CASE Insights, CMAC Actions: How to Respond to Emerging Alumni Engagement Trends

This is a post by Nicole Hess Kempton , vice president and senior consultant at CMAC.

A few weeks ago, CASE released its Insights on Alumni Engagement Report for FY23. Dozens of institutions from around the world contributed their engagement data to the report, which is now in its fifth year. In my last post, I shared my key takeaways from Jenny Cooke Smith and Nicholas Campisi 's excellent webinar previewing the FY23 report. This time, I’m going to share some ideas for how to respond to these trends.

1. Share, share, share your engagement data across your institution. Doing so does a few things. First, it’s a way to gauge the overall health of the alumni network, which is something that’s becoming increasingly important to would-be funders, prospective students and their parents, and of course, rankings. At many colleges and universities, growing alumni engagement is a goal that’s shared across many departments far beyond advancement. How are alumni contributing in the classroom? In the career center? Advising students? As Lauren Simione from the University of Delaware said on our last episode of Alumless, “we may own the data, but we don’t own the alumni.”?

Sharing engagement data helps illustrate the value of advancement to the institution as a whole. With cutbacks looming at many colleges and universities, it’s important to be able to demonstrate the positive, outsized impact that advancement can have. This can only help when you’re advocating for more resources. Lastly, it incentivizes collaboration. We all know that collecting engagement data can be an imperfect science at the best of times, and it can be tempting to hold your data within advancement until you have it perfect, but sharing your data with the rest of the institution helps them understand how they can contribute and incentivizes them to contribute in the future. The CASE report is a great external benchmarking tool that underscores the importance of alumni engagement across higher ed, not just at your institution.??

2. Look for ways to grow volunteerism outside of traditional board service. It comes as no surprise that volunteers continue to give at substantially higher rates than non-volunteers, so building what Jenny Cooke Smith calls “multi-modal engagement” is the key to a more engaged alumni population and more dollars raised. Several platforms engage alumni as advisors to each other and to students (Protopia is a personal favorite of mine and sponsor of CMAC's Alumless podcast). Some institutions have seen great results from engaging alumni in one-off community service projects in their region. Others involve alumni as guest judges on start-up pitches or engineering projects. Whichever volunteer opportunities you choose, make sure they’re easy for alumni to find and that you thank the alums who participate. One way to evaluate the effectiveness of new volunteer opportunities is to look at your data and see if the alums who participated engaged in other programs. In other words, did volunteering lead to that deeper, multi-modal engagement? If it didn’t, maybe it’s time to pivot and try something else.

3. Most importantly, we need to know our alumni better. The alumni engagement curve continues to be U-shaped, meaning that alumni 0-5 years out engage at a higher rate, then we all tend to lose them for 10-15 years before we get some back when they’re further out. How do we not lose them? I suspect that what they did during their time as a student is less relevant once they hit that five-year mark. Messages from their department or student club might not resonate much, but perhaps messages about ongoing career resources or professional development opportunities or industry networks might. Wake Forest’s “First Five” program is an interesting way to engage grads in this way.

As Cara Giacomini, PhD from CASE said in a recent interview, alumni “are engaging in different ways based on evolving interests.” It is incumbent on us as advancement professionals to know what those interests are and to ensure that personalizing their experience with our institution as much as possible. One simple exercise is to interview some of your graduates who are 5-10 years out. Get a feel for what their lives are like, what’s important to them. Then tailor your messaging and offerings around that. In fact, have your entire staff get involved and bring their learnings to a staff meeting. As a design thinking practitioner, I believe it’s absolutely critical to triangulate quantitative (think: survey) and qualitative (think: interviews) data to generate insights that can help us unlock engagement.

ICYMI, CASE just opened up reporting for the FY24 report, so if you’d like to help make this incredible resource even better, head over to their website to learn more.

If you want to learn more, I encourage you to subscribe and check out past episodes of CMAC’s podcast Alumless. Alumni engagement data (and how to use it) is a frequent topic of conversation and we’re here to help, especially now that we have the fabulous engagement data guru Melissa Schipke on board with the CMAC team.

What trends are you seeing in your engagement data? Let us know in the comments. -NK