Welcome, everyone. The Council for Advancement and Support of Education is pleased to present this online webinar. Alumni online programs, Building Engagement and Philanthropic Support. My name is Ann Weller and it is my pleasure to introduce our speakers today. Roxanne Shields is the Director of Alumni Strategy in the marketing unit of the Penn State World Campus. Online Learning. Roxanne received her Bachelor's of Science and Master's of Science from Penn State. She has more than 20 years of experience performing alumni relations at Penn State and a professional and executive volunteer leadership capacity. In the last six years, her speaking and writing efforts have focused on unique experiences of adult and online learners as it relates to alumni engagement and philanthropic. Amber Redmond is the director of alumni relations for Penn State World Campus. She is a two time Penn State alumna, having earned a master's of public administration through Penn State World campus in 2018 and a Bachelor of Science in Management through the Smeal College of Business with a minor in Labor Studies and Employment relations in 2009, she's worked at Penn State for close to eight years, and has worked in both development and alumni relations and admissions and financial aid. Welcome, Roxanne and Amber. Well, thank you so much. And for that wonderful introduction and for including us as part of this on Demand series. Such a great opportunities. There is so much that has changed in higher education over the last year, and it will continue to change through time. And we are just so very happy to share our experiences with the case community. We hope that those in the case community will do the same and support their colleagues. Today we're going to talk about the field of alumni relations for online programs. Then we're going to talk about the importance of the online student experience to philanthropy and engagement. We will also highlight the World Campus Alumni Program, and we'll talk about some research that I have done. We're World campus and with some other universities. And then finally, Amber will wrap it up, talking about how we can support each other. So the field of alumni relations for online programs isn't really something that has been identified as being unique in and of itself. It's lumped in with all of their alumni relations. In 1998, Penn State started our online program, and from that time there has really been very little that has been written about these unique alumni. I started serving this population in 2014, and there really hasn't been much improvement since in terms of what has been written. There have been a couple of doctoral thesis here and there, but it's really something that needs to be explored a lot more. There are a lot of assumptions about alumni of online programs. First of all, when thinking about students, a lot of people even long time ago, the common assumption that the students are busy, they don't have time to get involved with their university. They're managing their families as they're managing jobs, those kinds of things. And so they just simply won't get involved. Other assumptions are that these alumni don't have the ability to their university because they've never stepped on the foot of any campus. And if they do have some kind of affinity, the assumption has been made that they don't make significant donations. Well, we're here to tell you that that these assumptions are simply not correct, and we have learned it through time. But what I do want to warn you is, as you do look on past literature about this population, a lot of these assumptions are woven through it, even from our professional work organizations. So taking it all with a grain of salt, something else that I want to point out is that I have heard other universities talking about these populations, and they have really great intentions. They talk about we want to make sure that fees alumni feel just as much a part of the alumni family as our face to face alumni. And so so what they don't do is they don't identify these populations as being different in their databases. They come in with all of the rest of the alumni and so that can be problematic down the road. And so if you're one of those institutions, I'm just letting you know that you might want to think about that because the last thing that you want to do is to send an invitation to your alumni base, your alumni population, and say something like, Stay in the same dorm that you stayed in while you were a student. It just doesn't apply. And now you find that you've alienated perhaps thousands of alumni. So anyway, keep it in mind. Something else I want to mention is that with the pandemic, there's been even further confusion that has been created about what alumni of online programs mean. We are not referring to all of those classes that went from in-person to Zoom during 2020. Rather, we're talking about asynchronous programs that are delivered through a variety of technology applications in media and the populations that typically become students of these are around age 30 as an average age. So part of the reason for us doing this presentation is really to increase the awareness about this special population. This is particularly important because of the pandemic, because many institutions moving forward are now thinking about creating permanent online programs as part of their universities. Their students have found the flexibility that Zoom can allow. And so so they're taking students or taking courses when they want to, that sort of thing. And so they're creating these new online programs, and they're also looking at it as a way to financially support their institutions during these rough times. So with this field of alumni relations, we're actually turning to you because we are hoping to create an ongoing opportunity for discussion. And Amber is going to be talking about that later in the presentation. So we hope that you'll be part of that. I'd like to talk about the importance of the online student experience as it relates to philanthropy and engagement, because