“Inconceivable!”
If you’ve seen The Princess Bride, this rings bells for you. If you haven’t here’s some context: One of the characters, a gangster named Vizzini, uses (er, misuses) the word repeatedly the Dread Pirate Roberts overcomes challenge after challenge to try to rescue the titular princess, whom Vizzini has kidnapped. Another character—his colleague in crime, Inigo Montoya—finally says to him: “You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
In alumni and donor engagement, we have a word like that. It’s “community.”
It appears on our websites, strategic plans, donor appeals, and social media posts. It’s operationalized through programs and events, such as tech platforms, happy hours, tailgates, networking nights, and 5K runs, to name a few.
The roots of that approach, as Richard Millington noted in a recent Keynote episode, are in part structural. The founder of FeverBee and expert in online communities explained that, while higher ed advancement teams have no shortage of staff with event-planning or content-creation skills, they lack people with skills specifically geared toward community building.
But the reasons are also philosophical. Too often, when our own institution’s engagement efforts fizzle after an initial burst, we look outward for other ideas. We ask, “What programs earned a CASE Award for alumni engagement last year?” “Who in our field is the best at building community among their constituents?”
If an advancement team had a specific community engagement specialist position, and that person were well-versed in community-building strategies, they’d ask a different question:
Do we know what community means to our people?
The answer is likely, “Not really.”
Historically, we’ve tracked how alumni feel about us through proxy metrics like response rates, RSVPs, and net promoter scores. Yet these metrics don’t measure relevance—which is what the latest National Alumni Survey results show as critical to alumni’s interest in engaging and giving back to their alma maters. To have that kind of relationship, alumni need the institution to show up in their lives organically, no matter their age or stage.
(Spoiler alert: “Showing up organically” doesn’t mean through an annual report or tear-jerker Giving Tuesday appeal.)
Answering the question of what community means to our alumni and donors isn’t easy. Our knee-jerk reliance on “best practices” or other institutions’ models likely won’t help much—both because I’m not sure there’s an institution that’s really figured this out, and because what works for one alumni population may not work for another.
An answer I keep circling back to is a bit of a paradox: What if building a stronger alumni community is less about connecting alumni to the institution and more about connecting alumni to one another? What if a key to keeping the institution relevant in the lives of alumni has very little to do with the institution itself?
In our first episode of Keynote way back in April, Whop’s John Hill spoke with Ryan about how, in an AI-driven world, human connection is becoming a commodity. Community, in a sense, has a luxury item. With sophisticated data collection, analysis, and—yes—some help from AI tools, alumni engagement teams can become purveyors of this luxury item to their constituents.
They can help people moving to new cities, states, or even countries find at least one person with a shared connection to show them the ropes. First-time parents in an area could connect with fellow alumni to compare notes on potential babysitters. Someone seeking a weekly running group could find local graduates who lead one. When the football team comes to town to play a local rival, alumni could coordinate a meetup for themselves and their families.
What are the mechanics of this kind of model? That’s where I get a little stuck. Is it a new kind of digital platform that succeeds where we’ve previously failed with Facebook groups and bespoke alumni communities? Is it an investment in staff whose entire job is to focus on building these kinds of communities, rather than leaving it all up to volunteers?
Whatever the solution is, it’ll require experimentation. Maybe, for one year, it’s transforming Homecoming from an on-campus event to a regional observance, empowering local alumni to celebrate their shared tie to the institution wherever they are. Maybe it’s transferring some of the funding for an alumni chapter program that’s floundering to building, maintaining, and moderating digital tools that alumni can use to build community on their own.
The entire program won’t be perfect from the get-go. And, as Millington says, it shouldn’t try to be.
“If you look at how communities generally develop, the ones that really succeed and are sustainable for the long term, they usually begin small,” he says. It can be as few as five or ten people organized around one particular idea.
“Associations and alumni groups often go wrong because they try to launch a hundred groups at once, and then they’re surprised when all these groups don’t burst to life. But that’s not how it works,” he says. “You create one group at a time, get that going, then move on to the next one.”
Ten graduates deeply connected over issues that matter in their lives may sound small, but they’re probably worth more to an institution than a thousand dormant accounts on an alumni portal. It’s not a number that CASE will hand out an award for, and it may not turn the heads of institutional leaders. But it’s a starting point.
Maybe an alumni community that serves the institution and keeps it relevant in graduates’ lives isn’t so inconceivable after all.
Upcoming Member Events
Agora
Behind the Scenes of a Signature Alumni Event: Lessons from the Bentley Alumni Conference
A great alumni conference can do more than bring people together — it can create the conditions for relationships to grow, alumni expertise to strengthen the institution, and university priorities to become meaningful and relevant to graduates.
In this Agora, Allison Kerivan, Executive Director of Advancement Relations, will take attendees behind the scenes of the Bentley Alumni Conference, the university’s flagship professional development and networking experience, and share how it has evolved into a strategic platform for alumni engagement and donor cultivation.
Date: Thursday, September 3 from 12 - 1 pm
Faculty-in-Residence
For six weeks beginning August 17 - September 25, Speaking Engagement welcomes Mallory Erickson — executive coach, creator and host of the What the Fundraising podcast, and author of the book by the same name — as our inaugural resident.
We’ll have a final live Symposium event for members on September 23.
