our speakers, Beth and Ziba, who I'll introduce to you shortly. They're providing us with a session around why alumni relations, key trends and challenges and opportunities, and just provide you with some basics and tips. And just for Beth and Ziba's information, I had a conversation around the dynamic world of advancement, big picture, touched on alumni relations and just the importance of alumni and community relations. You know, we've got some people in the not-for-profit sector with us, schools, higher education. So to me, alumni relations, community relations, particularly when I was in the school sector, you know, you're doing similar programming to attract them, aside from reunions, et cetera, but very important. So thank you for joining us, Ziba and Beth, very much appreciate you being with us today. So just for everybody, a light introduction. So Ziba is the Director of Alumni Relations at the Australia National University, and Ziba is responsible for connecting university's global network, over 122,000 ANU alumni. She was previously with the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia, and since her vacation to Australia in 2017, and she's had extensive sector experience as a prior to moving to Australia in 2017 in London-based universities, and most recently at the School of Oriental and African Studies, SOAS, and previously at the Imperial College of London, and she is a graduate of King's College, London. Beth manages the Alumni Relations Program at Singapore American School. It was founded in 1956, so she's got a good 60 years of generation and families, which serves 4,000 students in pre-k through to grade 12, and represents 52 nationalities, which is about 10 different countries and localities represented here in this call. So yeah, her alumni are scattered around the globe, which is fantastic. Beth has spent over 20 years in school administration, student affairs, both in higher education in the US, China, and in Singapore, so well traveled around the world again, and I think I mentioned that in my previous session, that with advancement you can pretty much go anywhere. Her experience in schools includes the management roles of admissions, communications, community relations, alumni relations, and fundraising, and while her roles in higher education included career counseling, student advising, directing a non-profit consortium of colleges and universities. So again, a wealth of knowledge. At some point I'd love to hear your views through this program, if you can slip it in just on integrated advancement models. We'll stop there and hand over to the both of you. Thank you. Thanks to Heather and May from CASE. Thank you to CASE for having both Beth and I on this session. I am a fan of CASE. You'll hear from me in a few more minutes, but I've had quite a few years working in alumni relations and advancement, and I have been completely connected into CASE from the beginning, so it's great to continue doing sessions like this. And hello to everyone. Welcome to this session. Welcome to newcomers, to the profession in particular, and thanks for taking the time out to join us today. Our line of work, I'm sure you've been hearing this over the online conference, our line of work is all about networking and it's a real shame we can't be together in person, but we want to make the most of our time here today. So briefly to go over today's format, so you know what to expect. Beth and I will share a little bit about our experiences in the alumni relations sector, and we'll try to bring in the cross-collaboration and cross-advancement as well into that. And throughout the presentation, we'll try to bring in the nuances between the university sector, which is my experience, and the school sector. And so we'll share a bit on our thoughts on the foundations of alumni relations, why we do what we do, the value our work adds to our institutions, and why we're always again looking to make those connections. Great to be here and look forward to interacting with all of you as much as we can in this virtual way. So I don't need to say too much more about an introduction for myself, I just wanted to give a little bit of context in terms of when I'm talking about my experiences, you can understand where I'm coming from. And Heather's already explained to you the experiences I've had in higher ed and in secondary schools in the United States, China, and Singapore. In terms of my school, that'll help you again understand where I'm coming from in my program. We are 65 years old this year here at Singapore American School. You can see the photo on your right is showing the buildings with a sort of red-orange top that shows where our campus is. We are located in a residential area of Singapore. Just over 4,000 students here, from our three-year-olds all the way up through our 18-year-olds, our 12th graders, representing 66 countries. We are an American school, but just over 50% of our students hold U.S. passports, so we really do hail from all over. An important point I wanted to bring to your attention is that it's typical in international schools to have a fair amount of turnover with their families every year, and that does impact alumni relations and it impacts the culture of our school. So typically, a third of our families will leave every year and we'll get new folks in. This year has been a bit of an anomaly. We've had fewer people leave Singapore and leave SAS, and I think that's in large part because Singapore has been quite a safe place to be during the pandemic. And so, you know, it gives you a little bit of a snapshot of our school and what our, you know, focus is. Going on to the alumni relations program here at SAS, you can see the number above the pie chart. We have 43,600. Another thing that's probably unique