In my last post I discussed how the relationship between a university and its constituents is one to one, lifelong, and often damaged over time because of the way that our engagement is divided over different divisions and technologies.
The critical failure I see right now in higher education engagement is that the relationship between the individual and the institution suffers at the transition points – when a prospective student becomes enrolled; when a current student becomes an alumnus. Higher Ed typically uses different data systems and different internally divided teams to manage the relationship at each point. This leaves a great deal of risk that data and affinities will get lost when people are moved from one stage to another. In this way our internal higher ed silos and disparate data sources are directly damaging our relationship with our constituents. I think that higher education needs to begin looking at the relationship holistically. This will require internal staff to be aware and involved in each stage of the life-cycle.
So identifying the problem is all good and well but let’s actually do something about it! In an effort to bite off exactly as much as we can chew, I’ve broken out some of the main areas of issue and have suggestions to get us started towards a more cohesive, collaborative future. This isn’t going to happen entirely overnight, but some of it actually can happen, literally, tomorrow. Each set of suggestions starts with a very doable, simple first step and grows in both scope and complexity until arriving at what I see as the ultimate goal.
Issue: Transitions from Admissions to Student Affairs to Alumni
Tomorrow: Create a list and then email it
Prospective and enrolled students will group together around like interests within the accepted student social networks you create for them. These self-selected groupings should be passed on from admissions professionals to student affairs professionals, career services staff, faculty advisers, and club leaders so they know who to look for at club fair and academic advisement. This can be as simple as a spreadsheet that gets sent out to a list of all interested parties.
This Year: Identify the leaders
In addition to the above, professionals should be monitoring the enrolled and matriculating students who are the most vocal and natural coordinators of these interest groups. These individuals should be noted as potential student leaders and flagged for contact by current student leaders. Current student leaders should be identified by student affairs and systematically passed on to alumni staff. The theory is that active prospects will become active students, who will in turn become active, involved alumni, who will ultimately be the most generous in their giving back to the university. There is no reason not to identify these individuals as early as possible and share this information with as many people as possible.
Ultimately: All inclusive, all the time
Current student leaders should be actively recruiting people for the clubs and activities before they are even on campus. All this information, right from the beginning, should be shared by admissions, student leadership and student affairs professionals with:
- Faculty, so that they can address specifics on their program offerings and even see what interest there may be out there for new and different course offerings.
- Career services, so that they have more information at their disposal when discussing career options and majors.
- Alumni, who can then begin to identify potential alumni mentors and alumni-to-student internship possibilities.
Issue: Data Integration
Tomorrow: Make a list
Think of everything you would like to know about your audience. Demographics, affinities, relationships, and anything else that would make you more effective at engaging them. Put it into a column. Add another column, label it “Lives Where”. Fill in this column to the best of your ability with what department has this information. Include everything you’d like, even if you are sure no one currently has it.
This Year: Get the data
For every one of the items on the list you’ve created, contact the people who own it and ask them to share. They might refuse or be unable to do so; find out why. If it isn’t a good enough reason, push back. If no one has the information you are looking for, identify who has the best opportunity to collect that info. Contact them and ask if they would be willing to add it to their list and share it with you. Don’t be deterred by different database systems. Data is data. It is worth the effort whether you get a nice auto-feed from one system or have to manually process through Excel. I’ll repeat that – just because the data isn’t pretty or isn’t easy to get does not mean you have an excuse not to get it.
Ultimately: Develop a universal data set
In the end we need a single document that contains every piece of data that could be relevant to anyone at any stage of the engagement cycle, along with the evolution of that data over time. This document needs to show who owns the data, who it is shared with, when it becomes available to certain parties, the data format, other data that is linked to it, and how that data evolves over time – i.e. if you drop email when someone graduates, what does ‘primary email’ become? When exactly does a student become an alumnus – (hint: it might not be graduation day). It is absolutely unacceptable that professionals in one office not be privy to information that might help them do their jobs simply because another department owns or manages that data. We all deal with sensitive information. We should all trust each other to deal with all of the sensitive information from all of the sources throughout the entire process. There are exceptions for truly sensitive data such as social security numbers, but anything else being withheld is nothing more than stubborn territorialism.
Issue: Internally Divided Teams
Tomorrow: Have coffee
How many people outside your division or department could you define job roles and duties for? How many of those people have even an inkling about what you do? Take the first simple step and make it a goal to meet one new person from outside your silo per week. Grab coffee, talk about what you do and find out what they do. Simple, but you’d be surprised how many things you’ll discover over a latte: opportunities for collaboration, duplications of effort, software licenses you could consolidate, etc.
This Year: Cross pollinate your meetings
Everyone hates meetings, so why not make things more interesting by having one department sit in on another one’s planning meeting? Swap meetings once or twice a year and you will all have a better idea of what challenges, opportunities, and projects each other is working on, and where you might be able to work together.
Ultimately: Hybrid employees
I think collaboration between people is great, but an even better option would be employees who work with each stage of the engagement cycle all year long. These individuals become a living, breathing bridge of information. Positions like this would need great autonomy and a reporting structure allowing them to push through change against the grain. This can also be extended to functional working teams between areas – the alumni career services team, alumni admissions team, etc.
An obstacle: what if the problem isn’t awareness, or effort, or silos, but red tape?
Andrew Gossen, senior director of social media for Cornell alumni, had this comment in response to Andy Shaindlin’s excellent post on whether alumni relations was a form of customer relationship management:
“A significant impediment to this is often not insularity, lack of creativity, or absence of good intention but the long shadow of FERPA. The most elegant and user-friendly system in the world isn’t going to help you any if you’ve got people in your institution arguing that any and all data relating to any aspect of what an individual did as a student is off limits because of FERPA. Sadly, many American institutions seem more worried about CYA than positive, integrated relationship management.”
So how do we address this issue? I’m no FERPA expert, but maybe that is just the thing to be. Maybe the first step to tackling that angle is to familiarize ourselves with why there is so much hand wringing over FERPA, how much of it is warranted, and how much of it could be worked through.
Truly effective lifetime engagement management is going to take time to evolve, but the first step can and should happen tomorrow. The above ideas are also very inwardly focused: improving our relationships with each other on campus will lead to improving our relationship with those off campus. My next post will take a look at what we can do with all this wonderful, timely data and shared knowledge to engage our external audiences throughout their entire lifetime.
Fran Zablocki 