Leveraging Alumni Stories
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The document describes Washington College's "Path to Passion" program, which collects career and engagement information from alumni through an online form and displays searchable profiles on their website. These profiles have led to increased alumni participation in panels, mentoring, donations, and story leads. The program started as an idea to showcase different career paths and engage young alumni and has now expanded to provide additional benefits across different departments.
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Leveraging Alumni Stories
- 1. Leveraging Alumni Stories Path to Passion at Washington College Check it out on the web
- 2. About Us
- 3. Washington College • Private liberal arts school in Chestertown, Maryland founded in 1782 • Roughly 1,400 undergraduate students, DIII Sports • Sticker price of $50k+ • Around 10,000 active alumni, many in the Mid-Atlantic region
- 4. Lindsay Bergman-Debes ’07 • Digital Strategist • College Relations & Marketing • Specializes in content and social media strategy • Runs the Content Management System • Started at WC before Facebook existed
- 5. Jenny Hutton P’19 • Volunteer Coordinator • Alumni Relations • Matches alumni volunteers with opportunities in Career Development, Admissions, Academics and Student Life • Plans alumni panels and other engagement tools for Alumni Relations
- 6. Why Path to Passion?
- 7. How Jenny’s Idea Became Strategic Content • Engage alumni who filled out survey • Inspired by being on the parent side of the College search • Key Questions: • How can we show the many different paths to take with your education? • Is there a way to take the information we already have and make it searchable?
- 8. The Little Idea That Could • First Challenge: Getting Buy-In • Is something like this even possible? • Why do we need content like this? • College Relations Perspective • Great engagement tool for young alumni who often feel not as special • Loved the ideas for how the program could serve multiple areas
- 9. But really, how awesome is this content? • Searchable profiles for admissions & career services • An engagement tool for reaching out to alumni • A pool of potential volunteers for events • Donor conversion • Leads for stories & social content
- 10. Searchable for Admissions & Career Services • Answers the question “What do you do with a BA in theatre?” • Reassuring for parents and students alike • Provides Career Services with insight and potential contacts for internships
- 11. Engagement Tool for Reaching Out to Alumni • An ask so soft it’s not even really an ask • Opens doors for alumni participation • Tell us about yourself…
- 12. Pipeline for Event Guests • Additional information provides more options for compiling potential speakers • Yielded participation from alumni not on the radar • Self-reported club interests and experiences provide further insight
- 13. Donor Conversion • In our first year, 48% of alumni who participated in Path to Passion donated • Overall alumni giving rate was 22%
- 14. Story Leads & Social Content • Self-reported information yields interesting results • Professors and peers reaching out can generate outcomes stories not otherwise known
- 15. How We Made It Happen
- 16. Ask for suggestions from: • Alumni volunteers • Who better to know what cool things their friends are doing • Faculty and staff • We added 27 new doctors immediately to our outreach list after reaching out to the pre-med program coordinator • Ask Google! Build List of Potential Contacts
- 17. Create The Form • Robust list of questions that require thoughtful answers but not too time-consuming • Should lead enough to capture the essence of your institution • Decide on form hosting (we use third party service Wufoo currently)
- 18. Reach Out to the Lists • Use personal connections when possible • Provide templates for faculty, coaches, alumni volunteers to contact via email • Promote the program at alumni events
- 19. Optimize for the Web • Decide on specific tagging nomenclature to include with your form • Build a site that can display by certain types of tags • We use majors and career fields • We will start to incorporate athletics as coaches reach out to alumni
- 20. What Tags Make Sense? • Career Field • Major/Minor • Adding: Athletics • Other Options • Affinity groups • Regional • Any grouping that makes sense to your audience’s needs
- 21. • Our LiveWhale CMS has a dedicated profiles module • It might be more of a narrative with headings in other CMSs • make sure you standardize the look before you get started Build Profiles in Your CMS
- 22. Our Backend View
- 23. What Our Audience Sees
- 24. What Our Audience Sees
- 25. The Road to Success Real Profile Examples
- 26. Suzanne Fischer-Huettner ’95 & Steven Huettner ’91 • Positive engagement experience • Panel participation • Career mentoring and speaking to classes • New donors
- 27. Suzanne Fischer-Huettner ’95 & Steven Huettner ’91 • Positive engagement experience • Panel participation • Career mentoring and speaking to classes • New donors
- 28. Megan Walburn Viviano ’07 • No answer to “cold calls” • Engaged by peer-to- peer email from classmate • Panel participation • New donor
- 29. Ciarán O’Keeffe ’94 • Found via Google • After reengaging via P2P, he participated in and won the alumni magazine photography contest • Celebrity of sorts for his work in paranormal studies
- 30. Ian May ’03 • Contacted with letter sent on behalf of popular International Studies professor • Magazine story & homepage story
- 31. Christopher Smith ’07 • Contacted because of biology major • P2P profile lead to visit from Major Gifts Officer • Donated at “1782” level • Homepage story • Wants to volunteer when he returns to area
- 32. Our Path What Does the Future Hold?