to international schools is that we consider not only graduates, but students who attended our schools but did not graduate, families who had to leave before they graduated. Those are former students. We consider alumni graduates, former students to be part of our alumni community, and we also include in the broader alumni community former parents and former faculty and staff. And so it's quite a large community, but the blue part on the pie chart where it says graduates and former students, for us that's 24,000 people, and that's really the focus of our program. We do have different programming and different communications for our different communities, and so that that is the focus. We have email addresses for about 18,500 alumni, and this is an important point because we do virtually everything digitally. We only send out in paper one alumni magazine a year. The rest of our community magazines, alumni magazines, are digital, and all of our communication is digital. Our alumni are all around the world, reflects our current student body, and in terms of staff and alumni relations, I'm it. I'm what's one full-time person, and so I kind of do it all with communications, whether it's the website or letters or portals or social media. I do all the events programming initiatives. I do a little bit of fundraising. I manage all the database, so that gives you an idea of me and what my office entails, and I am part of the advancement office, and there's six other people in the advancement office who do fundraising as well as community relations, so that just gives you a snapshot of my perspective of where I am in my role right now. So again, Heather has mentioned a little bit about my background, so I won't go into too much detail. I am a Londoner. I'm from the UK. I moved to Australia about four years ago looking for a bit of change in my life, and I found beautiful Australia, and I'm loving it ever since, and so I did want to highlight one aspect of my experience in alumni relations. I've found myself, kind of by chance, whenever I've moved teams and universities, I've joined alumni teams which have been pretty much at the foundational stages of their formation, and so I've really been, my experience has really been in building alumni programs from a very basic stage to fully-fledged alumni programs which are embedded across university landscapes, so that's been a big part of my experience, and I found that, you know, at Newcastle in Australia and now at ANU as well. I've got my LinkedIn sort of box up there. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn as well. Okay, so I thought I'd give you a snapshot of what we're doing at ANU in the advancement office. Again, like I just mentioned, ANU, we have a relatively new alumni team as well. ANU advancement went through pretty significant change about three years ago when we had a restructure, and so we have now a hub-and-spoke model of advancement where we have a central advancement office, and we are supported by smaller advancement teams in each of the colleges, and we have seven colleges of slash faculties here, and this gives you an idea of the structure that we work to, so we have, you know, our development team which looks after sort of, we call it uni-wide, so the central fundraising office. We have development team, advancement teams in the colleges which is represented there. You have my team, the alumni relations team. We are really well supported by a markoms team within advancement and also an advancement services and database team within the section. That dotted line is to the college alumni teams of which we have seven, like I mentioned, and so within alumni relations we have about 14 staff looking after alumni relations at ANU, so that gives you an idea. With it across the whole of the advancement office, there are about 80 staff in total, so it's a pretty big unit, and of that 14 of us specialize in alumni relations, but really supported by those other teams within advancement as well, and in terms of our alumni, to give you a bit of a snapshot, we're at about 124,000 alumni now globally. Of that, a huge 80% are based in Australia and 20% overseas. As per our records, of course, that's always chopping and changing a little bit. We have email contact with about 72,000 which is a pretty strong figure for us, and again, as Beth mentioned in her numbers, that's the focus, and obviously we'll go into that a bit more in a moment. I also thought it might be helpful to kind of share a bit of a snapshot of what we've been doing this year as well, and we're going to talk about the pivot during the pandemic, but we've had a few sort of larger activities take place in my team here at the ANU, so beginning of the year we conducted an all alumni survey. It was the first time we've ever done it for ANU, and it went out to all alumni. We had about 6,000 responses, which is about a 9% response rate, and for the Australian sector that's actually not a bad figure, so we were happy with that response and with that survey, and then in March we held a reunion program, a hybrid reunion program, and we had about 1,400 hours for that. We had lectures taking place online and tours on campus for that physical presence, again considering restrictions going on. Graduations at ANU have been cancelled. We haven't had any in-person graduation activity, nor have we had any digital engagement either, so literally students have been posted, their degrees have been posted out to them, and so the alumni team have been quite active in finding creative ways to activate and to be in touch with those graduates when they leave, when they've finished up at the university, and as part of that we've been able to continue to get contact details. We have an annual alumni awards program. This year