A blog is one type of website. I think it has many advantages over a “static” website when it comes to engaging with alumni.

For a start, we want to reflect change, both in what we offer students, and in what graduates experience. (If you disagree, then you are probably better off sticking with your relatively static University web pages, but I rather doubt that many graduates visit them.) Graduates will progress through life, and if you are smart and you get lucky, they will want to update your readers on the ups and downs of their professional and personal journeys. Because your blog publishes information chronologically (blog = web log,) readers expect lots of new articles and updates.

Of course there are other strategies. You may prefer the fully featured social networking platforms such as Facebook, but do ask yourself whether they would really meet all your objectives and whether you think that their model is appropriate and safe. My experience has been that Facebook is very good at finding graduates, but lousy at producing stories. Bear in mind that you can also hitch up Facebook, LinkedIn  or Twitter to your blog anyway.

Although blogging applications like WordPress or Blogger do offer some social networking functionality, the main difference beween blogging and social networking is that blogging is essentially publishing. If you were a newspaper owner, would you accept that your newspaper looked and worked just like every other newspaper? Blogs allow you to be totally in control of what your web publication looks like, what is in it and who can read it.

In our case there are at least two reasons for setting up and running a departmental alumni blog. My own motive has always been pedagogical  – to inform student experience by means of graduate experience. Another motive is to attract more and better students in the first place, by allowing graduates to tell true stories about their experiences after graduation – the so-called marketing agenda. A blog is ideally suited to both objectives, especially when it runs alongside other forms of graduate input, such as alumni events, guest lecturing, mentoring etc.

A further good reason is that blogging is easy. You really can create engaging content quickly with little or no knowledge of web design, HTML or any of that stuff. It’s as easy as using a word processor (often much easier) or sending an e-mail.