Alumni Engagement at the micro-level

 

A while back a tweet caught my eye that really piqued my interest. I don't remember who posted it, but it was responded to by someone I follow with a confirmatory story of their own.  The tweet went something like this:

I finished my [graduate] degree x-many years ago. In this time, I have not been contacted by my [alma matter] department to participate on panel discussions, webinars, submit updates on my professional activities, articles I've authored, write a guest blog- or newsletter-post, give a talk, facilitate a workshop, etc.

Let me say that I can totally understand! If my experience is any indication it's probably not you but rather how the organization functions.  As most blog posts go, I have some anecdotes! These are both from my experiences as an alumnus of an organization and as a staff member of that organization. 

Student & Alumnus Perspective

Let me start with my experiences as an alumnus. I graduated from my programs in 2004, 2007, 2008, and 2010 (x2!) respectively. The computer science department (2004) actually had a sort of "homecoming" even for quite a few years after I graduated.  It wasn't a dance, but rather an informal get-together for alumni of the BA, MA, and PhD programs of that department. I remember getting the notice each year, until one year they stopped. Every so often I would also get requests from the department to share achievements and professional updates.  These usually coincided with departmental review cycles. I am not sure why this stopped, but I do have some hunches (more on that later).  

The College of Management (2007 + 2008) didn't immediately have alumni reach out. After a new director was hired, there was a departmental Facebook page and many alumni were part of it.  Through that page, the CM invited us to events to reconnect, but no additional invitations.  I did get an invite from a colleague who was teaching the intro course (required of all graduate CM students), to present on collaboration technologies.  The course (and the degrees in general) focused a lot on collaborative work, and since I had a background in it (and already worked for the university) it was less of an alumn ask, and more of a colleague-ask. I am sure being an alumn helped with relating to the newbies in class. In 2008 I won the academic award (awarded to 1 graduate of the MS in IT who wins at academics, for lack of better words). It's weird that they wouldn't reach out to award recipients (since there are way fewer of us), but I digress (more on this later).

Finally, in 2010 I graduated with 2 degrees. Both programs only had Masters-level offerings, so no undergraduates and no doctoral students (unlike CM and CS). In one program I won the book award (again one student who wins at studenting during the graduating group gets this), and in the other program I got nothing, despite being good at studenting...turns out the "winning at studenting" award is only given to people who both complete a thesis and already have an acceptance to doctoral programs...phooey!  Awards are not an a priori motivator for me, but it's surely nice to be recognized, and be recognized for things that you actually accomplished rather than on things that are seriously gate-kept [most students don't do a thesis or continue on to doc programs]. Again, I digress.  For these two departments, I haven't really gotten anything in terms of alumni engagement.  However, as life would have it, I actually work with both of these departments (either full-time or gig) so I have some idea of what happens internally... 

I will say this, in the intervening years the alumni relations department has really stepped up its game.  They regularly have events, local, regional, and national, where alumni can meet, network, exchange ideas, and so on.  It's the entire alumni body, so you may not see fellow alums from your program or even your old faculty members, but it's still something that provides regular engagement opportunities, both physically proximal and virtual, that didn't exist at this level in the past.

Employee Perspective

It's hard to believe, but around 10 years ago I started working for an academic department.  the cherry on top of this cake was that I was also an alumn of that department! After learning the ropes of the core duties of the job I started to examine areas in which I could provide something new.  Having been a student of this program (and a few others at the university), my goal was two-fold:  improve the student experience, from start to end, and try to get alumni engagement. My program, at the time, only offered an MA degree, so my experiences reflect trying to engage MA alumni.