received 130 nominations for that, mainly from the public, which is really good because we're trying to get the external lens on those programs, and we launched an online alumni book club this year, earlier this year, and at launch time I think we're now at about 700 members, but when we launched it back in around April we had about 500 members, which again considering our program is quite new was a good hit rate, a response rate for us. Okay, so I hope that gives a bit of an overview of where Beth and I are at with our teams and our programs, and so a little bit of the content here of why alumni relations and you know why why we are doing what we do. So I hope this diagram indicates a little bit of about that. There are some factors here which make alumni relations a strategic asset to our education institutions. It really is about the networking, the advocacy, the volunteerism through our alumni, and what value that brings back to the institution, and so you know our alumni help to recruit students. Alumni provide an authentic voice. They're the best, they're the strongest ambassadors of the institution, and at ANU we've been trying really hard to connect those dots with our student recruitment team, so that we can really add value to what our alumni volunteers can bring back to the university through the student recruitment stream. Giving back is of course the biggest aspect of what we do, and one of the major outcomes. Whether that's volunteering time, whether that's financial contributions, there is plenty of evidence indicating that you know as a number of engagement activities increase, financial contributions increase as well, so there's a lot of evidence. I'm sure you've heard a lot of that during this conference. Supporting students with career skills, job opportunities, again that is a really big connection point for alumni and bringing alumni back into the university through, whether it's work experience opportunities for students, internships, placements, all of that activity which needs connecting back into the wider institution. And through all of these various, whether it's you know it's affiliation, it's the alumni affinity, the engagement that we build, alumni keep adding value to the institution and they help to raise the overall profile of the university, and through the impact of the work that we all do, we really add, we add status to and value to continue to the degree of the institution as well, to alumni that affinity by sharing those alumni stories, whether that's locally, nationally or internationally, it all adds value to the overall profile of the institution. And again alumni are a key part of the university or the institution's community. They add to the vibrancy, diversity and to an inclusive aspect of building that community. And so again the work that we do is always about trying to build that connection, and whether that's from an internal lens or whether that's also from the alumni lens as well, but it's about bringing that connection and really making alumni through the work that we do a real part of the community, and not this kind of gray box on the side where we go to for certain advantages and benefits, but actually how do we embed that into the university program? That's a big part of why alumni relations matters. I found this diagram when I was looking at, you know, my presentation for today, and I won't go through all these words here. Why does it matter though? And it's really that if you look at that first circle around awareness to the last word on the slide, which is support, and it's all those stages of what we do through our programs. Awareness increases interest, interest leads to affinity, affinity encourages participation. It's all those connections through the various levels of work that we do, and the stages of that journey, which then lead to that finalization, like that kind of end result of support. It also indicates through your various programs, the different, how we start targeting our groups of alumni, and why it does really matter. So when you look at that sort of participation information in the middle of the slide there, participation generates information. That information then allows to customize, and so it's about customizing our alumni experiences, encouraging that deeper engagement through the various programs, through various activities that we run, which then allow us to really identify individuals who can make an impact, individuals in our alumni community, and identify those interests and those passion points, which then, which is where this sort of journey continues, allows us to customize, it allows us to inspire alumni through the work that we do within our programs, within what the university research, and the news, and outputs of an institution. It allows for that personalized, one-to-one relationship to form, to then start really activating our alumni, and generating support in all shapes and forms. I know that's quite a complicated slide, so I'm happy to like, take that offline and talk a bit further, because I found this really interesting, and I can see aspects of this in almost everything that we do along the journey. Ziba and I have come up with our own list to share with you. You can see with the first bullet point, we're talking a little bit about maintaining good data. And I think that's a challenge for every school, no matter how big or how small you are. Keeping statistics, managing and cleaning up that data, recording communication, and alumni engagement is really critical to making decisions about where you want to go with your program and important for engagement. So that's, I think, an important element. And seeking feedback from your alumni is an important thing as well. I know here at SAS, it's become a very big thing for us. And so