From: technews <technews@ou.edu>
To: "'it-fyi@listserv.ou.edu'" <it-fyi@lists.ou.edu>
Subject: it-fyi: Alumni Offices Use Electronic Media (Chron of Higher Ed)
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 15:48:02 -0500
Alumni Offices Use Electronic Media to Forge Closer Ties With Graduates
By WENDY R. LEIBOWITZ
These days, the ties that bind may be hyperlinked. Alumni offices at
colleges and universities are pouncing on new technologies, attempting to
form tighter relationships with their graduates via e-mail discussion
groups, Web sites, Web cameras, on-line courses, and searchable alumni
directories.
"Creating an on-line community is the buzzword now," says Andrew B.
Shaindlin, executive director of the California Institute of Technology's
Alumni Association.
Some institutions, like Princeton University, are focusing on education,
presenting electronic seminars and discussions. Others, such as Stanford
University, are gearing up their Web sites to become "Web portals," offering
a broad array of services, including headlines, customized stock quotes, and
financial news.
Still other alumni offices say that their graduates are interested in
career-networking possibilities, and are turning to their alma maters for
everything from on-line business-card exchanges to e-mail interviews.
Some alumni directors sound a note of caution, however. Too much
communication, high-tech or low, can backfire. "If you ask alumni, from any
school, how often they hear from the institution, they tend to overstate the
number of contacts, and grossly overstate the number of times those contacts
relate to fund raising," says Caltech's Mr. Shaindlin.
Perhaps because of such findings, alumni-office activities are generally
divorced from fund raising. Alumni directors say that their high-tech
outreach is disconnected from development efforts. "We don't want to be the
hand sticking out -- that steers people away," says Eric S. Shivvers, the
Webmaster for alumni relations at Northwestern University. Thus, the front
page of Northwestern's site bears a "Campaign Northwestern" icon, but its
alumni page, http://www.alumni.nwu.edu, does not, says Mr. Shivvers.
Alumni offices have limited human and financial resources with which to
reach growing numbers of graduates. Internet-based technologies could be the
answer to their prayers, or could add to their workload. "There are a lot of
bets being placed on technology, unquestioned," says Douglas S. Dibbert,
president of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's General
Alumni Association. "We will move expeditiously where there's a clear
payoff. As to the rest, we will learn from our colleagues."
He's not alone in that view. "Alumni offices all over the country are asking
themselves the same question that eBay is," says Michael Stoner,
vice-president for new media at Chicago's Lipman Hearne Inc., a marketing
and communications company that advises colleges on incorporating new
technologies into their alumni programs. "Namely, 'What do our clients want
from us?'"
Individual institutions approach the possibilities of technology
differently, Mr. Stoner acknowledges. But the technologies offer all of them
new ways to build relationships with graduates. "For those alumni who have
good feelings about the institution and some of their classmates, this
technology offers unprecedented opportunities to stay in touch," he says.
"The question is, how can institutions take advantage of this?"
Recently, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offered a
five-part series on its storied men's basketball program, accompanied by
both video and audio clips, on the "members only" pages of its Web site
(http://alumni.unc.edu). In 1997, the university's first alumni directories
on CD-ROM sold twice as well as the CD-ROM company had projected they would.
"You could manipulate the information more easily [on CD-ROM], and do your
own searches," says Mr. Dibbert. "It was more user-friendly."
Northwestern's alumni Webmaster, Mr. Shivvers, publishes the alumni
magazine, cover to cover, on the site. He has also created Web sites for all
of the university's alumni clubs -- 32 of them across the United States, as
well as three abroad (in London, Zurich, and Tokyo).
"They come to us and say, 'We want to create an N.U. club in our city,'"
says Mr. Shivvers. "We give them a packet and an organizational chart. But
they've never been able to see what other clubs are doing." Now the London
group's membership and activity data are just a few clicks away from
Chicago's, says Mr. Shivvers.
On-line alumni directories are becoming a feature of many college Web sites.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, alumni can enter a
password-protected portion of the site to edit their own entries, or to
search for classmates by a number of criteria, including by region or by
company employer. "We found that 80 per cent of our 90,000 alums have
Internet connections in their homes," says Diana Tilley Strange, secretary
of M.I.T.'s alumni association. "Our vision is for every entering M.I.T.
student to be paired with an alum."
