Reimagine Constituent Engagement for the 21st Century

Thanks to the enrollment boom of recent years, alumni populations are at an all-time high. Amid this growth, advancement must solve an engagement quandary: with so many constituents to engage, how do we craft a strategy that resonates both broadly and deeply?

The days of in-person event programming serving as the central pillar of engagement strategy are nearing an end. Creating digital programming that requires active participation, but not much time, is the key to engaging today’s time-pressed alumni. 

There are two fundamental approaches to digitizing active engagement.

First, apply digital force-multipliers to in-person events, such as livestreaming popular events to a remote audience. 

Second, engineer micro-engagement opportunities online, which can involve a range of opportunities, from contributing memories to a virtual university timeline, to adding songs to a collaborative Spotify playlist, to submitting virtual postcards for students during finals. Successful examples of digitizing active engagement share six key elements, as shown below.

Higher education institutions have historically struggled to engage alumni in their 30s and 40s due to the three c’s: children, career, and commute. Compounding that problem, millennial volunteers and leaders of today bring new expectations of convenience, customization, and deployment of their expertise, rather than just their time.

Institutions must offer an attractive array of new involvement opportunities that meet the needs of this critical segment of constituents to build a strategic pipeline of high-potential leaders. 

It is critical for advancement organizations to meet the needs of today’s would-be volunteer millennials. Appealing engagement opportunities should be clear, convenient, skills-based, and yield tangible benefits for participants. Review five rules that the most successful initiatives follow to develop the next generation of alumni leaders and volunteers. 

Engagement programming often aims to serve the entire alumni community, but come-one-come-all programming often holds little appeal for high-potential prospects. Shifting alumni engagement strategy to prioritize pipeline prospects can make in-roads with tomorrow’s best donors—and do so at scale and without overburdening MGOs. For more collaborative programming, best practice institutions forge partnerships between engagement and development teams to streamline information sharing and orient programming toward revenue generation. 

Some institutions have shifted to pipeline-focused alumni relations programming. Others have modified their engagement programming to achieve specific cultivation goals, hiring engagement officers to carry portfolios of high-potential…