By Russell Garth, Executive Vice President, Council of Independent Colleges

About this time a year ago, both Georgetown College (KY) president Bill Crouch and his Allegheny College (PA) counterpart Richard Cook mentioned to me that they were undertaking some new approaches with their alumni. Since this topic had previously not registered very prominently on my radar screen of presidential interest, I was intrigued and asked them to share what they were doing in a session at the Presidents Institute. Other presidents indeed seemed interested, so recently I checked in with each institution's alumni director to get more details.
    Over the past half decade, Allegheny has been instituting a number of programs that involve alumni. For example, six years ago, they began an alumni mentoring option offered to incoming freshman (10 percent take advantage of it), and three years ago they combined several campus offices into the Center for Experiential Learning, through which alumni in three cities (Boston, New York, and Washington, DC) offer three-week internships to students during a May term. They also, like many other institutions, involve alumni as interviewers and friendly correspondents in the recruitment of prospective students.
    During the 1999-2000 academic year, they ratcheted up this effort, with a new alumni director moving over from student services and an unusual, I think, focus on alumni by the trustees, who devoted nearly two hours to the issue in their April meeting that year. Allegheny now offers a host of electronic communications with alumni, including broadcast e-mails to targeted groups (e.g., former members of the baseball team with information about the current squad or students of a particular history professor about an award she just received), invitations to regional events, an electronic newsletter, and an alumni-only website where they can search for contact information about former classmates. Soon, they expect to add an e-match-making service that allows students to seek career advice from alumni.
    Another newer focus has been on younger alumni, traditionally ignored until the invitation to their 10th reunion. The College is now inaugurating a special reunion at homecoming for the past three graduating classes, holding regional events for them in five cities, and developing some career-related services. The college is expanding significantly its outreach component to all alumni, more than doubling the number of regional events this past year and planning another doubling this coming year. Allegheny is in the process of giving this new attention a tangible embodiment by converting an historic campus building into an alumni center, and they have designed an Alumni College that will begin next summer.
    Many of these themes are echoed by Georgetown College, which also has created an alumni website, and paid more attention to younger alumni. Georgetown is even pulling the youth focus back into the current student body, creating a 35-student council to help with alumni events. The College is also conducting more regional events, focusing on various communities in Kentucky where the majority of alums reside.
    In one key respect, however, Georgetown represents an important contrast to Allegheny. Georgetown has outsourced the management of its alumni office to Host Communications, a sports marketing company. Thus the staff of the alumni office includes two full-time Host employees located on the campus (including the director), and two 20-hours-a-week student interns, who receive scholarships contributed by Host. The College specifically wanted someone as director who was not an alumnus but who would approach this very much as a business endeavor.
    Moreover, the staff assigned solely to Georgetown can call on other Host employees for relevant expertise. For instance, Host has a publishing arm that prints the alumni magazine. The college has been able to get not only an affinity credit card but also a membership card that provides discounts on cell and long-distance phones, car rentals, hotels, long-term health care, and some retail businesses-services usually requiring larger numbers of participants than many small institutions can guarantee. With experience in event management, Host is not only adding corporate sponsorship to homecoming but also is using existing contacts to arrange distinctive alumni trips. Finally, Host has in-house web design and database expertise that Georgetown has used.
    Both alumni directors report that they are still in early stages of analyzing such key results as increased financial contributions, but that the responses they have been getting to the new events and services definitely indicate that more alumni feel a stronger connection with the institution.

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Last updated: July 31, 2001
Copyright © 2001 The Council of Independent Colleges