we seek feedback from our parents, from our colleagues, from students, from alumni regularly. So, of course, the natural times for you to seek feedback is after events and programming and initiatives. Also consider sending out a survey to your alumni if one hasn't been done in a long time. I know Ziba has done one recently. I did one about a year ago. And it really does help to guide you in the future. And it also helps when you're talking with one of your boards or foundation boards or school boards or your superintendent or your president to be able to say, this is what our alumni want. This is the kind of feedback we've been getting from them. So it's a very good tool to guide you and also to sort of talk about the direction that you need to go in. The next bullet point talks about being creative and continually increasing alumni institutional value. I'm always asking myself when I create a program or initiative, what is it doing to increase alumni value? What's it doing to increase how's the institution benefiting from this? And so it's understanding what you're doing and why you're doing it. Because our time is precious. A lot of us feel very stretched in our jobs. And so I sort of feel like everything I do has to really count. Your institution wants to know how they're going to be impacted. I know that you have to look for opportunities to show that impact, to show that value. And so I often look for those opportunities and making sure that I share what our numbers are or share what our initiatives are through a weekly e-newsletter that goes to all the parents. I make sure I send that to a similar e-newsletter to our alumni. I make sure that our foundation board knows what we're doing and they receive monthly updates. And I make sure there's always an alumni relations update. So it's making sure the word is out there and showing your impact. There are some offices who, and I've talked to lots of alumni people, whether you're at a university or school, where they feel like they have to justify their existence. And that can be tough. And so always thinking and being intentional about your programming and showing that impact is important. Targeting and segmenting communications and initiatives is something that takes extra time and lots of planning. The benefits are well worth it. Not one size fits all in our institutions. We're coming from, we have alumni who have been a part of the school or attended 30, 40 years ago. And so it's important to make sure that you're thinking about all your constituencies. Having effective and a variety of communication and outreach. I know that our alumni from the 1960s want to be communicated differently from those who graduated five years ago. So keeping that in mind is important. I also think that no matter how big or small your organization is, to try to make sure that the communication you're sending out is at its highest level in terms of professionalism. And so make sure it's consistent with branding with your school. Hopefully you have a good relationship with your communications team. And if not, make sure that you do. Some of you might have your own communications people on your team who are doing that. But making sure that it meshes with your larger institution is a good thing to do. And planning out that communication throughout the year in advance. In terms of management of volunteers, I think this is a challenge for everybody. If you can do it while you're alumni, your volunteers will really help you out. But if you're just starting off in your job, I would say if you've got a lot of volunteers, just first try to hone in on those volunteers who are kind of your superstars and learn what it is, the way they want to help and the way they want to give and what your role will be. Openness to change and a new way of doing things. I think all of us have had to do that over the past couple of years with the pandemic. But I would say that to make sure that you're continually learning and getting new skills so that you can be creative in your outreach to alumni and in ways that they can benefit. Two other things that I did include on here would be setting annual goals and strategies for yourself in the very beginning. And again, making sure that meshes with your department's priorities and goals as well as your institution's priorities and goals. And looking for ways to collaborate is a really important thing across your institution. I think I end up with better programming if I'm working closely with admissions, working closely with my advancement team. It's a much richer experience for your alumni and for your institution. Looking ahead to what key trends are, I'm only going to speak towards international schools because it's a little bit different than we talked about the universities. Universities have always had some pretty good career development programs and that's always been important for universities to be able to connect with alumni and help their graduates as they go into the workforce. But we're doing the same thing here in international schools. For all of us, there may be some of us who are part of organizations where our alumni team is sort of at a more basic level. Others are much more advanced. But I know for a lot of us, we're looking at how to really develop this internship mentoring and career support programs. Another trend is that it used to be in international schools that the alumni office was quite separate from fundraising and that we really just kind of focused on alumni and didn't do as much fundraising. But now as alumni professionals, we are also doing more fundraising at the same time. And we are also focusing on creating a more robust program for our graduating seniors. We believe the more they understand the value of the alumni program and the alumni