I started by trying to revitalize some communities I had begun as a student.  As a student, I had created a LinkedIn group for alumni, a GoodReads group (I wanted to start a linguistics book club), and a Ning community for current students and alumni.  The goal was for alumni to join these groups and engage with one another,...and in the process of engaging with fellow alums share information about their accomplishments, any job openings their organizations had, recommendations for PD, and anything else that came up.  I didn't have a list of alumni to invite, so I reached out to our alumni department to see if I can get a list of program alumni that I could invite to our community, create a mailing list, or get some means of engagement between our alums and our program.  I was politely declined.  Seems like the alumni department is protective of their contact lists and wants everything to go through them.  I get it, it's a reputation-related issue for the university. If an individual department stuffs up and sends spam to their alumni (or that list gets compromised by a phishing evildoer), it's the university's reputation on the line.  OK...so what's Plan B?  I ended up focusing on current students, while at the same time reaching out to my own classmates (now alums) to invite them, and have them invite their own old classmates.  This way, through overlaps, we'd start a community. I had marginal success.  In my time in the department, I've seen about 500 students graduate. Very few choose to remain engaged with the department after they graduate. Some do come back later, as their needs change, but there isn't consistency. Perhaps the issue is engaging with them on a site owned by the university that it's part of their day-to-day life rather than engaging with them where they are... In the end, neither GoodReads nor LinkedIn proved much use. I closed down the LinkedIn group because it was siphoning off resources I didn't have.  GoodReads still exists and I hope one day we can get our book group going...Ning still exists because it's part of our student onboarding, information sharing, and community building, but I am constantly re-assessing it.

Still, I wanted to give it one last try (at least for now).  So here's Plan-C. This last try had a few prongs. First, there was an institution RFI for alum information (name and date of graduation). This was easier to get than current alumni information. Using this information I could do some cyber-sleuthing and use LinkedIn to find our alumni and connect with them (and invite them to the LinkedIn group before I shut it down). This was a lot of effort, and in reality, it was hard to do that kind of "snooping" work. You can find some people, but it's a lot of looking for needles in a haystack.  Not to mention that (in retrospect) it is rather creepy...  I did create a Facebook page and a Twitter profile to share news and information about our department and the discipline and through this, I left it up to students and alumni to connect with us, rather than the other way around. On Twitter at least we can find out about all the cool stuff our alumni do and we can amplify and ♥ what they post since it's all in public [it should be noted that organizational entities doing this can still be perceived as creepy on social media!].  Facebook eventually killed our page in December 2011 for some unknown violation (which they still refuse to tell me), but I've resolved to not resurrect that. I don't have the bandwidth for it.  When I started in my department we had more staff, so it was easier to do some exploratory work and experimentation like this, today it's a bit of a luxury.

What about webinars, panels, and guest blogs?  Well, I tried getting some of these things off the ground as well! None of these got off the ground for a variety of reasons. Some of it is timing...well, most of it is timing IMO. Given that my focus is distance education, I started pitching the idea of us hosting webinars and virtual panels as early as 2012. Back then we had access to cludgy software like WIMBA and Illuminate on campus, so nothing as fancy as Zoom, but we could make a go at it - either with our cludgy software or through less-cludgy software webex and adobe connect. Getting people to think (and dream) beyond F2F panels was a challenge (and still is!).  Even in a case (or two, or three...) where a presenter falls in your lap, they still need to be sponsored by a faculty member to make things happen (and that's beyond my sphere of influence). I've had a campus event that I helped organize (for someone who had a presentation ready to go!) and it fell flat on its face (no attendees!) because no faculty advertised the event and didn't release students to attend. It was so embarrassing 😳😳😳.   Blogs, where faculty and alumni, got an opportunity to disseminate their literature and findings in more accessible ways, and an opportunity to boast about their achievements, but again - crickets 🦗🦗🦗🦗. 

I also recall a situation in the department I adjunct in: We were proposing a "capstone panel" for current students.  The idea was to have 4-5 panelists (alumni from the past 4-10 years) come back and tell current students about their experiences with the culminating student assessment (aka "capstone"), how they designed for it, the connections between work and school, and reflect on the educational journey and where they are today.  The person in charge of the department at the time said something "oh we just did this last year, we won't do that again".  Why? 🙄. Last year's students graduated.  This year there is a new group that is capstoning and would benefit from this 🤷‍♂️. Around the same time, that department had a 2-page Quarterly Newsletter in PDF form (which included alumni stories) which was student-run. It may have also been tied to a class.  Once people changed (majority adjunct department), so did the newsletter.

