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Coming Home Again and Again: How Universities Can Engage Young Alumni

By: Nick Sargent | 10/10/2011

When my wife and I graduated from college in 2002, I'm pretty sure one of the main reasons we were so excited was that meant we got to come back for Homecoming. We went to a Division III school, so football really wasn't the draw to drive back to northwest Wisconsin. It was the party. The first few years, we never missed it.

By the time we were 27, we felt out of place. By the time we were 30 and had kids, we didn't even consider going back. For us, our alma mater is an essential part of our story. It's where we met. It's where we got engaged. But today, we have a very fleeting connection to it.

As I talk with some of my younger co-workers who are gearing up for this weekend's Homecoming at Mizzou, I sort of long for their enthusiasm for their alma mater. Sure, they're looking forward to the party and running into old friends. But just like my wife and I had a few years ago, they have a special connection to the school.                                                        

From a marketer's perspective, Mizzou and hundreds of other higher education institutions have a great opportunity this month to capitalize on their engaged alumni. Thousands of enthusiastic customers are descending on their campuses and can't wait to share the experience with other ambassadors and pass the love to new alumni and potential students.                                            

But, looking back on my own experience, I wonder if they will do enough to take advantage of those excited alumni to build long-term loyalty that results in gifts of - as a lot of college presidents like to put it - time, talent and treasure. 

My alma mater failed to keep my wife and I engaged. We couldn't wait to attend Homecoming, but they never put any real effort into keeping that enthusiasm going after we got too old for the college bar scene. 

Many alumni feel like me -- disengaged from their university - even skeptical about how the donations are used. That lack of enthusiasm shows in development efforts where the nationwide mean for alumni giving is only about 11.6 percent. 

At Standing, we work with clients in the education and nonprofit space to help manage their reputations and position them for success with donors. We've found that the most successful campaigns involve intimate personal connections. Here are a few tactics I'd love to see universities use to build lasting bonds with young alumni: 

Feature people, not buildings: Your favorite memories from college might have occurred in your residence hall or the building where you took most of your classes, but they were just the brick and mortar around the memories. It's the people - professors and students - that stir up your emotional ties to your alma mater.                                                            

Here's a video that Standing helped produce for Southern Illinois University Edwardsville's capital campaign in 2010 that taps into that concept of connecting people with people. Rather than try to pull at alums' nostalgic heartstrings, we featured real people involved with the university and asked them to talk about what the university and donors mean to them.

Microdonations: Microfinancing has taken off considerably over the last five years as the internet helped connect lenders and loans. Lenders not only can make small donations (typically $25 on sites like Kiva.org), they see the difference that the small loans can have on the lives of the recipients.

Many universities have tried to leverage the concept by soliciting for microdonations, asking for small donations from young alumni (for instance, if you graduated in 2010, you would donate $20.10). Universities often allow donors to direct where the money goes, but even then it's for larger capital projects or scholarship funds. In those cases, it's not always clear where that money goes and how someone benefits from it.

Universities could achieve a greater level of engagement if they approached young alumni funding like Kiva. Imagine if you could engage 30 engineering alumni in a campaign for a graphics computer in the school's computer lab. Current students could create a video appeal about why the University needs the computer and how will it be used. That's real engagement and gives young alumni a connection to the University that, despite their small contribution, helps them feel like they're making a real difference.

Thank you videos: My final year in college, a number of my friends and I received small scholarships from the journalism department for our contributions during our first three (or four) years. Everyone was thrilled, but the chair of the department made one thing clear to us: We had to write a thank you letter to the donor who created the scholarships. It turned out that the letters from students go a long way in engaging those donors in long-term relationships with the school.

In the 21^st century, universities should be taking that concept to the next level. For all alumni who contribute to a fund or scholarship, they should capture thank you videos from students.

It shows alumni that no matter the size of their contribution, it's not just a donation; it's an investment in the future of real people.

University folks: What are some ways you're working to create long-term engagement with your alumni?

Everyone else: What are some ways that your alma mater has engaged its alumni? Do you think it is working?

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