By Myra Norton on 3/27/2008 9:06 AM

This week I have the privilege of serving as part of the faculty for a conference on Alumni Affinity Groups. The conference is run by Academic Impressions, and is really more of a hands-on working session for alumni relations and development professionals. Yesterday was the first day, and we had a very fruitful morning session on rethinking alumni social networks. We talked about the misconception that social networks = Facebook or MySpace; and that the reality is that social networks are about human relationships that form for a variety of reasons. Facebook, MySpace and other online social networking sites are tools alumni may use to connect; but they do not define the social networks among them.

One of the points we’re continuing to hammer on is the importance of asking alumni about the people who are most important to them – the connections they cherish from their time at your institution. So often, we identify alumni leadership by default – selecting those who volunteer or those who are most visible to the institution. This approach leads to overuse of the same alumni in multiple capacities, and doesn’t foster growth in alumni participation and engagement with the institution.

Brenda Morris, from Baylor University, shared some of the great work she and her team are doing at Baylor to grow the Baylor Network, a wonderful set of alumni affinity groups led by alumni and supported by the institution. Wayne Cozart, from the University of Virginia; and Jeff Schantz, from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, are fellow faculty with Brenda and me. I look forward to learning more today about Wayne’s programs for alumni that have grown out of student organizations and Jeff’s programs for alumni volunteer training.

The talented alumni relations and development professionals participating in this conference developed great strategies for building alumni affinity group programming; and I am excited to see them pu ... Read More »

By Myra Norton on 3/17/2008 8:00 AM

I was meeting with administrators from a University in the Northeast last week to help them improve overall Alumni participation, and more importantly, engagement. I have to say this was one of the most refreshing meetings I’ve had in a long time with a group like this because they actually said to me, “We have no interest in developing a strategy to raise more money from our alumni – we just want to serve them better and improve their experience of the University.” What a breath of fresh air – they get it!

Alumni are an interesting group because they already have a natural affinity for each other, and that often extends to the institution as well. But time after time I see Colleges and Universities make the mistake of valuing the relationship between an alumnus and the institution above the relationship of the alumnus and his fellow alumni – and not the alumni the institution thinks he should be connected with – the alumni who mean the most to the alumnus. A great deal of research has shown that we form some of the strongest and most enduring bonds with folks we met while at undergraduate and/or graduate school; and beyond the research, I think we all know that to be true in our own experiences. Yet, when we look to engage alumni, we revert back to the same demographic models employed by our counterparts in B2B and B2C marketing to predict likely relationships and behavior. Those models aren’t working in the traditional realm of marketing, and they certainly aren’t working in the context of alumni engagement.

For those schools making the effort to understand and support the relationships that matter to your alumni, I applaud you! But more importantly, your alumni applaud you – of course, you probably already know that.

By Myra Norton on 3/10/2008 12:01 PM

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear “social networking”? This is one of the questions I’ve started asking folks before I give a talk or lead a meeting to share the work we do here at Community Analytics. I ask because I find that the responses are varied, and to really talk about how to connect with an audience through social networks, it’s important to make sure we’re speaking the same language. Invariably, the answers to that question are “facebook”, “myspace”, “blogs”, etc. I find that last one kind of humorous now that I am blogging because I would not describe it as a particularly “social” endeavor.

If I am lucky, there will be one or two people in the room who will say something like, “a circle of friends” or “personal and professional relationships” or the like. I think it is important to make the distinction between “social networks” and the resources that help to facilitate them. Social networks are about human relationships. We may nurture, build or even develop those relationships online, offline or through some combination of the two; but the network is defined by the people involved and the reasons (issues/topics/interests/attraction) they formed those relationships in the first place. For instance, I participate in an executive roundtable through the Greater Baltimore Technology Council – this is an example of one of my networks. These relationships were formed because of mutual interest in growing a business, growing people, creating work/life balance, etc. Some of us interact online and some of us interact primarily offline – regardless, the network is defined by the relationships and the types of information and advice we share with each other, not the medium through which we share this advice and information.

Given this, it’s interesting to explore the different dimensions of value we receive through our networks. What level of advice or information do we seek from our connections on Facebook ... Read More »

By Myra Norton on 2/19/2008 6:28 PM

Greetings!

It is with excitement and a little bit of trepidation that I write my first blog post. The whole idea of writing this post seems counter-intuitive to me – I am much more comfortable responding to questions or ideas rather than posing them. So, I suppose my hope for this first post is that it will spur questions and ideas from all of you, and that we can begin a conversation from which we all can learn.

In the months of preparation for the launch of this website, all of us at Community Analytics spent a lot of time talking about messaging and language, images and aesthetics – what face would we present to the rest of the world? The truth that came to us in that process is that we were asking the wrong question – the question is not, “What do we want to say?” The question is, “Who are we?” – it’s a question of identity. What you see on this site is a reflection of our identity – the principles we believe in and the philosophies we live by.

Doesn’t that seem a little backwards? Aren’t marketing messages (and let’s be honest, that is what a company’s website is – a conglomeration of marketing messages) supposed to speak to what the audience wants to hear? In fact, here is the definition of marketing from Wikipedia:

Marketing is a societal process that is needed to discern consumers' wants; focusing on a product/service to those wants, and to mold the consumers toward the products/services.

In trying to reconcile the commonly accepted definition of marketing with our approach to this website, I realized something that is at the core of what we believe: If you have a genuine relationship with the community you are trying to serve through your products and services and if you seek to meet the needs of that community on their terms, then articulating who you are and staying true to that identity is all the “marketing” you need.
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