What's It Worth

By Maura King Scully

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Alumni relations just may be the Rodney Dangerfield of advancement: We don't get no respect. Need proof? Look no further than the CASE Advancement Compensation Survey. The results show that alumni relations professionals make less than their colleagues in development, communications and marketing, and advancement services. And it's been that way for at least the last decade.

Why is this? And is there anything alumni professionals can do about it?

In the beginning

First a history lesson: The first alumni association formed at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in the late 1700s. From then until the mid-20th century, "alumni associations were launched because alumni wanted them, not because universities thought they needed them," says Andy Shaind­lin, executive director of the alumni association at the California Institute of Technology. Mostly social in nature, these associations were formed by alumni who wanted to maintain ties with their institutions.

The organization was typically headed by "a retired football coach or beloved professor," says John Feudo, associate vice president of alumni relations at Boston College in Massachusetts. "It wasn't considered a profession so much as a place to move someone who had been valuable to the institution and still possessed a lot of institutional knowledge."

In the first 200 years that alumni associations existed, "institutions weren't filling a strategic need; instead, they were simply humoring alumni," says Shaindlin. This was the status quo for most until the 1960s, when more and more institutions began sustained development programs and realized that alumni-the only permanent constituency-could help strategically advance the institution's needs.

But once college and university leaders turned their attention to alumni, they most often focused solely on how the alumni organization could help raise money. And while that's obviously critical, any alumni professional will tell you that the work goes much deeper than that.

Making the case

"We're on the front line," notes Vicki Reaume, executive director of alumni relations at Eastern Michigan University. "We're the first place they call when they need something, whether it's a transcript, class ring, or help finding a job. We connect them with what's going on at the university today and recruit them as volunteers for legislative efforts, career services, and admissions," she says.

"We are their lifetime connection," agrees Feudo. "As the saying goes, 'students for four years, alumni for life.' We strive to communicate that you're part of the family the moment you arrive on campus. We introduce ourselves to students and let them know 'we're here for you and will still be here for you at every stage of life.'"

How important is maintaining those connections? "Think of the advancement cycle as four steps: identification, cultivation, solicitation, stewardship," Feudo continues. "We can influence three of those four components. We have the ability to make or break a solicitation. We engage alumni, support them, and take care of them. If we do our job well in alumni relations, we make development's job a lot easier." After all, Feudo explains, "in the need to make the institution better through private giving, development focuses on the 5 percent of top givers. But someone's got to worry about the other 95 percent of alumni, because it contains tomorrow's 5 percent."

Bill Johnston, executive director of the University of Montana Alumni Association, explains alumni relations in business terms. "Alumni relations is like a research and development [unit]. To have the highest quality education possible, we're working very hard to build those relationships and lifelong commitments. You always have to work hard for the next generation of graduates and students. And if you cut back on research and development, you jeopardize your future."

Joe Irwin, president and CEO of the Georgia Tech Alumni Association, makes a similar argument. "Long after faculty and staff are gone, alumni care about the institution," he says. "If you did nothing at all to drive alumni support, you might get major gifts, at least for a little while, but you wouldn't get passion, spirit, student recruitment, philanthropy, or advocacy. This is, fundamentally, a marketing business. Alumni need to choose to care about the institution, and we can influence that."

Measure, measure, measure

Building and fostering alumni relationships with the institution is clearly vital. However, any alumni professional will tell you it's also devilishly hard to quantify.

"Coaches have win-loss records, fundraisers have dollars raised," observes Johnston. "That's easy to benchmark and measure. It's a lot harder to put a value proposition on what we do."

Nonetheless, measuring success is important. "It comes down to metrics," says Kathy Bickel, vice president of outreach and engagement at the Ohio State University Alumni Association. "We've been talking about metrics for as long as I've been in alumni relations-14 years-and we don't seem to have come far. We know half our graduates are engaged in some way, and they wouldn't be, if not for us. But how do we prove that?"

Some groups, such as the Association of Private College and University Alumni Directors, have developed benchmarking tools so that peer institutions can compare metrics. And some institutions have experimented with their own measurement systems.

"We've done measurement for a long time," says Carrie Cadwell Brown, executive director of the Smith College Alumnae Association in Massachusetts. "We look at cost-per-head, participation, giving rates, readership surveys, Web site usage, and then use that information to tweak programs," she says. "Figure out how to measure what you're doing, write about it, present about it. Once you start talking about measurement, you can't stop. It improves your performance; it improves your importance. If you're doing things well, it's hard to refute."

Bickel reports that Ohio State is developing a new prototype to assess its efforts. "We have five objectives from our new strategic plan, and we're using the book The Balanced Scorecard to create new metrics. We hope eventually it will be something that can transfer to other institutions.

"What we really need is some Ph.D. student to take this on as a research project, to look at how you measure the value of an alumni function to an institution," Bickel concludes. Shaindlin agrees: "I think there's a big need for research in alumni relations, for smart people to ask good questions in a scholarly, rigorous way. It's a huge opportunity for the profession as a whole and would change the way we think."