This is not to say that alumni don't come back to give a guest lecture every now and again or be invited to class to present a module that they've become even more expert on after they graduated, but many of these hinge upon timing and one-to-one relationships with individual faculty members. If you're Fb friends or Twitter buddies with a former professor, and the department needs to offer a lecture for a seminar or colloquium, you may be asked to participate! But, it's very ad-hoc!

Key take-aways

Okay! Lest I sound like an old fogie who says "We tried that once, back in 1998 and it didn't work! We ain't trying that again" 👴, let me just give you my brief lessons learned from the last 15 years...

First of all, alumni engagement at the micro (department) level is one of those situations where it takes a village to make engagement successful. It can't be one person's job (or in my case a small part of my regular job). You just won't succeed. Everyone in the department needs to do their part by nurturing alumni connections, staying in touch, actively encouraging shameless self-promotion from our alumni, and ultimately inviting them to become part of a continuous conversation between members of the department community.

While it does take a village to do this successfully, it also requires strategic planning and the ability to adapt. Individual members of the village can take initiative to invite folks to present to, and engage with, the community (whether they are alumni or not), but the departmental village needs to amplify that voice.  Adaptation may mean doing events virtually because alumni move, hence enabling and amplifying voices beyond your proximal physical location, or it may mean canceling a class (or part of a class) to enable students to attend a virtual or physical webinar or panel. It's probably not feasible to do this on an ad-hoc manner, so strategic planning is important to ensure that classes don't get canceled too many times yet people can attend a variety of events.  Adaptability might also mean a weekend event or something.  

Timing and commitments of staff and faculty are also important to keep in mind.  This goes along with strategic planning. Tenure-track faculty have a lot on their plates: some are trying to get tenure, others trying to get promoted, and others still (past all those gauntlets), might be working on other important department work.  Acknowledging that you can't do it all, where does alumni engagement and community nurturing fall in a faculty member's workload?  Similarly, non-tenured lecturers are paid by the course, so work done for community nurturing falls outside of established payment (and acknowledgment) structures. This type of care work (and community nurturing is care work) doesn't get the recognition it deserves, and expecting people to do care work without compensation is just wrong.  So, this ties back to strategic planning. In departments that are majority adjunct (something the average students don't know), this type of continuity and community nurturing is not feasible (this is the topic of a future blog). Organizations need to adapt to better support the people who do the work of nurturing student and alumni communities at the micro-level.

Self-Promotion and Blogging are learned practices, and faculty and mentors need to prepare students to do this. I've come across a number of fellow alumni who've penned articles, done research, written op-eds, and generally do fantastic work! Very few people share this work with their departments.  They may share the work with individual professors they connected with, but not with the department grunt admin (that's me😅). This is because this type of sharing is relational and you need to build those relationships in order to have someone trust you enough to share things with you. This type of humanizing connection begins in the classroom, and it gets amplified by the social aspects of a degree program (the ones that are strategically planned and take a village).

Finally, this stuff needs to be baked in, not sprinkled on! It needs to be part of a department's core identity and core ethos. As new employees come on board, both staff and faculty, need to be future alumni ambassadors. The type of humanized learning experience and community nurturing that survives graduation and day-to-day life, the connections that bind alumni to programs need to be part of everyone's ethos.  It also means that organizations need appropriate levels of staffing, high employee morale, and a willingness to share with others.  After all, if we don't share with our colleagues in the department, how can we ask our alumni to share with us? And how can we continue to be part of each other's evolving story?🤔

My final word on this (for now), is that academic departments don't have the background, training, and oftentimes resources required to do this type of community building, and there are organizational silos to contend with.  I'm lucky that my background allows me to observe this, but others don't have this insight. That said, this doesn't need to be this way. How can we improve so that we can reach a virtuous cycle of engagement with one another?

Thoughts?