay between the judiciary, state, media, and the public sphere greatly matters, protocols in a non-profit Board support inter-generational continuity regardless of who is on the Board or what else the school is doing.

For example, at the GSB alumni board, there are clear protocols for building a candidate pipeline, for nominating and evaluating candidates, for advance preparation for Board meetings, for feedback on each session in each meeting, for engagement with current students, and most certainly for welcoming and saying goodbyes to Board members.

My favorite examples? Some specific exercises we did: We described ourselves in six words and did an MBTI workshop on how to work with information, engage emotionally, and act.

Key takeaway: To create a lasting organization, design good intergenerational protocols that are easy to understand and implement, and that prioritize good processes over personality cults.

(3) Hard questions are more powerful than easy exclamations to find novel solutions

For me, a primary reason for engaging with GSB alumni through experiences like an Alumni Board was that the alumni body includes great diversity of thought and action approaches. Often it is the contrarian path someone takes, the words they use, what they say, and how they follow through, that enriches discussions and helps solve problems better.

The humble question mark is a more powerful metaphor in my experience than the exclamation. The best ideas and real shifts often emerge when open questions are posed, debated, and mulled over, versus “happy talk” where everyone just agrees all the time. For difficult topics to be fully embraced, the philosophy of “getting comfortable being uncomfortable.” (punchline credit goes to fellow alum, Alex Lofton)

Asking and enabling good questions elevates discussions. It allows a solution space to open up to ideas that wouldn’t otherwise be considered. Thus, solutions for social media engagement don’t have to come only from Gen Z alums, and vice versa for engaging retired alums. The best ideas on engagement can often come from passionate alums who just happen to be disengaged at a particular stage of life. And the best ideas on growing alumni chapters, say, in Africa or Asia, can come from cross-pollinating with chapters from say, Washington DC and Belgium.

Key takeaway: To find better solutions, ask more open questions, actively seek divergent opinions, act and follow through, and celebrate those who say it as it is.

I hope this post inspires you to engage (or re-engage) with your alumni networks, support your alumni boards, and that you find these takeaways useful in your daily work.

Many thanks to all the current and past Board members I’ve had the opportunity to work with and learn from in these years including: Eugenio Garza, Sheila Dharmarajan, Michael Lopez, Michael Zimmerman, Corinne Augustine, Kirk Holmes, Bob Simon, Keith Pund, Atsuko Jenks, Michelle Cline, Lauren Keane, Dan Markovitz, Olaolu Aganga, Alex Lofton, Teri Read, Matt Thompson, Christophe Van de Weyer, Nick Mansour, Cornelis (Cor)J. P.van der Wal, P. Y. Nicole Chang, Michelle Bhatia, Gimena Pena Malcampo you are amazing.

Thank you for reading. Feel free to leave a comment, question, or wish below. I’d love to hear from you on your experience with this topic.