- 33. Stories and Social • Working to identify alumni to interview and increasing our Chris Smith factor • Promoting social content through alumni and prospective student Facebook and Twitter accounts • Using social to encourage other alumni to participate in Path to Passion
- 34. On-Campus Panels We’ve Had: • Putting the Pieces Together (Education) • #WACLikeMe (Alumni of Color) • We Love WC (Admissions Open House) • Entrepreneurship • Alumni in Media
- 35. Lead Like a Girl • WC has its first female President • Path to Passion re- engaged and fostered good relationships with several professional alumna • Alumna of the Year Award
- 36. Lead Like a Girl • Fall leadership symposium with speaker panels and networking/mentoring opportunities • Spring campus speaker with additional alumna engagement opportunities
- 37. Questions?
- 38. Contact Us Lindsay Bergman-Debes @lbergman2 lbergman2@washcoll.edu Jenny Hutton jhutton2@washcoll.edu washcoll.edu @washcoll facebook.com/washingtoncolleg e
Notas del editor
- We hail from the Eastern shore of Maryland – not DC or Washington State Our institution was founded in 1782 and George Washington gave us 50 guineas and his name. He also served on our Board. We’ve grown a lot in the last 20 years or so, and we’re now around 1400 students. Our sticker price is a bit over $55k and our discount rate tends to be a little below 50%. Last year, we inaugurated our first female president. Sheila Bair, who—as chairperson of the FDIC—took on big banks and Wall Street during the financial crisis, who was on Time’s “100 most influential people” list, on The Wall Street Journal’s “50 Women to Watch” list, and was Forbes’s second most powerful woman in the World in 2008 and 2009. She’s big on college affordability and coming from business and government, she has a huge focus on career placement.
- I started at WC in 2003 and Facebook didn’t happen for us until 2005. Now I help departments and offices develop their digital strategy and maintain their websites in our distributed authorship environment. We moved from a single dude hand-coding our site to a Content Management System called LiveWhale during my first year at WC, so my role has really evolved around getting to know the CMS and immersing myself in content strategy. I also run our main social media accounts, do social advertising for recruitment, and assist other departments with social strategy.
- Over 450 alumni filled out an alumni engagement survey stating they would like to give back through fundraising, as career mentors or as admissions champions. The problem? Career services wanted job placement, not career advice. Admissions was going through its own growing pains and didn’t want to coordinate interaction with prospective students and alumni. Faculty already had their favorite volunteers. So what do I do as a new Volunteer Coordinator with 450 alumni who want to give their time in ways the College doesn’t really want it? At the same time, my son was starting to think about schools. He knew he was interested in economics but didn’t want to be a banker. I wanted an easy way to show him stories of our alumni who used their economics degrees to find different careers.
- No one wanted to mess with our profile system. Why do we need another thing to maintain? I had a lot of work to do to prove to overworked and underpaid staff that my vision would benefit students, alumni, and prospective families and in turn help the Center for Career Development, Admissions and faculty. LBD When Jenny came to me with this idea, I liked it both as an alumna who—despite working for the College—hasn’t felt very engaged and as a content strategist who is constantly trying to figure out ways to repurpose content and create interesting materials for the digital sphere. After a few years under enrollment management, I knew that outcomes stories were important there, but I also know that my friends are doing great things that alumni relations might not be aware of because they aren’t connected with them in any super meaningful way.
- So when Jenny and I talked it out I saw content that could be used for admissions and career services, reaching out to alumni who haven’t really stayed in touch with the school, potential volunteers for Jenny to connect with, potential donors, and—most importantly for my shop—leads for new web stories and social content—and maybe even print collateral.
