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Managing Alumni Relations in a Connected World by Christoph Schmaltz cc gadgetgirl

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Are you still in touch with a company where youworked previously?I assume most of you are, but who you are in touchwith: HR? External Communications? Probably not. Inreality, you probably still have connections withsomeone from your team, colleagues that you sharedan office with or others that you met throughcommunities of interest (including social groups)while with the company. People connect with people.They do it while working together andafterwards. Companies need to think of alumni asemployees that never really left.This simple observation has a profound impact on theway companies go about their alumni relations.Unless you are McKinsey, most alumni programmestoday look something like this:When an employee leaves the company he is invitedby HR to be part of the alumni network. Frequentlythey will send general news and updates about thecompany as an email and/or shiny magazine.Recently, companies have rolled out corporate alumniplatforms or started to use Ning, LinkedIn or othersocial media channels to stay in touch with formeremployees and facilitate connections between them.In most cases, the value for the company and foralumni is more than questionable. Therefore, it doesnot come as a surprise that most alumni programmessuffer from poor engagement and low return-on-investment. The problem is that the approach toalumni relations is currently flawed. cc gadgetgirl

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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 wouldradically change the traditional approach. My alumniprogramme would: • Enable employees to connect with anyone inside my company • Encourage employees to connect with other employees outside my company • Give ownership to alumni cc gadgetgirl

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Enable employees to connect with anyone insidemy companyOften, alumni relations start once an employee leavesthe firm. I would argue that this is too late. It isdifficult to start building relationships once anemployee is out of the door. Better to do it whilst he isstill with the company. That is why alumni relationsneed start the day an employee sets foot into theoffice.Before the arrival of social tools, hallways, cafeterias,smoking corners and office parties were the fewplaces to meet colleagues you did not directly workwith. Unfortunately, these do not scale very well.These days, many organisations have piloted orperhaps implemented an enterprise networkingsolution. It allows employees to collaborate with eachother beyond physical borders, discuss topics theyare interested in and connect with like-mindedpeople. That way employees can build their ownnetwork of respected and trusted colleagues. Thestronger an employee’s network, the more likely sheis to stay with the company.That also means that organisations should not restrictthe types of groups or communities of interest thatemployees would like to create, unless they violatecompany policy. If there is a group of people crazyabout wines or football fanatics, why not providethem with the means to connect inside the company?The money saved for other initiatives to improveemployees satisfaction, and thus retention, will makeit even more worthwhile. cc gadgetgirl

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Encourage employees to connect with otheremployees outside my companyAs sure as death and taxes, an employee will leaveeventually. What is one of the first things she does,when she hands in her notice and leaves thecompany? She reaches out to everyone she knows inthe company, says goodbye and leaves her contactdetails. If she hasn’t yet, she will also start connectingwith colleagues on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.This can be a laborious undertaking, and in mostcases employees will miss some of the people theymet during their time at the company. Any of thesemissed connections could represent a missedopportunity for my company.So, if I know that people leaving my companyconnect with my employees using external socialmedia channels, why not encourage and facilitate thisactivity to begin with? As alumni programmemanager, I would look for ways to lower the frictionfor employees to connect with each other on externalnetworks, too. Easier said than done. I shall delve intodetails on how exactly this might look like in my nextblog post. cc gadgetgirl

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Give ownership to alumniBasically, I would ‘outsource’ parts of my alumniprogramme to the rest of the company. Nonetheless,even as someone leading such a programme for acompany that has become a social business, I needto be in touch with alumni, too. Alumni will pick upmost of the relevant information or gossip fromformer colleagues. Thus, general company news ornews about other alumni is a nice-to-have, but doesnot build much trust or engagement. I need to offermore than mere updates from the company: ideally,something that alumni feel proud of and passionateabout even when they have left the firm. For example,it is said that Ben & Jerry’s donate a percentage ofpre-tax profits to philanthropic causes, and invite theircorporate alumni to decide where the money will go. Icould not find confirmation of exactly how this works,but even if it is not entirely true, similar concepts areworthwhile to explore.All the above calls for a radical change in the way wethink about alumni relations. Alumni managers willdepend on many other people in the organisation tomake this change happen. Management needs tounderstand the different dynamics in a connectedworld, a formalised social media training programmeneeds to be implemented to enable employees to useexternal social networks, IT needs to put the technicalfoundation in place for employees to connect bothinside and outside the firewall, and many other stepsare also probably required. cc gadgetgirl

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If you are an alumni manager, I would like to ask youto challenge the status quo. Does your programmescale? 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 employeesthat never really left, and then ask how you can createa genuine value exchange to strengthen theecosystem that supports your firm. This blog post written by me was originally published on the Dachis Group Blog cc gadgetgirl