Managing Alumni Relations in a Connected World

by Christoph Schmaltz

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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. T h e y d o i t w h i l e w o r k i n g t o g e t h e r a n d 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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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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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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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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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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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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