It’s the question I’ve had running through my head a lot recently. As a field, we’ve coalesced around “yes,” that the work we do is primarily about driving the volume of alumni engagement activity. In fact, we’ve doubled down on the importance of scale in recent years.
Most engagement pros, including me, rejoiced when the news broke in 2023 that U.S. News & World Report would stop using the Alumni Participation Rate as a benchmark for evaluating and ranking institutions. One headline from the Chronicle of Philanthropy even read “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead,” referring to the change that we’d no longer evaluate schools by the number of alumni who give.
In its place, the field has adopted the alumni engagement participation rate, referring to the number of unique alumni who participate in at least one of the four CASE modes of engagement: communications, experiential, volunteer, and philanthropy. Schools have worked diligently over the last few years to first measure and then boost this number as a primary indicator of success.
This newish, all-encompassing metric is a significant win to work toward and benchmark against year-over-year and against other peer institutions. But what are the downsides to this relentless focus on scale? Indeed, one of the reasons we cheered when the demise of the alumni giving rate metric was announced was that it was overly focused on a scale metric we simply couldn’t keep up with in practice.
There are three main reasons why the focus on scaling alumni engagement might not be all it’s cracked up to be.
The four modes of alumni engagement are not equally valuable.
Can we really say that an alum clicking through to a newsletter article is the same as volunteering to be a giving day ambassador? Of course not, that doesn’t make sense on its face. Is there any world where attending an event should be considered on the same level as making a gift? No way. Alumni who engage through communications or experiential means are participating, but they’re not contributing per se. One could argue that attending an event is a gift of time, but I’m not going to do that here. Our objective as engagement pros in advancement is to create more contributors of time and treasure. The communications and experiential categories are tactics to achieve that outcome.
So, treating these categories as equal and leaning into the alumni engagement participation percentage as the key metric to increase inherently means a focus on the communications mode. It’s the only avenue by which most schools will successfully increase their engagement percentage, as the denominator increases each year with graduation.
Is that the outcome we want? More alumni engaged through communications? This isn’t a bad thing, but individuals engaged through communications isn’t our objective.
A focus on scaling engagement means always moving on to the next tactic
If there’s one commonality among all alumni engagement teams, it’s the ever-present need to add, never subtract. I see it over and over again with the alumni teams I consult with across all institutions. Instead of properly evaluating our events and programs and capturing the relevant participation metrics, we move on to the next thing.
It’s not because alumni teams don’t want to be more strategic; it’s because there’s no time for it. Due to the ever-present need for scale, it’s fair to say that alumni leaders almost always sacrifice strategy for tactics — more volume instead of tighter alignment.
Scale tells you nothing about whether anyone is moving along a journey.
The engagement participation rate is a snapshot in time, not a trajectory along a continuum. It counts the alumni who did at least one thing this year. What it can’t tell you is whether any of them moved closer to being a contributor. The alum who’s clicked a newsletter every year for a decade counts the same as the alum who went from attendee to volunteer to board member. Both are “engaged.”
But movement is the whole point. Participation is just the first thing. And because the metric can’t see progression, nobody’s accountable for the journey. We’re accountable for the scale number, so we optimize it.
So is scaling alumni engagement a good thing?
The answer isn’t that the scale is bad. Reaching and activating more alumni definitely matters, and the engagement participation rate was a genuine improvement over a giving rate, which measured a single, narrow metric. But we replaced a bad metric with a broader one and assumed broader meant better. What we actually did was make it possible to look successful while getting less of what we’re after — more contributors.
I’ve been one of the loudest voices for scale and the CASE AEM, which is exactly why this has been nagging at me. “How many alumni engaged with us this year?” is the question I’ve built my thinking around. I don’t think it’s the right question anymore. “How many alumni are further along than they were last year?” is harder to answer — it requires deciding which modes actually matter, subtracting the programs that don’t create a journey, and building the structure to move people from a state of participating to one of contributing, and then maintaining that status.
What do you think?
About Speaking Engagement
We’re quickly coming to the end of the our reading of The Generosity Crisis as our first book in the SE Book Club, and I’m looking for book nominations for our next go-around this fall. If you have a suggestion for a great book our community can read next, I’d be grateful if you’d hit reply with one. We’ll take a members vote in a few weeks based on those nominations.
About our next Keynote
I first became acquainted with Richard Millington about eight or nine years ago after I sunset our Graduway platform at Longwood began publishing articles containing my sentiments about alumni network platforms and the challenge of building online communities. His e-book called The Proven Path is still available and despite being published a decade ago, still holds up really well in my view. His expertise in community-building is really fantastic, and there’s no one better or more experienced. I’m really excited to share my interview with him on Monday.
Ryan Catherwood is the Publisher of Speaking Engagement, a platform exploring how organizations build relationships, community, and connection at scale. He is also Executive Vice President at Chris Marshall Advancement Consulting (CMAC) and Senior Consultant with Washburn McGoldrick, advising colleges and universities on alumni engagement, donor pipeline development, and integrated advancement strategy. He co-hosts the Alumless podcast — a bi-weekly web series on alumni enagement and intergrated advancement.
Prior to his consulting work, Ryan served in roles at Longwood University, the University of Virginia, and Washington and Lee University. Ryan writes and speaks regularly on the future of engagement, digital community-building, and the role of alumni in driving institutional success.
