I have always approached alumni relations from a community building perspective, bot often it could feel like I was helping to build a market place. There is a type of ask, want or need from the alumni-side. That can be a need for help with career advice, a desire to meet lost friends and classmates or opportunities to learn and grow by attending workshops and courses. And there is a type of supply, or offering, from more experienced alumni. Think of offering mentorship, fundraising or volunteering.
As Alumni Relations managers we try to cater to those wishes. Setting up mentoring programs, career-advice sessions and reunions and events. We’re trying to bring demand and supply together. Demand of our alumni in need of help or a little early career boost. Supply from our experienced alumni, who have a desire to offer experience, tips, advice and their time. It can sometimes almost feel like you’re running a market place between the two. Once you start approaching alumni relations from that angle, it all starts to become a bit more clear.
These two books helped me tackle my initial problems around alumni relations and alumni data management. Fair warning though, I’m assuming you’re at least using some form of a CRM to store your alumni’s details AND that you make use of at least some form of mailing software. If not, then just the book The Lean Startup is more than sufficient for you to start with!
1. The Lean Startup — Eric Ries
The most useful idea in this book for alumni data management and alumni relations: build, measure, learn. Don’t launch a full alumni portal nobody asked for. Send a small survey, measure the response, adjust. You’re trying to bring supply and demand together between your alumni, often while also balancing the wishes of the university. This book thought me a lot about how to properly measure results that I could show to my major stakeholders. It also thought me a lot about proper metrics tracking and how to make sure what I was doing or building for my alumni really landed.
It teaches you one critical thing: don’t guess what your alumni want, test it. Devise campaigns and activities that are highly measurable and scalable. I used to plan communication cycles and data campaigns far in advance. Everytime I launched them it was hoping for results to be good. But I never really tracked what I did differently compared to my other campaigns.
By applying the key principles of testing for adjustments and measuring key metrics and results, my email campaigns leaned on far more measurable outcomes: open rates, click rates, records updated. If one of my campaigns flopped, it was not considered a failure. It meants that I had a batch of data to look at and a number of dials I could turn to improve in the next one.
I recommend reading this book first if you’re interested in learning more about market place concepts and how they apply to other scenarios
2. DAMA-DMBOK: Data Management Body of Knowledge The DAMA International guide
If you work with a CRM, you are practising alumni data management, whether your job title says so or not. That can be MS Dynamics, Mailchimp, Razors Edge, Blackbaud, you name it.
DMBOK is the industry standard on data quality, governance, and lifecycle. The chapters on data quality alone explain quite clearly why any marketplace or organisation loses track of its clients/alumni/customers. Data records decay, and with them your ability to match needs with offerings.
It’s a though read, mainly because it’s meant to prepare you for the DAMA-DMBOK certification (I still haven’t done it, I know.) But the core theory is sound. Learning the lingo, principles and theory behind proper data management is invaluable if you want to understand how you should go about data management.
The book is a serious investment in money and reading time. But it paid itself back the moment I used it to structure a CRM audit. Instead of “the data is a bit of a mess”, I could name the problems (completeness, timeliness, consistency) and prioritize fixes in a language management recognizes. It will help you in your conversations with your CRM-manager, your major stakeholders and anyone else who is involved in data. Understanding the principles of data-management and a little bit of GDPR and the nature of data will go a long way in making you more effective at your role.