Should auld alumni be forgot..
With the advent of smartphones and social networking, it has never been easier to run an effective alumni network. Edward Arden (April 2014 Associate) shares his top tips.
The season of goodwill — and enforced office socialising — has well and truly arrived. It’s the perfect time to look back (through that festive fug) at colleagues and workplaces past… In my first placement I worked on alumni proposals for Frontline, the graduate recruitment programme for social work. The first participants won’t complete the programme until 2016, which means there’s a rare opportunity to start a network from scratch and really think it through. Here are the lessons I learnt.
Identify your purpose
It’s important to be clear at the outset about the purpose of your network. This isn’t always obvious and varies a good deal. For Frontline, the ultimate goal is to help alumni to remain in social work or a related role. Universities, on the other hand, have an eye to fundraising, while professional services firms look to win new work from alumni who work for potential clients.
Use technology to help
The scale of alumni networks varies dramatically, but reliance on technology is something they all have in common. McKinsey, for example, has a bespoke alumni website offering access to events, resources and alumni directories. A more basic model may involve just a LinkedIn group administered centrally, but this is no bar to using technology creatively. Are any of your alumni whizzkids at coding? It’s relatively straightforward to create a smartphone app (relying on the geolocation function) enabling alumni to log their own arrival at an alumni event. The data from the app can then be used to generate an attendance list for the event — this saves on two laborious admin tasks.
Catch alumni early
Whatever your network is like, the golden rule is to catch your alumni as early as possible. The ideal is to create the expectation of ongoing participation before they leave the organisation: for example, TeachFirst has a single Community website which is used by both current participants and alumni. This concept of a shared community (and a shared set of values) is a powerful tool for increasing engagement and participation.
Gather the right data, and keep it up to date
The data you hold about alumni, and your strategy for keeping it updated, is critical. As well as basic information like email addresses, you may want to know about the background and career interests of individual alumni — identifying areas of expertise will enable you to facilitate professional collaboration. Most networks ask alumni to update their details annually, but chasing them up is time consuming. Tools like LinkedIn are helpful, but most networks accept that this is a “Forth Bridge” task which is never quite complete.
Listen to what alumni want
The biggest challenge for every network is engagement. There’s no magic wand to wave, but it’s worth investing the time in asking alumni what they really want from the network, and what they will use. This could mean online breakfast seminars or sports and social clubs, for example. Think about how you can incentivise alumni to get involved, by offering news, training and job opportunities.
Make sure your model is sustainable
It’s also vital to build a network that will be sustainable as the alumni population grows. It’s a compelling idea to have alumni officers who play a matching role between individual alumni and job (or other) opportunities. However, a huge amount of resource would be needed to provide this systematically over a large and growing network. Volunteers (such as cohort reps) can help to share the load.
Measuring success
What should success look like for an alumni network, and how can you measure this? Quantitative data is readily available to show how many people attend events and post on online message boards.
The ultimate goal for a network is to have sufficient momentum and alumni engagement to run by itself: the trick is to know when to step back and allow the network to spread its wings and fly — which, after all, is what the alumni did in the first place.
