Sometimes our local alumni leaders wanted the University. Not the alumni association, not another visit from the staff member assigned to their chapter. They wanted the University itself.
They wanted coaches, faculty, and university leaders to come to where they were. Sometimes they wanted that presence badly enough to go around us and ask for it directly. And sometimes they were frustrated when we couldn’t deliver it.
My work in alumni engagement started, more or less, working with the team in the association to build the number and activities of our clubs and chapters. Much of my early career was spent helping people across the country build connections with each other and with the university.
Over a few years we grew from a few dozen clubs to more than 100. Part of the goal was to make sure that the university community meant everyone. Not just students, faculty, and staff, but the thousands of alumni and friends around the world.
Those chapters did important work. They raised scholarship dollars, helped recruit local students, organized football watch parties.
We saw ourselves as partners in that work, and I think we largely were.
The List
And we had something local alumni could not create for themselves: “The List.”
Alumni leaders wanted to know who else from Oklahoma lived in their town. We had the directory. We could identify graduates in an area or people who shared an affinity. We had the authority to approve use of university marks. If the president happened to be traveling to their city for a conference, we sometimes had the relationships to turn that into a visit with local alumni.
There were things the institution could provide that a loose collection of graduates simply couldn’t.
What I am less certain about now is what followed from that fact. We could help people find one another and give them access to a university they still cared about. Sometimes we could help create the conditions for something lasting to grow.
Did that mean the resulting community belonged to us?
At the time, I understood that mostly as a question of expectations and resources. But in hindsight, something different was happening.
We were supporting alumni communities, but we were also defining what those communities were supposed to do.
And I’m not sure we always recognized the difference.
The easy version of the argument would be that institutions are bureaucratic, communities are organic and universities should simply get out of the way. My experience doesn’t support that. Alumni communities can depend on access, continuity and institutional presence that individual graduates can’t easily reproduce on their own.
It started with the practical things. Alumni clubs needed leadership, and organizational structure. And, in my experience, they needed hundreds of pom-pons, koozies and pennants.
I remember a conversation at one of our club leadership conferences that has stayed with me for more than a decade.
We brought alumni leaders together to share ideas, provide training, and help them navigate the details of operating chapters. During a discussion about the websites we provided, representatives of two of our larger chapters explained why the platform wasn’t particularly useful to them.
One of the chapter presidents made a comment that stung:
“The Alumni Association is not really here for us.”
She wasn’t suggesting that we didn’t care about alumni. Her point was more specific. We had built a model that worked reasonably well for the typical chapter, but her chapter had grown beyond it. They had developed their own capacity, priorities, and ways of operating. The things we provided were not necessarily the things they needed.
I could have defended our approach, and I probably would have made a pretty good argument. We were trying to support a large network of chapters with finite staff and resources. Standardization made that possible. Not every chapter could receive an entirely customized set of services.
I still think those were legitimate considerations.
But she had identified something that I also couldn’t dismiss. We had established what support looked like based on our understanding of what a chapter should be.
Her chapter had become something else.
I don’t know that I had a particularly good answer for that.
A community before the program
I’ve been revisiting experiences like that while exploring how alumni engagement has changed in the last few years and what we mean when we talk about alumni community.
One of the people I wanted to learn from was Marcie Otteman, who has spent 28 years at Central Michigan University, including 16 in alumni relations. She currently serves as Deputy Chief of Alumni and Constituent Engagement.
Our conversation began with a question about where alumni communities come from.
Marcie’s first observation was that they begin long before anyone becomes an alum.
The identities people establish as students, through academic programs, employment, and friendships., become the connections they carry forward after graduation.
Alumni engagement professionals spend a great deal of time trying to reconnect people with their institutions. But many of those relationships never disconnected. They continued through ties that existed whether the alumni association was involved or not.
An example of that came from CMU’s own experience with alumni chapters.
Like many institutions, Central Michigan spent much of the 2000s developing a broad network of clubs and chapters. The groups reflected geographic, academic, and cultural affinities.
Over time, the volunteer leadership model became difficult to sustain. Longtime volunteers stepped away, and fewer people were prepared to replace them. Some groups became inactive.