it is the foundation of philanthropy and engagement. So in the field of advancement, we talk about the things of time, talent and treasure. So why is the online student experience so important? Just like in my traditional on campus experience, we know that from the limited research that has been done that the online student experience is a predictor of donating. So that treasure part. So we know that if experience leads to money, we can probably assume that it's the same thing for the time and talent portion of that engagement model. So while you as alumni professionals may not have control over the student experienced, Amber is going to be sharing and taking some time to talk about the experience because because it is the foundation from where you will start. As you listen to Amber, also consider that the student experience really has an impact on student retention. And so if you don't have students who are retained, then we aren't going to have alumni to work with. So your influence is very important. So Amber can take you with me. Absolutely. Thank you, Roxanna. I appreciate that. So one thing I think it's that's important to keep in mind when thinking about the student experience overall is that it actually begins when a prospect makes the decision to pursue higher education and starts browsing institutions to find the right fit. So we found that prospective students who are looking into world campus are very interested in hearing that they're a part of the larger Penn State brand. So a point that our admissions folks share with prospective students is that when they enroll in campus online courses, they are truly Penn State students attending the Pennsylvania State University, or what we've termed the real Penn State. One way that we've helped prospective students determine if World campus is a good fit for them as they're browsing through different institutions is by offering them the opportunity to talk with alumni ambassadors. These ambassador volunteers share their experience and their tips for success in online learning with prospective students in order to help them make an informed decision regarding their educational options. Because there's so many available to them, the program not only assists with recruitment and conversion of prospective students, but also with alumni engagement overall as well. So just something to keep in mind with that aspect. Another way that we've worked to bridge the gap between prospective students and these prospective students eventually becoming alumni is by holding regionally targeted in-person recruitment events. So pre-COVID, of course, we set these events up similar to mixers, and we really try to make them beneficial for anyone with an affiliation to world campus to attend. So from prospective student to staff to alumni and to friends of Penn State, part of the event includes more of a formal presentation to prospective students, where we're all campus staff, share information about services available to them. Alumni share their experiences in more of a panel format, but following these more formal pieces, we do allow attendees to interact with one another, network with each other and have that more informal networking opportunity. Prospective students at these events are also often offered the opportunity to talk with staff members one on one, and we have admissions counselors and financial aid coordinators available to answer any of their more program applications, specific questions or financially related questions as well. So once the prospective students make the decision that world campus really is the best fit for them, as you might imagine, the student experience continues and it really begins to ramp up. So we here at World Campus have made leaps and strides over the past several years to really enhance the experience for world campus students. We've established a robust student affairs team who strives to make every world campus student feel supported when taking their courses online and navigating their Penn State experience from a distance. So they've worked to create the World Campus Student Advisory Board, the World Campus Student Government Association, and upwards of 20 different student clubs and organizations that students become and can become involved in. And that list continues to grow each semester, and students actually are working to form online sororities and fraternities as well. So a lot of really awesome things happening with World Campus for students and for alumni as well. We also offer students access to career counselors and assistance in searching for their virtual internship opportunities. And the student affairs teams organized a student leadership conference over the past three years where students gain essential leadership skills that they can utilize in their workplace and their communities. The ultimate goal is to provide world campus students with an experience that instills that same sense of connection built by their classmates at our residential campus locations. Only thing that that I'll add to that, Amber, is that I had worked with somebody from the word Chester Polytech Institute on a presentation. They had come up with something that was really neat that I thought that we would want to share. They were starting something that was a student success team and so as soon as a student was admitted, they had somebody who was assigned to that student. And so it was a person who provided one face, one name throughout the entire online journey. And they were able to do this by supporting it through technology. But it really did create this really unique relationship with the students. Penn State is trying to do something like that at this point in time, and it just seems like something that will be really helpful. And I do have a statistic here that they provided to me, and they went from a retention rate of 77% of their students to 86% in 2020. So from 2016 to 2020, it was a pretty, pretty great increase. So anyways, so moving forward with that. So can you talk about just our General World Campus Alumni program? Sure. So once the