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CURRENTS Article Customer relationships built on loyalty lead businesses to higher growth and profitability. They lead our institutions to more alumni engagement, the currency of our industry. The Net Promoter system can help institutions better comprehend and meet the needs of various constituencies, including donors and alumni.

Volunteering Rates
CURRENTS Article Sweet Briar College's alumni office has created a volunteer management system analogous to the college's prospect management system.

A Is for Affinity
CURRENTS Article A survey tool to gauge alumni affinity promises to help institutions prioritize fundraising, alumni relations, and communications efforts.

The Science Behind Alumni Engagement
CURRENTS Article As part of an effort to double fundraising over the next 10 years, the University of Waterloo surveyed its alumni and purchased external data to determine how to move potential leaders into a more active role with the university.

The Power of Data
CURRENTS Article Alumni professionals need to demonstrate more effectively the impact they have on the achievement of university ambitions. A group of alumni professionals—mainly from the United Kingdom but also from other parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia-Pacific—created the International CASE Alumni Relations Survey in the hope of developing just such evidence.

Are We There Yet?
CURRENTS Article With an increased institutional focus on the bottom line and demand for accountability both inside and outside institutions, alumni relations can no longer rely on head counts or anecdotal feedback as indicators of a job well done. Alumni leaders now have to prove it, and to do that, they need to look at their programs with a critical eye, comparing where they stack up against peer and aspirant institutions on specific, measurable objectives. Alumni relations professionals need to benchmark.

Advance Work: Fun with Ratios
CURRENTS Article Using data from the Association of American Universities and U.S. News and World Report, an alumni professional devised a way to determine how alumni relations staffing affects fundraising.

Easy as Pie
CURRENTS Article The author is a member of the Association of Private College and University Alumni Directors, a group of alumni directors who share benchmark information, provide professional support, and conduct research. The most practical application of the group is the in-depth program assessment and metrics rating system it has developed: the Alumni Relations Assessment and Metrics Program, which collects, analyzes, and reports on the effectiveness of alumni relations programs. This article includes a sidebar, "Strength in Numbers," about the Northeast Indiana Alumni Directors Consortium.

Room for Improvement
CURRENTS Article Golden Gate University’s alumni association was not reaching its potential. Therefore, the author of this article saw an opportunity to revisit the association’s goals and embarked on a project to document and improve the GGU alumni experience.

Conversation Piece
CURRENTS Article Alumni directors constantly seek new ways to evaluate their programs and services as they attempt to connect with their former students. A research model from the Performance Enhancement Group has helped provide alumni feedback to more than 50 private and public colleges and universities throughout the United States. PEG has aggregated the responses into a database of more than 50,000 alumni from all 50 states and many other countries. Among other things, survey findings reveal that alumni from all types of institutions feel a sense of pride in their alma mater, younger alumni are less satisfied with campus communications, and that academics matter to alumni. To get even more value from their own alumni research projects, alumni directors should communicate the survey results with a broad alumni audience, develop targeted communications for specific alumni segments, take action directly related to the results, and inform alumni that those changes stem from their input.

The Spectrum of Alumni Involvement
CURRENTS Article Benchmarking in alumni relations has historically been difficult. Keith Brant of the UCLA Alumni Association makes the case for assessing alumni relations programs by more than just alumni giving. Patrick Regan of the University of Portland offers his rating-scale system for measuring the variety of ways his office engages alumni in the life of the university.