Bickel doesn't want to see measurement go too far, however. "I hope alumni relations doesn't get to the point where we measure ourselves into a corner," she cautions. "You can't always use the dollar as the bottom line. There will always be soft things that are hard to measure."

Plugging the profession

And that's where those marketing skills come in to play. If you want to be recognized and rewarded for what you do to advance the institution, you have to let other people know. And yet, that's where many alumni organizations fall short.

"We haven't been very good at marketing ourselves to our institutions," observes Loren Taylor, president and CEO of the University of Illinois Alumni Associa­­tion. "We need to communicate that there's a strategic purpose to everything we do. And the profession itself needs to do more to remind institutions of the importance of having strong alumni associations," he says.

"An active, thriving alumni association is the difference between having a world-class institution and not," asserts Irwin. "Schools have to choose to engage their alumni after graduation. Those who do will thrive. Those who don't, won't. Smart leaders are waking up to this fact."

But if your leader is not aware or convinced of the value of a robust alumni relations program, how do you make the case? Some alumni professionals have started to advocate for "a seat at the table," meaning that the head of alumni relations should sit in the president's cabinet. It's not a personal power play, however. "It's about the view of the role: that alumni relations is equally important as academics or enrollment," says Johnston. "We need to be with the senior team, not advising them."

Whether the chief alumni officer sits in the president's cabinet or not, "we need to do a better job of communicating our strategic worth," says Feudo. This could mean involving key campus offices in alumni strategic plans or highlighting the alumni association's role in major gifts or bequests. "We will be a respected entity the better job we do of showing our campuses the value of our work, and the more respected we feel on campus, the more respected we will feel as an industry," he says.

Culture clash

Here's the hard news: Alumni relations professionals may be part of the problem. Part of an alumni officer's job is to put other people out front, keep volunteers in the spotlight and give them all the credit. This works wonders from a volunteer management standpoint, of course, but does little to advance the value of the alumni association internally.

In addition, some view alumni professionals as little more than the institution's chief cheerleaders. Reaume describes it well: "People always say things like, 'You have the most fun job in the world!' 'Do you get paid to do this, or are you a volunteer?' and 'It must be great to have your summers off.' The reality is that part of our job is to throw parties, make it look seamless without drawing attention to ourselves," she observes. "It doesn't help."

Yet, "it's really important that people think it's fun, because if we're not having fun, then it's not fun," Brown observes. "In fact, it's a lot of work to make it look like that much fun."

Take the party factor, mix it with the others-out-front mentality and the predictable cycle of events, and you've uncovered the Catch-22 of alumni relations: "Our stock in trade is keeping things the same," says Shaindlin. "But the institution is not the same as when alumni graduated. Often, it's completely different. Those nostalgic feelings are legitimate, but we need to present alumni with new and different offerings."

Getting out of that middle position is the challenge. "Maybe we've developed institutional nearsightedness because of this," Bickel says. "We've been around for over 100 years and are steeped in tradition. Maybe it's that tradition that permeates our organization and holds us down at times."

Don't stop thinking about tomorrow

So how do alumni professionals break out of the mold? "We need to stop talking about all the things we've done in the past, or how we do those things better, and start thinking about what fuels innovation," Shaindlin says. "Let's invent it, not reproduce it. We need to be seen as a source of innovation on campus. People should say, 'Wow-alumni-they do some crazy weird stuff over there.' But that means we can't be afraid to stick our necks out and take risks."

A good place to start would be technology. "We, in alumni, are in the perfect position to become champions of technology," says Taylor. "We need to take the lead in looking at technological advances in record keeping and analyzing data we manage." There's fertile ground in "everything from the mundane, an e-mail address for life to sophisticated data warehousing, customer relations, and business intelligence capabilities."

Championing technology, however, isn't the same thing as knowing how it works. Alumni professionals don't need to start moonlighting as IT experts. "Many people are scared off because they say 'I don't understand it,'" says Shaindlin. "You don't need to understand it-the important thing is to understand ways in which people use technology. We should be champions for using technology in new ways that deliver something alumni want, will use, and can't get someplace else."

Where to begin? Draw on those relationship skills: Talk with IT folks on campus, advocate to the administration, and collaborate with development to do research and write proposals.

"In five years, we should be able to say to the president, 'I'm the foremost expert on campus on the use of social media to communicate with our permanent audience,'" Shaindlin concludes.

Closing the gap

But now, back to the beginning: Alumni professionals make, and have made less for some time. Is this a permanent state of affairs? "I hope not," says Brown. "I think it's a morale issue more than anything else, because we work side by side with people from development and public affairs all the time. It's hard to make significantly less. Good data, good information, like this salary survey, really help." However, she points out, "everybody makes choices in life. I left fundraising to do this, and I'm glad I did."

Feudo thinks measurement and benchmarking will help salaries in the field. "I think the gap will decrease the more alumni relations can quantify itself."

It's up to us: If we want to level the playing field we need to believe-and then prove-that alumni relations makes a real difference. Then we'll be able to state our value with certainty. When asked, "What's the worth of an alumni relations professional?" the answer without hesitation will be: "Priceless."

About the Author Maura King Scully

Maura King Scully is a freelance writer and a former staff member of the Boston College Alumni Association.