The Digital Toolbox for Alumni Groups: 2017 Alumni Group Survey Insights Part V
In this installment of our series about local alumni group data, we’re taking a look at the digital tools local alumni groups use to manage their club and communicate with their members. 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:
- Introduction and Group Profiles
- Challenges Facing Alumni Groups and What They Need to Solve Them
- Alumni Group Activities and Trends
- Alumni Group Funding
- The Digital Toolbox for Alumni Groups
- Lessons From The Highest Performing Alumni Groups
In the modern world, digital engagement is the bread and butter of every organization. Obviously there are age ranges where physical mailers and phone calls are still moving the needle, but the present and future is digital. You know this at the association level and a decade ago, your local leaders were probably ahead of the curve when it came to using social media outlets. We wanted to find out what those local leaders are using now.
Group Websites
53% have their own website — this is a website they update and which exists independently of Facebook, Tumblr, Medium or any other social platform. An interesting note: of those who do not have a website, 44% said that “website and social media tools” are the #1 thing they need address their challenges.
We’ve all come across defunct group websites, abandoned for years, that look like Geocities artifacts. But in reality, if a group has a site, they tend to be active in keeping it updated. 53% update their website at least once a month and 20% keep it updated once a week.
That updating tends to be the responsibility of a fairly small number of people. For 50% of groups, just one person has access to update the website and for an additional 44%, access is limited to 2 or 3 people. For our team, this is a great insight because we know that if something as core to a group as its website is the responsibility of just a single person, we need to make sure that our products make it as easy as possible for anyone to update their site, regardless of technical ability. If it isn’t dead simple, it will get procrastinated or forgotten as that one person’s time is filled with other responsibilities.
Half of all group sites are editable buy just one person. Alumni associations need to make sure they are offering a method for preserving institutional knowledge at the group level.
This also shows us that alumni associations need to make sure they are offering a method for preserving institutional knowledge at the group level. I can’t count the number of times we’ve worked with a group and heard something along the lines of “we’re not sure how to log into the current site or renew the domain because Bob bought it 8 years ago and he’s since moved to a Tahitian ashram.” When 94% of group sites are editable by such a small group of people, it’s important to make sure groups have a way to preserve access and information, balancing local independence with long-term institutional perspective.
In next week’s post, we’ll also examine how the most successful groups use digital tools, but we’ll tell you ahead of time that over 90% of highly active groups have their own site to spread their news.
Let’s Make a Deal
Most groups are getting a great deal for their website. 75% aren’t paying anything for their site because 38% use a free service, 26% have a website tool provided by their association and 11% have a website that was built or sponsored by a member.
But because we build tools that alumni associations use to power their local group websites (and so much more!), we wanted to see how groups like the tools they’re being provided today. Of the 26% who have a website provided by their alumni association, over a third (36%) said they were unhappy with their current site. And for 25% of them, “website and social media tools” was their #1 need — all despite getting exactly that from their association today for free. So we know that even if your organization is providing these tools today, there is still a need to find out what group needs aren’t being met. The main takeaway: talk to your groups, find out what they think about the tools you provide today and see how you can improve them. (See, that wasn’t too much of a sales pitch.)
Social Love
Social media is the real battlefield of alumni engagement today. It is a fight for attention amongst a million outlets, but you have something that no brand or company does: love. Most associations say “affinity,” but most people don’t know what “affinity” means. It’s also a weak word — it means something like “predisposition to” or “liking of” a thing. But most alumni loved their time in college, they love their alma mater and they still get a wistful sense of longing when they visit campus. Even the ones who aren’t “engaged” (yet).
We asked groups what channels they are using to reach these people and the results are the usual suspects: Facebook (90%), Twitter (30%), LinkedIn (27%) and a smaller number are using Instagram (9%) and Snapchat (3%). In the next post, we’ll dive a bit deeper into which of these tools are used by the most successful alumni groups and in later research, we’re going to drill into how groups are actually using each of these channels: ads, events, sales, etc.
You’ve Got Mail (still)
When we asked specifically about events, we learned that actually only 60% of groups are using Facebook Events to get the word out. But 71% are using email communications to promote them and a surprising 21% use postal mail at least once a year.
71% of groups are sending email newsletters and just over half have their own databases. Yes, your groups, too.
Speaking of email, we have to touch on the third rail of alumni group relations for a moment. 71% of groups are sending email newsletters and just over half (54%) have their own databases. Now, I’m sure there are people reading this thinking “Oh, I’m glad our groups aren’t doing that anymore, we took care of that back in the Great Email War of 2013.” But chances are that your groups still have their own email lists. — Going into this, we thought that “about half” of groups we talk to have their own lists and when the survey results came back at 54%, it validated a lot of anecdotal evidence we’ve gleaned from speaking to club leaders.
We found that 28% of them are using MailChimp, 18% are on ConstantContact, a handful of groups use other platforms and an amazing 53% responded with “Other.” When someone selected “Other,” they could then enter some text to elaborate, so we dug through all the responses by hand and categorized what people were using instead of the most common newsletter tools out there. We discovered was that we left off the most popular “black market” email tool available to local group leaders.
The most popular email marketing tool is “I send newsletters from my own email account”.
Had we included “I send newsletters from my own email account” as an option, it would have been #1 at 37%. They answered things like:
“Gmail”
“I just copy and paste it”
“Yahoo!”
“I do it manually”
“They don’t let us use a newsletter, so I send my own.”
So it’s pretty clear that in lieu of having access to the right tools to send our newsletters, they’re doing it anyway, using less effective means of communication without unsubscribe links, link tracking, without A/B testing, all probably in violation of CAN-SPAM Act. If your groups say they don’t have an email list, chances are at least some are lying to you.
But we think that’s fine. The data around all of this suggests that we need new, more collaborative tools, not more restrictive rules. 76% of the most successful groups in our survey maintain their own database (interestingly, 86% of them are using MailChimp). We’re very familiar with the reasons alumni associations want to limit access to their databases for fear of overloading alumni with un-vetted content as well as the arguments from local groups who feel cut off from the most effective means of communicating with their members.
But it is clear that what most alumni associations are doing now is not working and is unsustainable in the long-term. Somehow we’ve got to start creating a tool that democratizes access while centralizing the data, allowing groups to communicate with their members more freely while giving alumni the flexibility to control who they are hearing from.
That’s going to be a big focus for a lot of research in the future: newsletter content tools and strategies for dealing with it. In the meantime, we want to hear how your association handles email, what the pitfalls or successes have been and how you wish it all fit together.
Next week, we’ll be looking at the most successful alumni groups, their biggest indicators of success and how we can all learn from them.
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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.