students near graduation and file that intend to graduate, they are world campus students specifically are invited to attend a graduation ceremony that is specific to world campus students. While these students might be invited and elect to attend their actual graduation ceremony through their college campus, the celebration really serves as an opportunity for world campus graduates to build that sense of community among one another. This type of event does occur at a number of other universities across the U.S. as well, but we really see it as a key event that bridges that shift from student to alumni. And it does help to instill that sense of community among our online learners. It might be the first time that many of these students have seen each other face to face. Now, Zoom has kind of helped with that a little bit, of course, but it often is the first time that they're meeting their classmates in person, which is which is really awesome. We have students that all attend and be flabbergasted that they're from the same state and they have taken their courses together the whole time but have come to this graduation celebration and are meeting each other for the first time. So they build friendships for life, which is pretty cool. We hold the event during commencement weekend, so in conjunction with one, they may already be traveling to campus, participate in those ceremonies, and we intentionally make the event family friendly so that graduates can celebrate with the members of their family who really served as their support systems for them during their educational journeys. So as I mentioned, I've been working with the online alumni since about 2014. And what's interesting is that that graduation celebration had been occurring long before, long before we had any kind of formalized alumni program. And the reason that we have a formalized alumni program is because our alumni would go to events like that and say, oh, my gosh, this is great. What's next? How do we get involved? How do we make relationships with people? How can we leverage this for our careers? And Penn State hit really what I call the tipping point in 2014, where we hit about 16,000 alumni. And those alumni were reaching out to our leaders and to our staff and saying, okay, what's our next step? And what we were also seeing at the same time is that our alumni. Were. Joining the Penn State Alumni Association at a much higher rate than our other colleges and campuses that are part of the Penn State system. So we were having a join rate of about 45% versus 30% for those campuses and colleges. So what did we do about it? Well, we created an alumni board in 2014, and that alumni board then created its bylaws. There's bylaws were approved under the umbrella of the Penn State Alumni Association. So pretty quickly, we started working with the board and they created a survey to understand the alumni needs and desires. In the meantime, other surveys were being conducted with our Penn State world campus students to better understand their needs and what we were hearing from them was that they wanted to be connected to alumni. They wanted to be connected to alumni chapters. They were really very interested in career services as well. So we're going to talk to you about some of the things that we have tried. Given that survey information and this is where I need you have a disclaimer put in here because what works for one university doesn't always work for another university, and that's you probably don't know as alumni professionals, what comes back in a survey is not always the reality of what your alumni want. So over the next couple of years, we did try some things and because of our geographic distribution for online students, you primarily within the U.S., some being overseas, we were not able to have in-person events. We just could not find a high enough concentration, even within those large cities where we did have a lot of alumni. We could not create a concentration that would warrant an event where make it a successful event with lots of engagement. So we started thinking about it a little bit differently. We teamed up with our alumni career services unit within the Penn State Alumni Association, and we started planning networking events in some of those major cities. That way, we made sure that even if two, two or three of our alumni showed up, that they would have a really good experience with the rest of the Penn State family. So one of the other events that we had was the resume media event and so we would work with our alumni Career Services unit to have them review on resumes. But at the same time, you could get to meet alumni from across the Penn State family network. Some other things that we tried, we knew that we were going to have to be working primarily virtually, with this population. And so we worked with a company called Breezin on some networking events. And what that allowed to do us to do was to have ten minute online chats with people. And so alumni were paired randomly with each other and they could just talk about whatever they wanted to talk about. This started off really, really well and was very widely received, but it quickly trailed off. So we had to start thinking about that differently and we started thinking about making them focused on the academic programs that people came from. And so we did that for a while, but over time, that ended up dwindling. But it was still something interesting that we tried and did have its place at that time. We have at that time we also started a quarterly newsletter, but we didn't have a real strong commitment to that quarterly newsletter. And so it really didn't take off the way that we had wanted it to. And in 2017, we had a changes in leadership for our World Campus Organization and a couple of staff changes. And so in 2020, of course, Ember became the director of Alumni Relations for World Campus, and we finally have some great traction. So, Amber, can you tell them, please, what you are doing today? I'd be happy to. So I came on board as the director of alumni relations for our campus in 