- Admissions does communications in-house, so we’re always looking for interesting stories to share with prospective students. We’ve also started targeting parents of students with content via social and email. Under President Bair, we’ve increased our focus on career-related programming, and will continue looking at careers as an important topic. We’ve grown our internship program, and we’re always looking for additional connections—especially from alumni—to give our students opportunities for job shadowing and networking. Path to Passion provides a searchable database that can be narrowed down by potential major or career field of interest. You can find out that English majors in jobs from journalist to OB/GYN. Theatre majors who are top HR executives serving on our Board or working as a stage manager in Philly. People working in finance who majored in history or international studies.
- LBD A lot of my friends hadn’t really been engaged with the College since we graduated. This program gave us a chance to reach out to people who may not necessarily have a huge net worth but do have stories worth sharing. Not only do we ask them to share what they’re up to, but they also reflect on their experience at WC. JH How do they use their liberal arts background today? What faculty members inspired them? That question has helped knock down some of those very tall silos that faculty put around their alumni and programs. An influential international studies professor was so touched by a Path to Passion submission that he sent an email to all international studies alumni to ask them to participate. A beloved English Professor asked me for help filling a panel after so many English alumni wrote about the Kiplin Hall summer trip he runs as a treasured memory. Once she realized we weren’t just asking these alumni for money, the head of the pre-med program sent me her prized manually updated spreadsheet of 144 alumni that had gone to graduate school and become doctors. We had most of them listed as living with their parents in Datatel!
- How many of you are familiar with Datatel? So you feel my pain? I have zero idea what half of the alumni do as a profession unless I stalk them on LinkedIn or they self-select the information in a survey or event. Sure, we know what the top 10% (donors) do for a living, but will they be career mentors? Can they open up their Texas mansion for prospective students? Provide an internship? Through Path to Passion, we’ve found alumni who want to donate their time. We’ve filled multiple event panels—and even had some of these events inspired by profiles we’ve received!
- Surprise! Some of these folks want to give us a check too! I’ll take that. In just this first year we saw 48% of our participants give while the overall average for alumni was 22%—that’s more than double! I will never think of my position as a fundraising position, but… There is some really great information out there that tells us that volunteers give more—way more if they feel that they are engaged and appreciated.
- Path to Passion provides great story leads—and overall, content we can use all over social media as is. In some cases, we’ll do more in-depth interviews with alumni who complete a profile. These stories may end up in the magazine, on the website and then posted to Facebook and Twitter. It’s the self-reporting that helps us find the really great stories of success.
- We have several alumni working on campus and we work with a handful of regular alumni volunteers. Reaching out to them yielded our first batch of profiles. Working with faculty to find contacts is immensely helpful, because alumni are more likely to stay in touch with these folks. We mentioned earlier that the pre-med program coordinator shared her spreadsheet? We added 27 doctors to our data from that! Even searching Google yielded results. Lists of our top alumni? Those turned into potential contacts I reached out to.
- Our form is designed to provoke thought but not be too overwhelming to fill out. We want to know how the unique opportunities they had at our College affected their outcomes. The questions are shaped to tell a specific story. If we want to delve in further with anyone, we’ll contact them as follow up. You need consider the story you want to tell for your institution. If your school has a lot of research opportunities, maybe ask a question specifically about how those opportunities made a difference for the alum after graduation. We also keep it fun—What is your favorite memory? Most write about May Day—we’ve got a tradition around May Day that involves some nudity. We actually went with a third-party form service outside our CMS because we wanted to incorporate some form logic and we wanted folks to be able to upload pictures directly with the form—just some things that are a little beyond what our CMS currently offers. We are using Wufoo, which we then embed on the site.
- JH How do we convince alumni to participate? We talked about faculty reaching out. But I work with other alumni especially during reunion years, chapter chairs, staff, coaches… and I stalk people. Yes, I stalk people. I find folks that are on the Washington College LinkedIn page, Google, Facebook—you name it; I try to find a personal connection. I even made Lindsay email people. I also use the logo that is not the traditional school colors everywhere—alumni panels, open houses, alumni weekend emails, on the website. We had people recognize it at this year’s alumni weekend, and for those who didn’t, we had the opportunity to explain the program. LBD Personal connections are super important to my cohort! We screen everything, and the younger you are, the better you are at tuning out noise. But if I get an email from Professor Gillin? I’ll open it in a heartbeat. I’m 10 years out and have been working there for 5 and I still can’t call him Rich. Either Professor or Dr. Gillin. Always. He commends respect, including the respect of me opening my email. We plan to work with faculty more as we continue to grow the program. I had my rock star student worker reach out to alumni who had been brothers in his fraternity. That yielded a lot of responses, too. And, a month after that student worker graduated, he filled out his profile! As the recognition of the program grows, we’re really finding it a lot easier to persuade people to join us.