connections they can make, that that's going to make a very big difference for us in terms of their affinity to our school in the future. So those are some key trends for international schools. Ziba, do you want to talk about universities? Yeah, I thought, I mean, a lot of that, to be honest, applies to what we're doing in the universities as well. I thought I'd touch on a couple of points here and really about the connections. And I'm sure this is like everyone is feeling the same, the connections alumni have to universities, multiple. So, you know, it's through the academic studies, it's through their friends, it's through their campus life and activities, residential halls. There are so many touch points. And so building an alumni program, which positions alumni relations as the alumni gateway to the university is really important. And that's online or whether that's on campus or around the world. But it's making sure that your alumni team is the sort of the channel from where alumni can communicate with the university and our teams help to facilitate and navigate that through the university landscape. And so whether it is we touch on networking, feedback, advocacy, volunteerism, but having that all facilitated through the alumni office, which also serves as the voice of its graduates. And so many alumni teams, you know, traditional alumni relations was about, you know, join our network, join the university alumni community, receive discounts, but actually the messaging is really changing and it's about helping advance your university. So it's being part of something bigger and being part of the university's mission, which is a real significant change in messaging and positioning of alumni relations. I wanted to touch on this because I feel we can't talk about engagement and not refer to the pandemic and the great pivot that we've all been working on in alumni relations over the course of this pandemic. And I've shared a few images there from what we've been doing, how we've pivoted in the ANU alumni team. And of course, again, that sort of notion of alumni relations where, you know, we're so used to in-person relationship building and stewardship. That's all kind of up in the air in this sort of new environment that we're in. Instead, we all started to think about meaningful engagement with kindness, with support, with concern for our communities. You know, you had 20, 20 graduates entering the most challenging job market ever. You had local businesses suffering like never before. And so pivoting has been really looking at that meaningful engagement, having a really community-focused approach in what we did here at ANU. And I know a lot of other alumni teams and obviously going to a digital first platform, looking at creative online solutions and that hybrid approach of working. And so what we did, we had that first example of Shop ANU alumni. That was a local Canberra-based initiative for us to really support our alumni businesses, our local alumni businesses and promote that through our network. We introduced a new alumni impact makers online webinar series where we had panel webinars. But that was really connecting with our alumni networks in different places because of course we could no longer do that network in-person activity. But we looked at our networks to bring through key speakers from their regions and to have panel events around that. And that last slide was again, whilst we couldn't have in-person graduation, but this was supporting our youngest graduates with key career skills webinars really targeted to that group of graduating students. In terms of challenges of alumni relations, I mean Ziva talked a little bit about the pivot to a lot more of virtual programming. And this is certainly a huge, it's been a big plus for a lot of us and it's been a real advantage, but it also remains a challenge. And so what I would say is that, my challenges is how to become more sophisticated with our virtual programming and to make sure I keep my finger on the pulse of our alumni to find out where they are on the spectrum of how much, what they enjoy and don't enjoy about virtual programming and how much they want. And I think that's something that's evolving as this pandemic evolves in our different regions around the world, our alumni are going to want different things at different times. In terms of limited staff and resources, some institutions are facing reduced budgets right now. And I think the most important thing is what you can do is just focus on your top priorities and where you're going to have your greatest impact. The next thing is talking about diversity and equity inclusion. And I know that for many institutions around the world, particularly in the past year and a half, it's been a really important thing to look at our institutions historically, and also to look at what our current students are learning, looking at curriculum. But I think engaging our alumni in this is a really important thing, but it does need to be done in an authentic, impactful way. In terms of managing data effectively, I think the one thing I would point out about this is that I think that it's everybody's responsibility to make sure that your data is good and to make sure that it benefits you in the future. And so if you have data people on your staff, that that's what their job is. Make sure that you're involved with it and don't leave it just to one or two other people, that everybody has a responsibility. And I guess the final thought and challenge is that, again, it's what we're doing and is the institution feeling a benefit and impact? Same with the department and your alumni. You need everybody to feel satisfied. And one way to do that is to make sure that you're not working in a silo. This is really a wrap up at the