Are Engaged Alumni Found or Created?

Have you ever been out driving and noticed a college or university bumper sticker on the car ahead of you? What is the motivation for placing that bumper sticker? Is the driver truly loyal or engaged with the institution? And, if so, was that engagement latent or was it created by the institution?

Every post-secondary educational institution tries to mobilize its alumni in order to achieve the goals of the institution. Alumni provide substantial monetary and voluntary support to the institutions, and their contributions and relationships extend well beyond the conferment of a degree or diploma. The Council for Aid to Education (CAE) reports that alumni accounted for 30% of the total voluntary contributions to post-secondary institutions in the U.S in 2006. Alumni also provide substantial, tangible, non-monetary benefits to institutions. These include - but are not limited to - recommending the school to a prospective student or their children, hiring a graduate, acting as a mentor or volunteer, and countless other activities that support their favorite school.

On average, however, only 12% of U.S. alumni have contributed to their respective institutions in the past year and this percentage has been slowly but consistently decreasing over time. Does this mean that the level of alumni engagement is decreasing?

Universities and colleges view consistent donors, frequent participants in activities, and purchasers of alumni services as "good" alumni. Educational institutions want their alumni to participate and they seek out alumni that get involved in such activities. They ultimately want alumni that remain engaged in the institution long after graduation day and tend to view alumni that participate in these kinds of activities as being successfully engaged. But are they? Are institutions confusing actions with engagement? At Ipsos, we think so.

Active, donating, or so-called "engaged" alumni may, in fact, lack a strong emotional connection to the institution. Their activity may be defined by habit, by peer pressure, or any number of other reasons. Their need to belong and to be seen as a contributing member of a community may be completely satisfied by many other competing charitable and volunteer opportunities. Similarly, alumni who appear to be uninvolved - those who do not show up as "active" in alumni databases - may have a latent, high degree of emotional engagement to the institution that is largely untapped. These alumni may not have the opportunity to express their engagement in a way that fits their lifestyle or circumstances and they may not show that engagement in a way that the university or college can even see, let alone capture in the alumni database.

At Ipsos, we understand that engagement is not an action or group of actions. Engagement is a positive set of attitudes and actions that are the conditions of being "engaged." Ipsos has identified six positive principles that help to identify engaged alumni:

• The alumni are proud of the mission and uniqueness of the institution.
• The alumni have a sense of involvement in fulfilling the mission.
• The alumni know what they can do to personally contribute to the success of the institution.
• The alumni are motivated to contribute to the cause of the institution.
• The alumni recommend and advocate for the institution to family, friends and professional contacts.
• The alumni participate in the life of the institution on a personal and professional level.

It is the role of the institution to provide the conditions - in terms of performance, interactions, activities, communications and opportunities - that generate the most number of alumni matching the six principles.

Only two of the six principles are related to actions taken by alumni. So, institutions need to change their thinking and break the exclusive link they make between superficial activity data and engagement and, particularly, that monetary donations are the ultimate expression of engagement.

Ipsos' global research on loyalty and engagement shows that there isn't a one-to-one correlation between action, value of the customer (or alumni) to the organization, and engagement. So, if overt actions by alumni - donations, attendance at events - are not necessarily a measure of engagement, then how can we identify truly engaged alumni as targets for engagement and advancement efforts?

The typical approach of scouring through alumni databases using the tools of data mining and predictive modeling has limits and does not necessarily lead to increased alumni development performance. This is not to say that current methods are poor. It is just that the relationship with alumni and the institution's success at matching the six principles cannot be explained by the very thin view of the alumni's life captured by a university database.

The captured activities also tend to be final outcomes. The act of donating is a logical and final expression of engagement that has developed over time but it alone does not necessarily demonstrate true engagement.

There is no proven correlation between action and engagement. Globally, Ipsos has done a significant amount of work looking at customer loyalty to brands and organizations. We find no link that says high activity equals high loyalty. In fact, in previous research for universities, we find alumni segments that show high activity such as donations and attendance at events but low measured engagement. Conversely, we find groups that express high engagement but do not necessarily participate in specifically outlined alumni activities. The current activity-based data mining misses both the opportunity presented by the second group and the threat posed by the first group.

Further, there is an assumption by many institutions that small changes will incrementally improve alumni engagement. As the CAE data identifying the slowly declining rate of alumni monetary participation shows, the small changes aren't working. Substantial change is needed. We have already identified the first area for change and that is, shifting the focus on outcomes like donations to a focus on creating the conditions that generate engagement as defined by the six principles.

The second opportunity for substantial change comes from understanding the relationship between engagement and outcome. As the following chart shows, our research identifies that the relationship is not linear. There are two areas where changes in engagement result in significant positive impact for the institution. The first opportunity comes from reducing the barriers that block disengaged alumni from being partially engaged. The second is creating the drivers that change partially engaged alumni to fully engaged.

Unfortunately, many institutions are focused on small incremental changes that target partially engaged alumni. As the chart shows, small changes in the level of engagement of this group do not lead to significant incremental results for the institution.

At Ipsos, we have taken our global research on loyalty and tailored it for the post-secondary education alumni market. We have developed a methodology that can measure, optimize, and predict alumni engagement and identify both the barriers and drivers of engagement. This methodology can also interact with existing databases and help university and college development departments identify, at an individual level, truly loyal and engaged alumni. This model shows that it is possible to change the conditions that lead to engagement. The model incorporates specific measures of attitudes, current activity and future intentions that correspond to the six principles we have outlined.

In our view, the two assumptions of a linear relationship between action and engagement and the assumption of a linear relationship between engagement and value to the institution are the two key limitations in current activities by institutions looking to create more "engaged" alumni and greater alumni participation.

The solution is to provide a measurement and search mechanism that incorporates emotional measures, activity, and engagement.

Chris Setchell Associate Vice President Ipsos Loyalty 416.324.2106 [email protected]

Chris Setchell has more than 20 years experience in marketing consulting and development of segmentation and positioning strategies. His expertise is data synthesis. He integrates the tools of traditional survey research and data mining with other data sources to build a comprehensive picture of an organization's business environment, customers and stakeholders. Chris uses data synthesis techniques to discover opportunities for substantial and meaningful change for his clients.

Prior to joining Ipsos, Chris built a successful marketing strategy consulting company and worked in senior client service roles in advertising and branding agencies. Chris has extensive experience in several sectors including travel and tourism, financial services, not-for-profits and imaging.

Chris holds an MBA from University of Edinburgh and is also Vice President of EDUCT, Edinburgh University's alumni organization in Toronto, Canada.