Alumni Relations Program Review Toolkit

Alumni relations professionals today face unprecedented pressure to demonstrate value, and senior advancement leaders across the country have begun asking them tough questions about ROI.

Use these tools in order to:

• Calculate total resource investment in terms of both staff time and budget expenses
• Assess impact on engagement in a measurable way
• Determine how each program impacts fundraising
• Determine ROI by comparing total resource investment against total impact on engagement and fundraising

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Practice “less is more”

Before we can even think about giving our already-overburdened alumni engagement staff a “to do” list of new programs, we need to give them a “stop doing” list. To unlock the capacity required to pilot new and innovative programs, we must divest from the detritus that clutters our calendars and siphons our staff time.

Alumni Relations Program Review Template provides guidelines for comparing alumni relations programs’ resource investments to their impact on engagement and their impact on fundraising.

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Quantify your impact

Unfortunately at a time when many university functions are being asked to quantify their bottom-line impact, alumni relations professionals lack nuanced metrics to make their case. Instead, they point to “soft” metrics (event attendance, satisfaction rates, level of engagement) without consistent standards for quantification.

The Return on Investment Matrix asks alumni relations professionals to plot their programs on a two-by-two matrix to visualize the highest and lowest performers.

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Eliminate the excess

Without sufficient means to quantify program impact, alumni relations try to compensate by simply doing more. Their thesis is this: If we can’t prove outcomes, we can at least show output. In order to remain relevant to our institutional objectives, it will be necessary to make some tough decisions over the next decade to overcome the negative consequences of good intentions and to add value to the lives of our alumni.