Ever have to re-introduce yourself to someone who you have already met? Awkward. How about to a place you just spent 4 years and $100,000 on? More than awkward, probably angering, at the very least really disappointing. Yet this is what new alumni do all over the country, all the time.
Let’s walk through the scenario (with our imaginary friend Joe)
Joe: “Hi, I’m Joe. I think your school is kind of cool and might want to go there, can I have some more info?”
Admissions Officer: “Hey Joe! Absolutely, we would love to have you come for a tour, or check out this live chat we have set up where you can talk to real students with any questions. You can also read our student blogs and experience the campus through our virtual tour.”
Joe: “Cool! I’m convinced, I just sent my app in.”
Admissions Officer: “That is awesome! We will let you know our decision soon, but in the meantime here are a bunch of resources you might find useful based on the information from your application.”
Admissions Officer (after reviewing app): “Hey Joe, congrats! You have been accepted and we wanted to celebrate by inviting you to this special Facebook group just for the class of 20XX. You can meet up with people you might room with, join a group discussion on a topic or club you are interested in, or just get to know your future classmates.”
Joe: “Wow, thanks! By the time I get to orientation I’ll already have a great group of people to hang out with who share my interests!”
Student Affairs employee: “Hey Joe, welcome to orientation! The admissions office let us know that you’re interested in rugby and chess, so we circled those clubs and where their representatives are located for club fair later this week. And since you joined the biology group on the incoming class Facebook page, we’ve pulled some materials on that program to get you started.”
Joe: “This is incredible, you obviously really know me and what I need, I’m off to a great start!”
(four years later, after being involved in countless clubs, sports, academic and extra-curricular pursuits)
Joe: “Wow, this college has really been the best four years of my life. I’ve made so many great friends by participating in all kinds of clubs, activities, athletics, and Greek life. I’m going to seriously miss this place, it has been so amazing.”
President: “Congratulations to the graduating class of 20XX. You join xx,000 alumni who have gone before you. You are all going to go out and change the world!”
Joe: “I love this place, I am ready to take on the world!”
(three months later)
Joe: “Man, finding a job related to my major is HARD. I need some help. Ugh, the email that I’ve used for the last 4 years is GONE? And so is everyone’s that I graduated with? Guess I’ll have to use Facebook to stay in touch. I better grab a LinkedIn account too for professional networking.”
Office of Alumni: “Please update your email with us by filling out this paper mailer that we sent to your parent’s address!”
Office of Annual Fund: “Give us money!”
Office of Alumni: “Please let us know what types of things you are interested in!”
Capital Campaign: “Give us money!”
Office of Alumni: “Join this Facebook group with all the other alumni from our university!”
Office of Annual Fund: “Did you forget to give us money?”
Joe: “What the heck?! I just graduated with, like, $100,000 in debt and a piece of paper! You take my email address away, ask me for money I don’t even have, and then I’m supposed to be excited to join a group with people my parent’s age in it? Do you guys even talk to student affairs or admissions? And what about all the things I DID at school, you should already know what I like….I thought you knew me, but I guess I’m on my own.”
To be fair, the above portrayal is not accurate for every institution out there. Many really great alumni communities exist and many great fund-raising campaigns have achieved success. The point is that even these initiatives are fighting an uphill battle to stay engaged with their alumni in a meaningful way.
Stop divorcing your recent graduates
From the very first day that a prospect opens your admissions materials, they have a relationship with you. Sometimes that relationship doesn’t last beyond a glance. Sometimes you date a couple times and decide it isn’t going to work. The students who attend your college have an exclusive relationship with you, and breaking it off at that point can be difficult and painful as a transfer or drop out.
Once they’ve graduated, your alumni have put in a lot of time with your institution. They have a strong affinity; you are essentially married. You both need each other and benefit from each other’s success. You have official documents that carry a lot of weight.
Then they leave.
The best four years of their lives living, breathing, and growing on your campus is over.
It is at this point that the relationship that you have with this individual is at its most critical since you initially made that contract when they enrolled. Yet, we often carelessly neglect this relationship, or at worst damage it thoughtlessly right at the point when it is weakest. We sometimes do irreparable harm that resonates for the rest of the relationship.
How many alumni are divorced from you because the relationship has soured do to overuse of asks for money? How many are off the grid since you got rid of their email? How many opted out of email because you spammed them to death?
How many of your graduates feel the same about your institution as the day they walked across the stage? Where did it all go wrong? Why did it all go wrong? When did the honeymoon end? These are questions that all alumni advancement and development offices struggle with as they try to build engagement with alumni, but for this discussion I am less concerned with
How do we get them back? (re-engagement) than with
How do we prevent this from happening every single year? (sustained engagement)
The challenge for higher education professionals
Start thinking like your audience. You see the university as:
- Alumni
- Development
- Admissions
- Student Affairs
- Career Services
- Academics
Your audience sees the university as:
- The University.
You see an individual in your audience as:
- Prospect
- Enrollee
- Student
- Graduate
- Alumnus
- Donor
That person sees themselves as:
- Themselves.
This is a one-to-one relationship, not a many-to-one relationship. When each stage of the relationship cycle is manned by a different team in a different silo with a different technology, our half of the relationship seems schizophrenic, forgetful, and thoughtless.
Today’s prospect is next decade’s donor. This is why your admissions team needs to meet with your student affairs team and your alumni team and get on the same page. Well, what are you waiting for, reach out and introduce yourselves!
