Alumni Group Activities and Trends: 2017 Alumni Group Survey Insights Part III
In Part 3 of our series about local alumni group data, we’re going to look at the types of activities groups are hosting and trends we can learn from. The data we’re exploring was collected and analyzed as part of our Alumni Group Survey — the largest survey of alumni group leaders ever conducted — in which we profiled 398 groups about their traits, challenges, activities, relationships, success and digital tools.
We’re sharing our findings over 6 weeks with a new post each Tuesday, covering these areas:
Events!
Events are the lifeblood of almost every local alumni group. They are the offline culmination of all those online engagement efforts; a way in which your alumni network physically manifests around the globe. We asked group leaders to tell us about the types of events they host throughout the year and which they deem to be most successful. In this part of the study, we focused specifically on local offline events — many groups are pursuing digital engagement efforts and online activities, but we’re saving that deep dive for a future study.
As might be expected, with 69% of groups organizing them, football watch parties are the most common activity. While basketball watch parties came in at #3 with 43% of groups hosting them, the #2 slot was networking events. 53% of groups organize networking events. This of course, doesn’t mean that 53% of all activities are for networking, but simply that 53% of all groups are hosting at least one each year.
So in order to get some assessment of not just which events are happening, but those that are successful, we also asked group leaders to tell us which types of events are the most well attended. When those responses are stacked up, we see that each category shrinks:
Now, just because a category is ranked low doesn’t make it a bad type of event to hold — no one would expect sports league games to be the most well-attended types of events, so only seeing 1% of groups describe it that way seems normal. To extract some insight from these two series of data, we looked for categories that are under or over performing expectations — events that many people are hosting but are ranked very low for attendance, or the inverse: events that are hosted by relatively few groups but have a high attendance rank.
When we narrow the focus down like that, two clear outliers emerge: Volunteer events and formal dinners/dances.
One third of groups host volunteer activities, but only 4% describe them as well-attended. If we’re being honest with ourselves, this is not very surprising — most of us love the idea of helping people, as long as someone else is actually going out to do the helping. Similarly, just over a half of all groups host networking events, but only a quarter describe them as well-attended. The reason we highlight these is not because we have a silver bullet to solve attendance, but to suggest that when you are looking for ways to affect meaningful growth in the success of group events and alumni engagement, there is significant relative benefit to be had in categories like these.
If we could all improve football watch party attendance by 10%, it would be a great metric but would overall have relatively little effect on alumni engagement rates or group success.
Moving the needle
If we could all improve football watch party attendance by 10%, it would be a great metric but would overall have relatively little effect on alumni engagement rates or group success. If instead, we can focus on those types of events that are very common across groups, but have lots of room for improvement, there is significant potential payoff. If we devote resources to groups to experiment with new ways to promote or host networking or volunteer events, the lessons could be easily transferred to other groups to improve their own efforts. The best part is that you can experiment with many different approaches in many different groups and see what moves the needle — some things won’t be a perfect match for all groups but over time, raising the attendance rates for these under-performing types of events will have significant engagement rate impact that is not dependent on a sports team’s annual performance. And your network’s under-performing categories might be different than the data suggests here — as always, talk to your groups and find out about how their various event categories perform. (Small sales note: if you use Alumni Spaces, you can get that data any time you want with just a few clicks.)
On the other end of the spectrum, we have formal dinner/dance — a type of event that is punching above its weight class when it comes to engagement. Only 15% of groups are hosting a formal dinner or dance each year. But of the groups who do host one, 82% consider them to be well attended, making this the highest engagement rate of any type of activity. This suggests that there is a big opportunity out there to host more of them in additional markets where you can apply the lessons of your groups who are hosting them today.
82% of groups hosting formals consider them to be amongst the most well-attended of all their events.
Our first assumption was that groups hosting formals would be in large metro areas — and many of them are — but mid-sized cities are actually the most likely to have this tradition. Places like St. Louis, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Portland or Charleston are hosting annual dinners to raise money for scholarships, award scholarships, recognize their members or commemorate a date. Everyone sees the rich and famous don expensive dresses and tuxedos for expensive galas, but most of us don’t have the opportunity to put on a fancy outfit and pose in front of a step-and-repeat banner (that’s the logo filled background the celebs get photographed in front of on the red carpet). This is your chance to build an aura of gravitas and exclusivity around your alumni association’s presence. It certainly takes work to put together a fancy event, but you can start small — consider simply making a reservation for 15 -20 people in the back room of a local restaurant. Even if you simply split the bill and ask for a $30 scholarship donation on top of the cost, you’ve laid the foundation for a recurring activity with a formal air. This is also a great way to appeal across demographics — young or old, everyone likes to get dressed up every once in awhile.
While it may not be a smashing success for every group, these formals are so successful for those that host them, you may be surprised at which groups latch on and start forming a new tradition. We’re planning to devote a future study to some of the details around these events: average cost per plate, venues, event topics, formats, etc. And, we’d love to hear from you about groups who host formals or those who are exploring the idea — how do they measure success and how did they start it?
Next week, we’ll look at the funding support groups receive and how it affects their success.
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If the results of this survey confirm or contradict something about your alumni association, we would love to hear how you are using the data — it helps us tailor future research and add real-life examples to the numbers.