- Suzanne Fischer-Huettner, the first female publisher of The Maryland Daily Record, and her husband Steven, a top senior researcher at Johns Hopkins, were not engaged with the College. Suzanne answered that initial engagement survey that kicked all this off by saying she wanted to provide an internship, but the process to submit an internship was difficult and tedious, and she reached out to tell me about her experience. Wanting to prove that her alma mater had not let her down, I invited Suzanne and Steve—college sweethearts—back to campus for an admission alumni panel. [[SWITCH TO NEXT SLIDE]] 250 prospective students and family members were in attendance and they told the audience about how much they loved the College, fell in love with the college, and credit their current careers to the education that they received at WC. They both did Path to Passion profiles very early, and Steven has since provided a job shadowing experience for a pre-med student who he then offered a job after graduation. Suzanne came back for a media panel and is now a member of the alumni board. Not to metion, these alumni who have been out for more than 20 years became first time donors! BOOM!
- Suzanne Fischer-Huettner, the first female publisher of The Maryland Daily Record, and her husband Steven, a top senior researcher at Johns Hopkins, were not engaged with the College. Suzanne answered that initial engagement survey that kicked all this off by saying she wanted to provide an internship, but the process to submit an internship was difficult and tedious, and she reached out to tell me about her experience. Wanting to prove that her alma mater had not let her down, I invited Suzanne and Steve—college sweethearts—back to campus for an admission alumni panel. 250 prospective students and family members were in attendance and they told the audience about how much they loved the College, fell in love with the college, and credit their current careers to the education that they received at WC. They both did Path to Passion profiles very early, and Steven has since provided a job shadowing experience for a pre-med student who he then offered a job after graduation. Suzanne came back for a media panel and is now a member of the alumni board. Not to metion, these alumni who have been out for more than 20 years became first time donors! BOOM!
- JH This alumna was untouchable. Emails, calls, airplane writer—I just couldn’t get Megan to be a volunteer but I really wanted her to come back to campus. She was the perfect student and now had the perfect story and career. She became the executive producer at a top Baltimore news station and she married the hunky head sports reporter that covers all of the Ravens and Orioles games! And this is one of the students Lindsay nonchalantly mentioned she knew, and one of the best examples of how those personal connections really yield results. LBD Megan was an English major with me, and she was my editor on the College literary magazine. I knew she would answer me, because we’re Facebook friends and we worked closely together in school. She would have probably dismissed emails from someone she didn’t know, or we may have even had an old email address on file. I asked her on Facebook for her current email address and sent her an email designed to reach out to people I knew when I was a student. This template is basically the same, with an explanation of the program and a little update on campus, but has a couple spots open to say something about a shared interest or activity we had. I talked about hell nights assembling the Collegian with Megan. With another friend, I talked about the Creative Arts dorm we’d lived in—things like that.
- This guy is a television ghost chaser in England! Found him on Google with a search as one of our top 100 alumni. He was one of the first to respond to outreach and he was very nice! After re-engaging with the College, he entered and won our magazine’s photo contest. He would like to Skype in to a class, and his favorite professor is still at the College. We’re working on a story for the magazine or website.
- Ian May shared his story after being contacted by an international studies professor. He took an interesting path from graduating with a background in international studies and Spanish to serving with the Peace Corps to joining the military to becoming a doctor. His profile is sparse, but he was contacted for a follow-up interview for the magazine that we cross-posted on the website. In his magazine story, he says “The study abroad opportunities I had, traveling to Cuba, Ecuador, Spain, and South Africa, as well as the focus on writing and critical thinking, set up a base for me to continue my education and interact with the larger world.”
- Chris Smith is one Path to Passion story who saw coverage on the home page and social. We still had him living with his parents in Datatel, but he is actually living in Texas and married to another WC alum and expecting a little Shoreman. He’s an oral surgeon in the Air Force and wants to come back to Maryland. When his family moves back up, he’d like to be involved with the Pre-Med program at the College. Through this (re)discovery of this alumnus, we were able to send a gift officer to meet with him during a Texas trip, and he is now also one of our mid-level donors in our 1782 Society.