But technology also invites more lighthearted offerings, says Caltech's Mr.
Shaindlin, who mentions trivia contests, brief "virtual reunions" with
far-flung classmates or faculty members, and performances by campus musical
groups.
Electronic services to alumni, such as e-mail accounts that end in
"@alum.yourschool.edu," do more than provide alumni with free e-mail
addresses for life, say alumni officials. As Mr. Shaindlin notes, "E-mail,
unlike any other type of communication, has the potential to put the name of
the institution, the alumni association, the mascot, the school colors, or
the school slogan in front of alumni on a daily basis."
But putting an institution in front of its graduates every day can be a
daunting prospect -- and therein lies an economic opportunity for private
companies, some entrepreneurs think. Stanford farmed out the technical
aspects of its alumni association's on-line activities, retaining a company
in Emeryville, Cal., to create and maintain the technology that serves up
its alumni Web page, called Stanford Start (http://www.stanfordalumni.org/).
The company charges the university nothing for the site, which is financed
by advertisements that the company sells and that appear on inside pages.
The reason for such "outsourcing" is simple, says C.J. Yem, director of
on-line services at Stanford's Alumni Association: "By the time you build
anything for the Internet, it's obsolete." By outsourcing the technical
work to a niche vendor, she says, the alumni office can focus on adding
content to the site every day, and on developing new alumni services, rather
than on technical issues.
The goal, says Ms. Yem, is for alumni to start their day at Stanford,
checking the site for news, local weather in their home towns, and
customized stock quotes. The Stanford Start page can be customized by alumni
to suit their interests. It's much like the personalized news page, "My
Yahoo!" but "less cluttered," says Ms. Yem. Currently, Stanford Start
appears to be quite similar to "My Yahoo!" but Ms. Yem says the service will
soon integrate Stanford's news into headlines from The New York Times, and
Stanford sports results into national sports headlines.
"We want people to feel that Stanford is a part of their lives, and that
they're part of Stanford," says Ms. Yem. An advisory board of six alumni is
consulted on Web-site issues.
"Unified messaging is coming -- fax, voice-mail, and e-mail," says Ms. Yem.
"I don't think every alum is interested in every service, but we hope to
have something for everyone." The site was launched in August, after two
years of planning, and of 160,000 alumni, says Ms. Yem, 25,000 now have
e-mail accounts with Stanford. She declines to provide specific financial
information, but says that Stanford's budget for on-line alumni activities
is in the six-figure range.
New media are also spawning unofficial forms of alumni networking. E-mail
discussion lists can spring up whenever an enterprising graduate takes the
time and trouble to organize one. Such networks create ties with an
institution that are much less formal than contacts with a college usually
are. Anne Diffily, a former editor of Brown University's alumni magazine,
started such an e-mail list for Brown graduates called Brunonia, recalls Mr.
Shaindlin, a Brown alumnus.
E-mail discussions are so popular that M.I.T. plans to create a section of
its Web site in which alumni can start their own. "An alum said to me, 'Why
don't we have an e-mail list for M.I.T. patent attorneys?'" recalls Ms.
Strange, of the alumni association. "Soon, I can tell him to do it himself."
At Caltech, says Mr. Shaindlin, some of the residential houses have their
own e-mail lists, because students' strongest identification may not be with
their class year, but with the house in which they lived. At other
universities, he adds, students' primary ties might be to a particular
academic division, such as the School of Social Work or the College of
Pharmacy, or to a sports team, a drama group, or a marching band.
Even the basics, such as an alumni magazine's class-notes section or an
institution's reunion events, can be updated and expanded using the tools
technology offers -- along with a little creativity.
Last year, three seniors in a Web seminar at Dickinson College, in Carlisle,
Pa., created a Web page for each class celebrating a major reunion. "They
went to the library and researched the events of each year from 1934 to
1994, and posted news with old yearbook photos" on the same site that alumni
consulted to check a schedule of reunion events, says Tammie Brush-Campbell,
Dickinson's associate director of college relations.
"Alumni could see what the campus looked like then, compared to now; what
tuition was then; what people were wearing. We're going to continue to do
that every year," she says.