At CMU, though, something happened after parts of the chapter structure and growth had quieted down.
Faculty and staff who had maintained relationships with former students began organizing a Homecoming gathering for Black alumni. They did it without the alumni association initiating or directing the effort.
The first year attracted modest participation. They tried again the following year. According to Marcie, those early gatherings drew perhaps 40 or 50 people.
They kept going.
By the third year, the event had gained enough momentum that the organizers approached the alumni engagement team for help. The community had demonstrated that it could bring people together. Now its leaders wanted assistance in doing more.
Today, the Black Alumni Chapter and Latine Alumni Chapter host a joint Homecoming gathering, with the university helping provide space, logistics, and financial administration. Marcie estimated that more than 500 people were gathered in the area during this year’s event.
She gives the organizers credit.
“We just needed to get out of your way and facilitate whatever you needed.”
There are two ideas that aren’t always easy to hold together.
Getting out of the way requires an institution to recognize that alumni have their own relationships, interests, and capacity to organize. Facilitating requires that same institution to invest resources and accept responsibility for helping those relationships flourish.
In this case, the relationships existed first. The initiative followed. Institutional support came when the organizers were ready for it.
The people who initially organized the gathering were faculty and staff. They were part of the university, maintaining connections to people whose lives had intersected with their own through the institution. And none of them had ‘alumni relations’ on their business card.
The community wasn’t neatly outside CMU, waiting for the institution to discover it. Institutional people were already participating in it, even though the formal alumni engagement structure wasn’t directing the activity.
It complicates the way we sometimes talk about institutional engagement as though the university and its alumni community are two separate organizations entering a partnership.
Supporting, managing, stewarding
Marcie’s example offers a practical picture of an institution responding to something alumni and their campus connections were already building.
It also raises a question: what happens when a community’s priorities and the institution’s expectations don’t align.
We were offering support, but that support came with an understanding of what chapters were supposed to be and how they were supposed to operate.
In most circumstances, those expectations were useful. An institution has legitimate reasons to make sure groups operating in its name do so responsibly.
But supporting a community also introduces an element of management, whether intended or not.
Marcie described how academic programs at CMU have sometimes tried to establish their own alumni associations. In those circumstances, her team has explained that groups cannot use the university’s Alumni Association name without coming under its formal structure and oversight.
Most of the time, a conversation about what the university can support and what responsibilities come with formal recognition resolves the issue.
That seems entirely reasonable.
Those decisions are necessary. They are also expressions of institutional authority.
The distinction matters because the institution may control the recognition and resources without controlling the relationships that make community possible.
A university can convene a community, but the more completely it decides what the community is for, how it behaves and what counts as success, the more I wonder whether we have crossed from stewardship into management.
Maybe that’s why I’ve become more interested in the idea of stewardship as a way of describing the institution’s responsibility.
Stewardship suggests a responsibility to care for something whose value isn’t entirely defined by the person or organization responsible for supporting it.
It doesn’t eliminate management. Someone still has to approve budgets, coordinate activities, and protect the university’s interests.
But it might change the questions we ask before doing those things.
What already exists here? What are these people trying to accomplish? What do they actually need from us? And what might we unintentionally diminish by insisting that their community fit our model?
Near the end of our conversation, she offered a thought that has stayed with me:
“I like to think that the benefit of being connected to your alma mater is equal to or greater than the benefit of your alma mater being connected to you.”
I appreciate the aspiration behind that.
The chapter president who told me the alumni association wasn’t really there for her chapter wasn’t necessarily questioning whether the relationship was mutually beneficial. She was asking whether our understanding of the relationship had kept pace with what her community had become.
What happens when the institution’s ability to support alumni communities becomes confused with its authority to determine what they should be?
Dave Hail is a fundraising strategist and storyteller who works with nonprofits and institutions to design stronger donor relationships and more effective engagement strategies. His work focuses on helping teams move beyond transactional communication toward systems that support long-term connection and growth.
His perspective sits at the intersection of strategy, systems, and storytelling, with a focus on helping organizations act with greater clarity and intention.
Dave is a lifelong learner, husband and dad, and lives in Oklahoma.
