Written by Andy Shaindlin, Consultant & Vice President (Alumni Relations) with Grenzebach Glier & Associates

Measuring Impact in Alumni Networks

Alumni practitioners and network managers are feeling increased pressure to show the value of their work. Engaging remote audiences can be expensive in both budget and staff time. But how can alumni professionals know whether their efforts have some measurable benefit?

Alumni communities had not set many numerical targets for alumni interaction until recently. For decades the alumni profession defined “success” roughly as “reaching as many people as possible with as many events or communications as possible.” Missing from this calculus was any understanding of the key results of the interactions.

Now, alumni professionals are more assertive in understanding the results of their work. The outcome of increased philanthropy from alumni (and other donors) has always been clear: more revenue for the organisation; more tangible support for its mission and its people. But what was the outcome of increased event attendance? The recent shift to more structured and analytical alumni engagement metrics is in part a result of our need to understand more than “what we did this year.” We need to answer, “What happened because we did it?”

Metrics as Part of Your Strategic Plan

To measure the impact of alumni relationships you must have some context. For example, to know whether your event strategy is succeeding, you need to state why you are hosting the events in the first place. Identify a desired outcome of that activity, then define “success” in terms of achieving it.

Let’s say one of your long-term objectives is “To engage alumni in the work of our organisation as volunteers in a diverse array of roles.” To do that, you’ll need strategies that give your alumni work to do. As volunteers, they can serve on boards, committees, and task forces; they can mentor youth or peers; offer internships; and host events. Now you can set participation targets for each kind of activity, being consistent and thorough in recording which alumni were involved, during what period of time, and in which roles.

In this example, you might think that counting the total number of volunteers is “measuring success”, but it’s only part of the formula. In addition to knowing who volunteered, you want to know how else that person engaged with your network.

Quantifying Your Impact – Two Kinds of Metrics

In the example above, you recorded some information:

• Who volunteered? When? Doing what?
  This is a “tracked metric.” The person engaged, and you made a note of it.

Now you want to answer a second question:

• What happened because they volunteered?
  Answering this question requires something more: a “calculated metric.”

Once you can start reporting both kinds of data (i.e., the activity, and the result of the activity), you will truly be measuring impact in your network. Here’s how to do it:

Tracked metrics are just what they sound like: a record of which alumni engaged in which ways. The most common ways are for alumni to come to an event (in person or online); to volunteer their time; and to make a monetary donation.

Many alumni will not engage at all, but a small number will attend an event (online or in person) and may serve as volunteers or give a donation. Your most engaged alumni will do more than one of these things. You want to find out which alumni are most involved, because they are likely to be the most dedicated supporters over a longer period.

If you are accurately recording attendance, volunteerism, and giving, you’ve tackled the first of two key steps in using metrics effectively. You now have a set of tracked metrics – a record of “what this person did.” But knowing what they did still leaves many questions unanswered.

This leads us to the second big step: identifying and determining “calculated metrics.” If tracked metrics show what someone did, calculated metrics can illuminate the outcome of them having done it.

The clearest way to gain this insight is to find out the correlation among different activities by alumni. Once you are recording the relevant behaviors (attending, giving, volunteering), you can further ask, “Is someone more likely to volunteer once they have attended an event?” “Is a volunteer more likely than a non-volunteer to become a donor? How much more likely?” “How many events does the typical volunteer attend before they become a volunteer?” And so on.

Answering these questions will not show causation – someone may volunteer for numerous reasons, some of which are impossible to pinpoint, and many of which are outside of your control. But the correlations you uncover will show the connection between different types and amounts of activities. And this helps you determine, over time, how to allocate your resources (such as a staff time or budget).

For example: on average, attending an event for the first time may make an alumna twice as likely to volunteer their time. But if you find out that attending two events makes them five times as likely to volunteer, you can shift some of your resources from recruiting new attendees over to ensuring that recent attendees come to an additional event. Why? Because coming to that additional event correlates with an increased likelihood to volunteer and to donate.

Tracking all this information can be time-consuming, especially when you are first establishing your tracking and reporting system. But once you can say how different kinds of engagement support each other, you will be a more effective advocate for your organisation and its mission, and better able to gather the resources and support you need because you will be using data and evidence.

Of course, you are not limited to using this system for alumni only. Similar frameworks are just as relevant for students’ family members, for local community members who participate in your activities, and for stakeholders in your organisation’s network. Every network has different kinds of memberships, and each network’s mission is unique – so the specific terminology, the audience segments and the degree of quantitative rigor will vary.

But the bottom line is the same, no matter how large or small, how well-funded or lean, how well-established or new the organisation itself: you want to do more than illustrate how “busy” you were last year. You want to show the impact of your work and of the support your stakeholders gave you. By recording and analysing engagement metrics, you open the door to a deeper understanding of the impact of your network’s activities.

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