2020, which was about a month. It was in February, so was about a month before the pandemic began, which is a really fun time to start a new role. But luckily, I wasn't new to Penn State as a whole. So that was that was helpful for me in this in this new venture. And I entered this role as a world campus alumna myself. So I came at it with a bit of a unique perspective, and I've tried to use my own alumni status to sort of ask myself what I would want to see as an alum from an online institution, knowing that none of my actual classes were taken in person, but also trying to incorporate my status as an employee who has a physical connection to the campus in what I do for alumni. So one of the first changes was to incorporate a personal note from me at the beginning of all of our monthly newsletters that are sent out to World Campus alumni. I just felt like this was a nice personal touch, easy to do, easy to implement. So that was one of the first steps I took. And then next, I looked at our social media presence and I tried to gauge where I could have the greatest impact and the broadest reach to the most alumni from our campus. Our Facebook group was and it's still very active with alumni posting, commenting and sharing pictures pretty regularly. So I try to remain engaged in the group with everything that they're sharing so that I can become familiar with the alumni population and they become familiar with my name and my face as well. Digitally, of course. So LinkedIn, on the other hand, it's been a bit of a challenge. We originally had an alumni group on that platform, but it didn't seem to encourage much interaction among alumni, at least our alumni population. So we recently shifted to a showcase page that is directly linked with the main world campus LinkedIn page. So the hope here is that it will make it easier for alumni to connect with world campus and with one another. And initially, our group, our alumni group had a little over 300 members, but our page actually hit 500 followers. So I think we're on the right track with with that change. I'm excited to see where that goes. Another small communication piece that we've implemented is a birthday greeting, another personal touch that I felt would have a pretty broad impact for the alumni population. So we send a birthday greeting to alumni each month at the beginning of the month. If they have a birthday in that month, just saying, Hey, happy birthday. And it's actually really nice because some alumni will reply and they'll send a thank you or, you know, just a quick message. So it's it's a really nice way for me to just start an email conversation with those alumni that do choose to respond to that. And then as far as events go. One of the most popular has been an alumni book club discussion. So I've been holding these on a quarterly basis and will discuss at the quarterly meetings the entirety of a professional development related book via the Zoom platform. So alums will join and they'll share their thoughts overall on the book that we have read together. But they'll also come with other resources that are related to the book. And the discussions that we've had together have proven to be a really nice way for them to build their networks by connecting with one another and for me to build my relationships with the alarms that attend. Otherwise, I may never have gotten the chance to interact with them. So these have been, I think, really successful for our alumni population. And I'm actually looking into a similar type of event around collectively listening to a podcast and then pausing the podcast episode at particular points during the episode so that we can talk about the content. I've also worked to collaborate with colleagues from across Penn State to plan to get plan events together as well as promote events that they're planning that might appeal to World Campus alumni. And I do this really to strengthen the World Campus alumni connections to Penn State as a whole. Again, really building on that connection and the aspect that they are Penn Staters and they are part of the Penn State network. So some of the examples of these types of events are a cooking class or cooking virtual, virtual cooking, demos, alumni speakers. And then I've planned virtual yoga, which was actually pretty cool. And then one other thing that I've recently done is taken on the role of Advisor to the World Campus chapter of the Blue White Society. So this is a student organization, and it's the student contingent of our Penn State Alumni Association. So I really see this opportunity and the ability to advise these students as a really nice way to bridge the gap between students and alumni by strengthening their connection to the alumni association while they're still students. I'm hoping to facilitate more of a partnership amongst the Alumni Society Board, the Blue White Society, and then some of the other student orgs that world campus has is growing to kind of help these students and the alarms just build their network. And hopefully it will help build the affinity to Penn State and encourage these students to remain engaged and connected with Penn State World campus after graduation. So I have done a lot of work in just looking through the literature and seeing what's out there to see what what people might be thinking about. So I just have a couple other things to to add to what Amber has been saying and some other things to try. It might be that your institution is ready for an alumni and a student mentoring program. We did look at that for Penn State. What we found was that we had three alumni who wanted to volunteer to every one student. But still, it may be something that is very appropriate for your institution. It would be really great if some of those relationships could lead to jobs and talk about affinity building. That would just be fantastic. Something else I wanted to share with you is I mentioned that student survey that we had conducted back in 2014, and it did show that 23% of our online students thought that contact with a local alumni alumni chapter was extremely