This article looks at new approaches to corporate alumni programmes in a hyper-connected world. It discusses not only the use of social technology but more fundamentally the changes that need to happen on a cultural and organisational level.

1. Managing Alumni Relations in a Connected World
by Christoph Schmaltz
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2. Are you still in touch with a company where you
worked previously?
I assume most of you are, but who you are in touch
with: HR? External Communications? Probably not. In
reality, you probably still have connections with
someone from your team, colleagues that you shared
an office with or others that you met through
communities of interest (including social groups)
while with the company. People connect with people.
They do it while working together and
afterwards. Companies need to think of alumni as
employees that never really left.
This simple observation has a profound impact on the
way companies go about their alumni relations.
Unless you are McKinsey, most alumni programmes
today look something like this:
When an employee leaves the company he is invited
by HR to be part of the alumni network. Frequently
they will send general news and updates about the
company as an email and/or shiny magazine.
Recently, companies have rolled out corporate alumni
platforms or started to use Ning, LinkedIn or other
social media channels to stay in touch with former
employees and facilitate connections between them.
In most cases, the value for the company and for
alumni is more than questionable. Therefore, it does
not come as a surprise that most alumni programmes
suffer from poor engagement and low return-on-
investment. The problem is that the approach to
alumni relations is currently flawed.
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3. Try to answer the following questions:
• Do alumni want to connect with HR?
• Do alumni want to suddenly engage and network
with people they don’t know?
• Does this approach offer intimacy at scale and
help build meaningful relationships?
• Do alumni remember and want to go to yet-
another website destination…to do what
exactly?
• What value does corporate news, job tips,
discussion forum really offer to the alumni?
• What value does it bring the company?
If I was put in charge of an alumni programme I would
radically change the traditional approach. My alumni
programme would:
• Enable employees to connect with anyone inside
my company
• Encourage employees to connect with other
employees outside my company
• Give ownership to alumni
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4. Enable employees to connect with anyone inside
my company
Often, alumni relations start once an employee leaves
the firm. I would argue that this is too late. It is
difficult to start building relationships once an
employee is out of the door. Better to do it whilst he is
still with the company. That is why alumni relations
need start the day an employee sets foot into the
office.
Before the arrival of social tools, hallways, cafeterias,
smoking corners and office parties were the few
places to meet colleagues you did not directly work
with. Unfortunately, these do not scale very well.
These days, many organisations have piloted or
perhaps implemented an enterprise networking
solution. It allows employees to collaborate with each
other beyond physical borders, discuss topics they
are interested in and connect with like-minded
people. That way employees can build their own
network of respected and trusted colleagues. The
stronger an employee’s network, the more likely she
is to stay with the company.
That also means that organisations should not restrict
the types of groups or communities of interest that
employees would like to create, unless they violate
company policy. If there is a group of people crazy
about wines or football fanatics, why not provide
them with the means to connect inside the company?
The money saved for other initiatives to improve
employees satisfaction, and thus retention, will make
it even more worthwhile.
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5. Encourage employees to connect with other
employees outside my company
As sure as death and taxes, an employee will leave
eventually. What is one of the first things she does,
when she hands in her notice and leaves the
company? She reaches out to everyone she knows in
the company, says goodbye and leaves her contact
details. If she hasn’t yet, she will also start connecting
with colleagues on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.
This can be a laborious undertaking, and in most
cases employees will miss some of the people they
met during their time at the company. Any of these
missed connections could represent a missed
opportunity for my company.
So, if I know that people leaving my company
connect with my employees using external social
media channels, why not encourage and facilitate this
activity to begin with? As alumni programme
manager, I would look for ways to lower the friction
for employees to connect with each other on external
networks, too. Easier said than done. I shall delve into
details on how exactly this might look like in my next
blog post.
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6. Give ownership to alumni
Basically, I would ‘outsource’ parts of my alumni
programme to the rest of the company. Nonetheless,
even as someone leading such a programme for a
company that has become a social business, I need
to be in touch with alumni, too. Alumni will pick up
most of the relevant information or gossip from
former colleagues. Thus, general company news or
news about other alumni is a nice-to-have, but does
not build much trust or engagement. I need to offer
more than mere updates from the company: ideally,
something that alumni feel proud of and passionate
about even when they have left the firm. For example,
it is said that Ben & Jerry’s donate a percentage of
pre-tax profits to philanthropic causes, and invite their
corporate alumni to decide where the money will go. I
could not find confirmation of exactly how this works,
but even if it is not entirely true, similar concepts are
worthwhile to explore.
All the above calls for a radical change in the way we
think about alumni relations. Alumni managers will
depend on many other people in the organisation to
make this change happen. Management needs to
understand the different dynamics in a connected
world, a formalised social media training programme
needs to be implemented to enable employees to use
external social networks, IT needs to put the technical
foundation in place for employees to connect both
inside and outside the firewall, and many other steps
are also probably required.
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7. If you are an alumni manager, I would like to ask you
to challenge the status quo. Does your programme
scale? What is the value for you and your company?
Think beyond what every other company does today.
Think of what could be. Think of alumni as employees
that never really left, and then ask how you can create
a genuine value exchange to strengthen the
ecosystem that supports your firm.
This blog post written by me was originally
published on the Dachis Group Blog
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