The challenge for higher education technology companies
Come up with solutions that work with the whole life-cycle. Not necessarily solutions for the entire life-cycle at once (though that would be nice) but tools that anticipate the major transitions in the life-cycle and make the movement of data and services through those transitions as open and easy as possible so that loss of data and affinities doesn’t happen.
Engage people who work on the entire life-cycle, not just one area. As an outside force, you can work to build the bridges that need to be made between internal silos so that we can maintain a sustained, engaging relationship from prospect to donor without ever missing a beat.
In part 2 on this topic I’ll discuss strategies and tactics to get started with connecting the dots to sustained engagement and starting the right conversations on your campus.
What are you doing to build sustained, seamless engagement? Please share!
Fran Zablocki 
This makes way too much sense . . . . . Everything else I start to write sounds like I am bashing my institution therefore I remain speechless.
Thanks.
One of the best posts I’ve read in years. A well crafted and polite slap to wake us up and really start thinking about life cycle management.
Nice job.
Thanks, Seth. I’m really looking forward to continuing the conversation on this.
Outstanding post! Thank you for writing this, and I eagerly await the follow-up. I would love to know if what you implore us to do — “This is why your admissions team needs to meet with your student affairs team and your alumni team and get on the same page” — actually happens anywhere. Because that would be amazing, but I fear it’s rare. I’d love to be proven wrong.
Thanks, Georgy. I would love to know if this actually exists too. It is tough to imagine this happening without a fundamental restructuring of the silos. The true internal communications structure of a college is which individuals speak to each other, so my hope is that change will come from conversations that start between individuals in different silos that break outside the org. chart.
Excellent! I love that you’ve taken some of what I’ve heard you speak to over the last couple of years and turn it into a thoughtful and dead on article about how we’re doing it wrong in higher ed. I’ve stumbled across several places here where I work where a huge university conistently–albeit unintentionally–fumbles the pass from student to alumni. Eagerly looking forward to Part 2!
Thanks, Robin. I think that is just it – unintentional fumbles. There are lot of reasons why this doesn’t currently work and almost none of them are because one person or one department isn’t doing their job. We’re all doing our jobs and working really hard at it. The thing we aren’t doing is talking to other people about what job we’re doing, what job they are doing, and how the jobs relate to and impact each other.
Funny. True. Thoughtful.
This is a great piece…and an awesomely candid way to present it. When people think about CRMs many use the term end-to-end tech which is the way to think–prospect to alum–but it would be better suited as initial-to-infinite as you can’t really ever put an end to it. Can’t wait for p2!
Thanks Alex, you’re right, there is no end. In fact, the relationship extends even beyond our own time – through endowments, scholarships, and bequests. This is truly long term planning!
Spot on. And we’re even further behind with admissions communications in the UK, so most students here don’t even get that great experience at the beginning. I’ve been banging on over here for the past few years about how we need to stop communicating with our audience according to our internal organizational structures, and start engaging with them seamlessly and on a human/person-to-person basis.
I regularly run an exercise in my workshops over here with universities where I ask to think about what their audience wants and needs are – but I stipulate that this is ‘in life’ not ‘in relation to your organization’. I have never forgot (and regularly share) the experience of a group of alumni relations professionals putting as the number 1 thing that their alumni want (remember, in life, not just in relation to the uni), as to “know how to give money to the university”. I could have repeatedly bashed my own head against the wall there and then, except that might have been perceived as a bit rude.
I feel really reassured to hear you all sharing this sentiment too. Great post.
Thanks, Tracy. I picked on alumni and advancement in the scenario with Joe, but it can really apply to any or all stages of the life-cycle. It is so easy to think of our audiences as being just like us, as your example points to all too well.
What a great, great post. I’ve been trying to get this is with my own colleagues for ages (I work in advancement at a mid-sized private college in upstate New York). For example, I’ve been encouraging our new parent giving officer to form a cross-divisional team to help solidify communications to parents of our students.
As is typical at many schools, no one unit at our college “owns” the parent audience, leading to the fragmented typed of communications — and, I’d imagine, frustration on the part of the parents — that you illustrate above. We’ve made some progress in recent months, but we have a long way to go. I honestly don’t ever believe we’ll “knock down silos” but I do think that schools can do a lot of good by exerting effort to coordinate across units. Again, thanks for the informative post.
Chris, thanks for the great comment. I think you have to start somewhere, and your idea on cross-divisional teams is a really good start. It is one of the things I’ll be discussing with part 2 of this piece, which should be out shortly.
Wow, very much looking forward to Part II. And yes, it would be awesome to have a piece of technology that spans the whole life-cycle, a mega CRM. Of course, then we’d have to figure out how to put it to use.
You’re right, Erik. Thanks for the comment!
Fran- a great call for breaking down silos in higher ed. Well done! I am fortunate to be in a situation where we moved to an integrated advancement model and am a strong proponent. We are able to maximize integration and collaboration across all stages (and transition points) of the lifecycle.
Your point about audiences seeing all of us and our units as “the University” is an important one. I recently heard Don Schultz from Northwestern say that “stakeholders look at it (the university) holistically, but we’re organized in functional units.”
Another comment from your post that resonated is that today’s prospect is next decade’s donor. At a recent conference Neal Raisman (Power of Retention) emphasized that “the decision to become a donor (or not) starts before a student comes on campus” and that advancement needs to get involved from the beginning.
Great topic and content.
Rob,
It is really encouraging to hear you say that you’ve had success with an integrated and collaborative approach. Having a proven example of success to follow is key to more campuses getting on board with these types of initiatives. I’m interested in hearing more (and I’m sure others would be) about your experiences and what went into the process of transforming the silos. Thanks for the insight!