end, actually, just to go over the key points of what we do again. And it's all about creating those opportunities to connect, enhancing the affinity and pride of our alumni base, looking to really personalize the experience through the various programs, events, and activities that we run. And Beth mentioned something a couple of slides ago about collaboration, and that's where that leverage support comes in. That's something I've always worked on, kind of a model I've worked towards, is really looking at collaboration points across the university, not just with your advancement colleagues, but actually looking at other teams, like the careers team, the student recruitment teams, general managers from other faculties. It's really looking at how do you leverage support to have the alumni program embedded across the university. And I just got a last point on building the strategy. That's been vital for a really successful alumni relations program. It really helps to lift the visibility by having a strategic focus for an alumni relations program. And with us at ANU, just to give that ANU example, you know, I was relatively new to the team when the pandemic hit. And with that pivot to online engagement and thinking about meaningful engagement, a key part of our growth as a team was the opportunity to really focus on rebuilding the alumni strategy for the university. We really came together and we looked at different touch points. We collaborated with people across advancement to build the alumni strategy as well. It wasn't just within the alumni relations team. It was again, looking for those leverage points and building that into the strategy. So, and to look for those deeper connections as well in terms of formulating an alumni program. So I would encourage you to take time to look at your alumni strategies and programs, even your annual project plan, and just keep thinking about that reprioritization. Look back at those projects. Think about why you're doing things the way you are. Can it be different? Does it need to be different? And the value that adds to the institution. I can share that I developed a mentoring programs. We have our alumni who serve as mentors for our seniors and graduating seniors. And we hope that relationships will continue beyond graduation. I also developed an internship program where our alumni offer internships or work experiences or project experiences to our other alumni, but also to our graduating seniors. And so I think being able to connect them in the career realm as well as mentoring are, there's kind of endless possibilities, but that's some things that I've done. We did a fun thing with the sort of change in the graduation models this time. We asked donors to write personalized messages of congratulations to the graduating students, and we slipped it into the degree tubes. We had students then, obviously we encouraged them, the call to action was to post it on their social media, you know, to tag us and the hashtag. And it was just a really nice personalized touch, both a nice experience for the donor as well, to feel like they were giving that back to the student and for the student to be sort of wished by someone else as part of the university community. And I would say too, if you have, you know, some universities and schools have amazing traditions throughout the year. So think about ways that you can engage alumni with those traditions. Alumni love to sort of relive the glory days. They love to be able to give back in a variety of ways. And to do it in conjunction with traditions, I think can be a really powerful thing. And anytime you're connecting a current student with alumni, they look up to them and think, that's what I can be, that's what I can aspire to. So I think there's probably some easy ways to be able to connect those groups. And I think the rewards are really significant. We had a really good learning whilst we were doing the big pivot. We had a few events where we were really struggling with how do we connect the audience together. And then I think around a few webinars in, we then kicked off one webinar by saying, in the chat, please list one word which connects you back to your best university memory. And there were a whole host of comments from random things, like someone wrote magpies, someone wrote the food or the library, or, you know, and a few negative things as well. But what it meant was that it was a whole reason to say, hey, Jason, what does that mean? What does magpies mean? And then the person would come on the screen and recount their memory. And it just broke the ice in the conversation. And, you know, people are laughing. And there was a bit of like, everyone was like, me too, hands up, you know, they agree with, they remember that too. So it was a really good icebreaker for an alumni event and to talk about nostalgia. I agree. I think the chat rooms can be helpful. They're very simple. But in doing these breakout rooms and trying to be as creative as you can with the breakout room can make a difference. And I always feel like at the end of an event, it's better to have people wanting more and wanting more connections than having an event go on and on, and then it lose its steam. So I often feel that way at the end of events, because you have so many people, people are so eager to connect, and it can leave people wanting a little bit. But I think as long as you've provided opportunities for people to connect with each other, that's the important thing. And you can also put people in rooms according to years and classes, or, you know, there's ways to control that for whatever experience that you want to have. Thank you, Beth and Zeba.

alumni relations

networking

advocacy

virtual programming

institutional value

meaningful engagement

strategic focus