desirable. And so we created a program out of that. It was something we called our World Campus adoption opportunity. And what we did was we worked with chapters to have them invite students to be part of their chapter and to have a free membership in that chapter. And then they were invited to events for those alumni. Some of those events were reimagined because students of online programs tend to be supported by their families. And so the events in order for them to take the time away from their calendars and needed to be family friendly if they were going to take time to do something, they needed to be able to include their families with them. One thing that the chapters did that was really neat was they started sending encouraging cards to these students at times of Greg I'm sorry, at their finals, times. And so it was just, hey, good luck on your finals. We're thinking about you. So happy to have you as part of the Penn State family. And then they would send them little things like stickers were, you know, small swag things. And so it was just really very impactful to those students. And then, of course, at Penn State, when you graduate from Penn State, you are a member of the Penn State Alumni Association for the first year. You get a free first year of membership. So what that means then is that what's in it for the chapter is that these are students who are familiar with their chapter, and they are people who become alumni who then don't move anywhere. And so they become chapter members, full fledged chapter members who might be leaders for their future boards, whatever it is that they might need. So that's kind of what's in it for them. And then the last bullet here is Leverage Alumni advocates for recruiting students just thinking about word of mouth advertisement. And so so what we can do on social media. Amber had talked about, you know, some of the sites that we have, but just having them tout the brand of Penn State and the brand of Penn State world campus. And oftentimes we can get them to do that to companies that they work at. So it's just a wonderful way to have alumni involved. All of this is really good just to have alumni involved at any stage in the student experience, because what it does is it reinforces the value that Penn State puts on alumni, but it also helps the students envision their own success so they can see alumni participating with them. And they think, Oh, good, I'm going to be in that alumni status soon. So just very rewarding all around. So I'm going to switch gears here just a little bit because I'm going to talk about the philanthropic part of our presentation. And if you or your leadership is wondering, is it really worthwhile to cultivate alumni of online programs? Well, I have a story to share with you. So I had told you that our alumni efforts really started in earnest with the creation of the board back in 2014, within two years of the creation of that board. One of the inaugural members of that board ended up committing $2 million within a state gift. And this was a person who was not on anyone's radar anywhere. Her back story is that she was a mom, had a couple of children, and gave up her career so that her husband could pursue his career. And obviously, he must have done something pretty well. So it was her time to finish the degree that she had started. And so she did it through world campus. And she was so impressed by it and excited by it and just felt so accomplished that she was very emotionally connected to the university. So that's that's her story. So just one one of those individuals makes your whole program worthwhile. But having had received that gift in 2017, I became very curious about the giving habits of alumni of online programs. And that was when I started doing some literature review and we didn't know what to expect for the future. So I joined up with some colleagues that were from the University of Wisconsin Extension who had first posed the question about giving back in 2002. And of course, Penn State was in its infancy at that time, but people were thinking about it then, but nobody was really doing anything about it. So we decided that we would move ahead with some research. There was very little empirical data available about giving patterns and so we started a multi-institutional study to compare the giving of habits of online alumni and comparing them to those of campus based programs. We were able to find five institutions that agreed to participate. These were the only ones that we could find that had the appropriate data that we could use. I had talked about data earlier. There were five other institutions who expressed an interest in participating, but they could not produce the data because they did not have the markers on that data to know who their online alumni were. So we have lost a lot of valuable information and time with this specific population. So and I talked about doing a literature review, you know, several times throughout this presentation. But what I did find was that alumni of online programs do contribute to annual in especially targeted campaigns of institutions. One of the articles that I found was this exceptional response to supporting a library. And if you think about it, online learning, what's one of the major connections that you might have to your institution? It might be through your library. And so that's how that came about. So this is I'm just giving you some really high level results of the study that we had performed. What's important about some of this is that we could only follow donors over a three year period after graduation. Again, the data was just not there. And so I'm showing it here on this slide that participants agreed to participate under anonymity. And but what I can tell you is that that first column with the largest land grant university that was Penn State. And you can see that we had much higher participation rates. So the act of making a donation on the part of alumni and we were in the 19 to 24% range between their first, second and third years and continue to increase their some others. You