Lessons From The Highest Performing Alumni Groups: 2017 Alumni Group Survey Insights Part VI
In the final installment of our series about local alumni group data, we’re narrowing our view to the most active and successful alumni groups. They operate differently than most groups — some of those differences are because of their success and some of their success is because of those differences. We’re going to explore it all.
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:
When we crunched all the numbers from this survey, we created a lot of cross-sections to see how groups sharing certain characteristics might line up on other metrics experiences.
- Are groups that receive more money more likely to succeed?
- Do groups who host their own website consider reaching their members to be as much a challenge as those who don’t have a site?
We’ll dive into those in some later posts but the most striking way we found to draw conclusions about a group was based on the number of activities they host.
“Number of events hosted in a year” is not a perfect measure for gauging true on-the-ground success of a group, but it is a decent proxy as it transcends a number of variables. Large or small, funded or broke, the number of events it hosts suggests something about the quality of a group. If a group hosts a lot of unsuccessful events, it will eventually scale them back — or if it starts with a few highly successful events, it will expand the calendar, suggesting that regardless of how we measure success, over time, more successful groups tend to host more activities in a given year, even in small markets.
The most active groups in our study host more than 50 events each year, but they are outliers, representing only 2% of their peers.
And since only 10% of groups hold more than 20 events, your groups does not really have to be all that active in order to be a success story. In fact, if your local alumni group hosts just 10 events in a year, you are amongst the top 37% of all groups. Ten events per year is a very attainable bar for success — it amounts to just one event every five weeks or even just a watch party per football game. If you mix in an annual holiday party, summer picnic and a single volunteer event, you’re already one of the most active groups in America.
If your alumni group hosts just 10 events in a year, you are amongst the top 37% of all groups.
With 63% of groups holding fewer than 10 events per year, we want to draw some meaningful lessons from the success stories in our survey. You might also recall from our first post in this series, the most commonly shared trait amongst successful groups is local peer collaboration. 95% of these groups work with other alumni organizations in their area, collaborating and learning from one another. How else do the most successful groups differ from the average? What types of activities are they hosting, how do they promote them and what tools are they using?
This post will also reference a lot of data we’ve previously covered and how these groups differ from the norm — we’ll try to provide links back to the full post where it’s useful.
The Outliers
First, we looked at the outliers — those big groups hosting more than 50 events per year. That is a huge level of activity, unrealistic for most groups. These Super Groups tend to have very large alumni populations to draw from — 62% of them have more than 7,500 alumni in their areas but only 32% receive more than $500 of funding each year. Evidence that as groups become more active and drive sustained outreach, they need less institutional support in the long run and become stronger as a result.
The Top 5%
If we expand our consideration to the top 5% of groups, we get a mixture of successful groups, ⅓ from private schools and ⅔ from public, with replicable lessons for any alumni population. These “Highly Active Groups” are hosting more than 30 events each year and are 12% less likely than the average group* to say that event attendance is a problem for them.
They also tend to be better at communicating to their members and cultivating/retaining leaders, being 5–10% less likely than an average group to cite those as challenges. They are more likely, however to say that fundraising for scholarships (+11%) and communication with their national association (+5%) are challenges. (Don’t miss our post about group challenges and solutions)
When asked what tools could be provided to help them address those challenges, they are 20% more likely than the average group to need additional funding and 10% more likely to need group management training. Being very active, it’s probable that these groups are hitting the limits of their funding and organizational effectiveness because they are growing but have not yet fully developed a self-sustaining cycle of engagement.
These groups also see success with different types of activities compared to the average (check out our full post about activities and trends). They have significantly more successful networking events (+19%), professional sports outings (+21%) and wine tastings (+12%) while other categories like outdoors, volunteer, formal dinner/dance and professional development are moderately more successful (+7–10%). They are, however a bit less likely to see success in categories that are heavily relied on by the average group. They are slightly less likely to cite football watch parties (-7%), basketball watch parties (-5%) or school spirit (-10%) as successes.
Digital Lifestyles of the Active and Successful
When it comes to the digital tools they need to drive these activities, (czech out our previous post on the digital toolbox for all groups) this category of groups probably doesn’t need website tools because 86% of them already have their own site, compared to just 53% of their peers. Similarly, 22% fewer mentioned email newsletter tools as a needed tool… most likely because 76% of them already have their own email database (86% of those use MailChimp, FYI).
When we look at their digital tools, a few clear trends emerge. 86% have their own website, 81% use Facebook, 62% are on Twitter and 52% are using LinkedIn to engage their members.
These are some of the most distinct difference between Highly Active Groups and the average group — they are 33% more likely to have a website, 32% more likely to use Twitter, 25% more likely to use LinkedIn but surprisingly, 9% less likely to use Facebook. We don’t interpret this to mean that using Facebook could make you less successful, but rather that most groups over-rely on Facebook when they should be diversifying their digital toolkit.
When the most successful groups are using Twitter at a rate more than twice the average, we know it is worth examining more deeply. Find out who in your network is using Twitter to promote their local group and learn how they’ve found success.
The Why and How
Of course, nothing is a silver bullet — group success cannot be distilled to a single trick or tool. By examining the habits of successful groups is just like reading books written by successful leaders in politics, business or society — not by copying their methods but by emulating their strengths, we can progress towards our goals.
Our goal for this survey and the analysis we’ve shared in this series was to add a foundation of data to some of the anecdotal knowledge alumni relations professionals and group leaders have about their organizations. Some of this data probably confirms or contradicts assumptions you have had and that is the main lesson from all of this: talk to your groups, understand how they align or differ from our findings and see if you can apply some lessons from what we’ve shared to make your alumni groups more effective. We’d love to hear about how it goes or how your groups are different.
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* Methodological note: references to the survey as a whole or “average groups” consider the entire set of responses, including the Highly Active Groups we’re examining today. This is worth noting because if we were to have compared the active groups to those who are less active (rather than the average), the differences we’ve explored here would have been even more stark.