There can be problems, of course. If the technology malfunctions, as it is
inclined to do, the institution can look amateurish or incompetent.
Stanford, which offers customized e-mail to its graduates with an
"@alumni.stanford.edu" address, was embarrassed when the software that
manages its e-mail got caught in a loop and circulated messages repeatedly.
"We finally had to shut the server here" until the problem was fixed, says
Ms. Yem. "The glitch wasn't our fault, but from the alum's perspective, it
looked like Stanford's fault."
When a site is difficult to navigate, or slow to download, alumni offices
can be transformed into help desks as users swamp telephone lines with
questions. "Who do you call for technical support?" says Northwestern's Mr.
Shivvers. "If I'm an alum, I call the alumni office, and we're accountable."
Information overload is another pitfall. E-mail beckons as an inexpensive
way to alert thousands of people about alumni events or graduates'
achievements. But the messages, if they arrive too frequently, can be
perceived as spam, poisoning the relationship between the college and the
graduate. "Yes, we have the ability to send out e-mail. But very few people
can hit the send button," says Ms. Yem. "We use e-mail only for our monthly
newsletter."
North Carolina's Mr. Dibbert agrees. "The ease of misuse is the most
dangerous" aspect of the new technologies, he says. In preparing the
university's alumni directory on CD-ROM and, now, its first searchable
on-line directory, the alumni office went to great lengths to make it
difficult for addresses to be downloaded by on-line entrepreneurs, such as
pornographers and purveyors of get-rich-quick schemes.
He adds that public institutions must be aware of the appropriate use of
resources.
And while graduates might not want to receive too much e-mail from their
alma maters, when they send e-mail to the university, they expect an
immediate response, increasing the burden on the alumni-office staff.
Similarly, news that missed the alumni magazine cannot, in the information
age, simply be held until the next issue. When college rankings are
published, for example, alumni will quickly turn to their institutions' Web
sites, each expecting to see a well-thought-out comment from the dean or the
president.
An institution can also explain its position on a controversial issue, and
attempt to rally its alumni from the Web: At the bottom of the front page of
the University of Michigan's site is a link to information about the two
admissions-related lawsuits the institution is fighting.
The technology institutions are using to stay in touch with alumni is not
cheap. "It's free to alums, but it's not free to Princeton," says Domingo
Monet, Princeton's assistant director of computer services, who coordinates
the university's "TigerNet" on-line community. Princeton's on-line course
offerings, Web services, and e-mail discussions "could potentially cost tens
of thousands of dollars, for full-time staff positions, server time,
hardware, tech support, and endless meetings," he says.
Princeton's on-line courses, formerly text-only, are now multimedia affairs,
with streaming audio, animation, and images, as well as links to extra text.
They are offered on a non-credit basis to alumni, who are issued passwords
to gain access to the materials.
Beyond adding infrastructure costs, technology-based offerings to alumni can
be expensive because -- at least for the time being -- they only supplement
traditional, off-line services, rather than replace them. For example, while
recent graduating classes may be open to the idea of receiving class notes
only via e-mail, older classes would not, says Mr. Monet.
Three years ago, Dickinson College hung a "Webcam" -- a digital camera
connected to the Internet -- in its student union during reunion weekend.
Alumni could pose for photographs, which were displayed within minutes on
the college's Web site, recalls Ms. Brush-Campbell. "It was very generic at
first. It just took a picture of someone or an area every few minutes and
posted that picture on the Web." People could also type in comments.
Alumni wanted more. This year, students used two digital cameras to take
pictures at every reunion event, and wrote captions for every image. The
images were posted on line as soon as possible.
As high-tech offerings become increasingly sophisticated, alumni
expectations can only rise. Douglas Blair, the associate director of special
projects at Princeton's Alumni Council, sees the relationship between
graduates and their institutions as being in flux.
"My personal view is that alumni relations changed at the same time that
technology developed. Alumni are starting to demand more back from their
schools." While rising expectations don't always mix well with relatively
new technologies, Mr. Blair says that the benefits are clear. High-tech
communication "helps to develop the alumni community away from regional
clubs and class distinctions, and towards the community as an entire
school."
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Copyright 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education