know, it was all across the board. So there's great variability between these institutions. So at Penn State University, one of the things that we found was that the on campus alumni participated at higher rates, but the online participants gave up to 10 to 12% more within the first three years than did their on campus counterparts. So what was really happening here was there were fewer gifts but larger gifts. And I look at, you know, how high the the Penn State participation rate is. And I'm trying to think about why is that so dramatically different than the other institutions that were involved in the study. Part of it probably does have to do with the Penn State brand. And we are just known to be a very giving and participatory population. But I like to think that part of it is also due to what we have done with the student experience. And part of it may be that we just have a more mature online program. So with this, we have talked a lot about the student experience. And in our case at Penn State, the student experience really took hold after 2014, where we really started putting a lot of effort into our activities. But it is important to realize that, again, just by nature of creating that board, we had our first major gift within two years at Penn State. Students of online programs make great alumni. The results that we saw through the research conclude that the relationship between degree modality and alumni giving patterns may be highly institution specific. And this study does add to the existing research finding that alumni of degree programs may be more apt to donate to a college or university very soon after alumni earned their degrees. So from Amber, in my perspective, of course, students of online programs do make great alumni. We've seen it not only through their gifts, but just through their eagerness in which they volunteer. Amber and I continue to work on the correct mix of events for their participation to round out their engagement. But my word of advice to everyone is just don't wait. Get in there and start something. So here I have just included the references to the research that I've been working on. You might want to pause and just do a screen capture of this, but the slides for this presentation will also be available through case after after this airing for the online webinar. So with that, I'm going to turn it back to Amber. Thank you. Yeah. So we wanted to include our emails again for you on this slide, just in case you would like to connect with either or both of us to talk anything. Alumni relations or online alumni engagement. As Roxann mentioned at the beginning of the presentation, we really are interested in creating an ongoing opportunity for alumni relations professionals like ourselves who are serving online, alumni to share what we're learning and what we've been trying over time. We really do welcome those of you who've been working in this area for years, as well as those of you who are just starting out. The more the merrier. So in addition to connecting with Roxann and I, we thought that another way that we could continue to build on this topic is subscription to the alumni relations community through Case. So I highly encourage those of you participating in this On-Demand webinar to ensure that you're signed up for this particular community if you aren't already. Once you sign up, you'll begin to receive regular alumni relations digest messages, which you can see on the slide. And they include kind of a summary of postings on topics that would be of interest to you in the alumni relations space. So I definitely encourage you to browse each one. I know I read each email that comes in and I always find at least one little nugget in there. So if you're not subscribed, I definitely encourage you to do that following this, this recording. I do want to send a special thanks to Janet from Georgia Tech. She reminded us of the unique opportunity to share ideas with our colleagues back in April. And you can see on the slide she posted in this community seeking input on engaging alumni of online programs. And she received quite a few responses. At least four of us expressed an interest in just meeting together and talking about what we've tried and what's been successful for us. And we did hold a Zoom call in response to her post, and we were able to talk through some really great ideas with each other. but not everyone was able to participate in the call. So it really got us thinking about the opportunity to expand on this topic some more. So Roxann and I wanted to keep the conversation going, and we thought that we would use this community as a way to do that. So we each month, one of us, Roxanna, myself, we're going to post a topic of discussion in this space. We'll put a call out maybe for some ideas regarding a big challenge that you've been experiencing or something that you found successful as it relates to engaging alumni of online programs. And then if it seems to be a popular topic, we might just to schedule a follow up chat so that we can talk about it more in depth. But we really thought this would be a great opportunity for us to get to know our colleagues at different institutions and to what's working and what has worked and just to build this online community that seems to be growing at exponential rates. So we're really excited to see how this goes and perhaps it will grow into something even bigger. So we're looking forward to your participation in that. And I, I just want to send a heartfelt thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to tune in to this webinar. And we really do hope to connect with you soon. So thank you. Thank you so much, Roxann and Amber. This concludes the webinar. Today's program. Copyright 2021 by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. All rights reserved. For additional case on demand webinars, please visit. W w w that case or on demand.

alumni relations

online programs

online student experience

Penn State World Campus

challenges and assumptions

giving patterns

alumni involvement

Case Alumni Relations community