Easy as Pie

By Kelly Redder

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"What are our peers doing?" As an alumni professional, you've probably asked this question or had it asked of you many times. As you most likely already know, getting the answer is generally not an easy task.

Maybe you've posted a query to a listserv, only to receive data from everyone except those whom your institution considers peers. Perhaps you've attended a conference hoping to get your answer, but the presenters who shared their successes were from institutions with much different resource bases.

For nearly 10 of my 17 years in the alumni relations field, I went through those same motions. Not anymore, though. I found a community of practice.

I am a member of the Associa­tion of Private College and Uni­versity Alumni Directors (www. pcuad.org), a group of alumni directors from nearly 40 midsize private higher education institutions in the United States and Canada. We share benchmark information, provide professional support, and conduct research. While I value my relationships with my fellow PCUAD members, the most practical benefit of the group is having access to the in-depth program assessment and metrics rating system we have developed.

PCUAD to the rescue

Each member of PCUAD is the lead alumni relations professional at his or her college or university. PCUAD member institutions have similar numbers of alumni staff members, operating budgets, and student and alumni populations. Members are expected to attend at least two PCUAD conferences every two years (two conferences are held each year) and to complete the annual standard metrics survey.

For many years, the rate and the amount of alumni annual giving were the only ways alumni relations programs were appraised. The conventional wisdom was that if annual giving was up, the alumni relations program must be working. PCUAD members felt that this was a backhanded way of measuring alumni relations success and that the profession could gauge success much better by employing other metrics and assessment methods.

To address this issue, PCUAD created the Alumni Relations Assessment and Metrics Program to collect, analyze, and report on the effectiveness of alumni relations programs. The Web-based program has a flexible survey engine, a customizable scoring engine, a simple and powerful reporting subsystem, and a summarized "dashboard" view of the most important indicators of a successful alumni relations program. The dashboard view in particular has been incredibly valuable to me; I share the information with my alumni board and trustees and at university budget hearings. The system is very flexible and measures

• longitudinal data: How is my program doing compared with the last time I checked?
• comparative data: How is my program doing in relation to other institutions?
• trend and "what if" data: Where is the alumni program going, and what are my options?
• outcomes data: How can we model our program based on the comparative analysis?

Although ARAMP is packed with nearly 200 questions, members faithfully enter their data because they know they will be granted access to the raw data reports only when they've completed the survey. Occasionally some additional prodding is needed. Usually an e-mail or phone call works, though a few times members of the leadership committee have sat down with a member to help with data entry. Members who have completed the survey in the past understand its value and help new members get through it the first time.

The metrics system is an evolving program. It will be reviewed, refined, and expanded to meet the ever-increasing demand for proof of measurable return on investment. Most important, members know the data are relevant because PCUAD institutions are so similar.

Data to the rescue

Access to the PCUAD data has been incredibly helpful to the alumni relations operation at my institution, Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. Our annual fund participation rate had been dismal for years. By working with PCUAD, we successfully made the case that increasing the alumni relations staff would allow us to engage more graduates. We were right. We added 23 staff members to the development and alumni relations division in the past six years-more than half of them alumni relations personnel-and the number of alumni annual fund donors has increased by 38.5 percent.

We also used ARAMP to investigate how our peers manage their reunion programs. RIT did not have a history of holding traditional reunions, but we wanted to increase the number of alumni who return to campus. The physical growth of the campus in the past decade has been astonishing. We wanted our graduates to be proud of their alma mater's expansion, and we wanted to identify ways to reconnect them to RIT. In addition to organizing the reunion by class years, we also offered affinity programming during the weekend. Our previously nonexistent reunion program has grown from 450 participants in 2001 to 1,400 in October 2006-a 211 percent increase.

The positive repercussions of the ARAMP data have filtered out to admissions, career services, volunteer recruitment, and giving. For example, our analysis showed that changes in our alumni volunteer program could make a measurable difference in alumni engagement levels. Identifying prospective students, welcoming new students, mentoring, offering co-op and career assistance, starting peer-to-peer solicitations, and participating within the university community as industry advisers are just some of the ways we now use volunteer opportunities to engage our alumni.

From our data analysis, we were able to make a case for adding an alumni volunteer manager to our staff. Instead of shuffling alumni volunteers off to several departments and divisions around campus (sometimes never hearing from them again), we are now assured that our alumni volunteers receive consistent training, know their volunteer options, have a single point of contact, and are regularly thanked and recognized.

How important are alumni volunteers? From fiscal year 2002 to fiscal year 2006, 16 percent of RIT alumni donated to the annual fund. During the same time, the rate of giving by those attending alumni events was 26 percent. Alumni volunteer participation in the annual fund has reached 47 percent over that five-year span.

These are just a few examples of how we have used benchmarking and our community of practice to our advantage. The results are real. Do you know where your community of practice is?

About the Author Kelly Redder

Kelly Redder is the executive director of alumni relations at Rochester Institute of Technology.