I have been asking myself why some schools are finding it difficult to find alumni stories.
In the LSM perseverance has paid off over the years; new stories and contributors still appear and existing contributors send us career updates. Jane Crofts has had similar success with her Public Relations alumni blog. So why are other schools having problems?
I suspect that some have underestimated the the nature and scope of the task. Finding graduates is simply a lot of hard work; creating and maintaining a successful alumni blog is not just for Christmas. It’s a long term investment in your school and its future, so sustainability is crucial.
Looking at the University of Lincoln alumni blogs which are working well, a common factor is the enthusiasm and hard work of one individual or a small editorial team – people who are prepared to keep going and never give up.
External factors have also changed the rules of the game. When we started the LSM alumni network, email seemed to be pretty effective at finding graduates, communicating with them and selling them the idea of blogging their stories. But now, even if you start out with good contact data, (a big if,) email is not what it once was; many graduates prefer using the social networks on their smartphones. Even if they do have email accounts they often change them as they move from job to job, and spam filters often mean that your invitations never get read in the first place. I now spend nearly all my LSM graduate-chasing time looking for story leads on Linkedin and Twitter, while another team member uses Facebook in the same way. (You don’t have to like them – they are just a means to an end.)
To give you an example: in the last week I found 32 LSM graduates on Linkedin. 13 have agreed to be connected and so far 2 stories have been submitted, both by graduates who I don’t personally know. Linkedin is very good at this, particularly in the smart way it suggests new contacts, and in how much useful information there is in the profiles. I guess I must have spent about 5 hours to achieve this. I believe that smart graduates see themselves as professionals and are using Linkedin to find jobs and make contacts with other professionals.
It’s generally recognised too in the alumni relations world that the personal touch is crucial. I long ago stopped sending out “Dear Graduate” messages. Your graduates are daily bombarded by all kinds of messages, and the easy option is to ignore them unless there is something to grab their attention, for instance the name of someone or something they know and like, such as the name of a tutor or just the word Lincoln.
I have always been convinced that we must engage our colleagues so that we can get to our graduates. If you happen to remember a graduate yourself, they might remember you and be more inclined to repond, but what if you don’t? Usually somebody on the staff will, so we need their help. Ideally they, rather than members of the editorial team, should send out personalised invitations.
By the way, we are not alone:
“At most graduate schools, there appears to be very little central data collection about career outcomes,” said Patricia G. Calarco, dean of the graduate division at the University of California at San Francisco. Individual departments and programs often maintain their own databases, she noted, but the quality of those databases is hit or miss.
Lynne M. Pepall, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University, asked the audience members (who were wielding classroom-style “clickers”) how many of their institutions kept systematic records of alumni outcomes. Of the 34 respondents, 20 said that no office at their university kept careful track. Not the dean’s office, not the alumni office, not the institutional-research office, not even individual departments.” Do you know where your graduates are?