Published by Speaking Engagement
Authored by Dave Hail
Michael Latsko came to Arizona State University in January 2023, about a month after ASU had wrapped its first-ever faculty and staff engagement survey. Sixty percent of employees responded. Affinity for the institutional charter landed in the upper 90s, not just agreement with what it said, but belief that the university actually lived it out.
Latsko has a useful frame for what makes that number meaningful. He spent years before ASU working at the University of Virginia, where he had also been a student for undergraduate and law school. As an alum, his affinity for UVA was genuine. As an employee, something different happened.
“My experience as an employee,” he said, “was nowhere near what my experience as a student had been.”
Most advancement professionals would hear that, nod, and move on.
That’s the mistake.
The chain actually runs the other direction.
Students form their sense of a place through the people they encounter. Those people are, almost entirely, employees. Faculty who show up for office hours. Staff who navigate administrative friction so a student doesn’t have to. Advisors who remember a name. The quality of the student experience, the one that creates lifelong affinity, flows directly from whether the people delivering it feel connected to the institution themselves.
Disengaged employees don’t create transformative student experiences. They create transactional ones. Transactional experiences produce alumni who graduated from a place, not alumni who belong to it.
By the time advancement enters the picture, the affinity has already been formed or it hasn’t.
The student experience gets investment. Identity-forming programs, milestone rituals, senior traditions, living-learning communities. The alumni experience gets investment too: regional events, digital engagement, reunion programming, giving campaigns.
The employee layer gets managed.
The issue isn’t HR. It’s that advancement treats the employee experience as someone else’s problem, even though its outcomes depend directly on what that experience produces.
At ASU, the charter’s 94–96% affinity numbers among employees aren’t a feel-good HR metric. They’re a leading indicator for everything downstream, including what alumni think about the institution twenty years after they left.
Latsko was already thinking about this at UVA, before he ever got to Tempe. His goal in HR, he said, was to recreate the “magic sauce” of the student experience in the employment experience, so the through-line would hold. Most institutions don’t have anyone thinking about it in those terms.
The typical response when alumni engagement underperforms is more. More events, more touchpoints, more messaging, more personalization.
Those things matter. They’re just downstream of the problem.
Alumni affinity that was never fully formed can’t be repaired by an alumni program. The work is with what was built during the years the institution had the person in its ecosystem. If the employee layer was broken during that window, the effort to rebuild, or explain why the institution deserves renewed affinity, is much heavier than most shops account for.
The reframe isn’t that advancement should own HR. It’s that advancement should understand what it’s actually measuring when it measures alumni engagement.
Most alumni engagement audits start with the alumni: who’s participating, who isn’t, which segments are we missing. Latsko’s observation suggests a different starting point.
Before asking why alumni feel disconnected, ask a harder question:
Did the people responsible for their experience feel connected themselves?
Alumni affinity isn’t built at graduation. It’s inherited from everything that came before.
