In July, CASE will launch the inaugural annual survey of Alumni Engagement Metrics. This survey is based on the industry-wide framework for measuring alumni engagement as articulated in the white paper released by CASE last August. The white paper was drafted by the Alumni Engagement Metrics Task Force, a group of dedicated global volunteers, while the survey itself has been refined and tested by another group of volunteers—the Alumni Engagement Metrics Beta Group.

Alumni relations and advancement services professionals at CASE member institutions will receive an email invitation in July asking them to submit data to the online survey. We anticipate that data collection will remain open through the end of October in order to ensure that CASE members have the time to collect, refine, and submit their data.

We will be asking members for the count of alumni involved in each of four areas of engagement—philanthropic, volunteer, experiential, and communication. We also will be asking for unduplicated counts in combinations of each of these areas. A guidance document with instructions will be released at the time we launch the survey.

The Alumni Engagement Metrics survey is part of AMAtlas, CASE’s initiative to be the global resource for educational advancement metrics, benchmarks, and analytics. The survey will benefit members by providing an industry standard by which engagement can be measured. It also will enable comparative metrics across peer and aspirational peer cohorts and will ultimately provide longitudinal views of alumni engagement. The initiative will enable members to build upon the framework with other engagement measures that are specific to institutional culture and history.