Building Community Initiative

Museums, happy hour meet-and-greets, luncheons, waterfront Seattle… how could we not be excited for the 2012 CASE VIII Conference? All frivolities aside, the CASE VIII Conference, being held this year in Seattle February 15^th-17^th, is an event the BCI team has been looking forward to for quite some time.  This annual meeting of talented and interesting professionals provides a unique opportunity to bring together an important common interest: the improvement and support of educational institutions worldwide.

This year’s conference will also feature a unique blend of keynote speakers: Emmy Award winning and Beatles expert Bill Stainton,  Nate Miles (highly regarded pharmaceutical executive), and Andrew Shaindlin (administrator and alumni relations expert from Carnegie Mellon University).  The conference’s main presentations should provide three unique and inspiring perspectives on matters of importance to the advancement and support of educational institutions. We are extremely happy that alongside this stellar cast will be Oregon State University’s very own Mark Koenig and Aaron Escobar, who will be leading a breakout session on major gift discovery programs. As leaders of the advancement and development efforts for OSU’s Foundation, their expertise in alumni giving has been a tremendous asset to the BCI team.

Sadly, all of this excitement makes me green with envy, as I will not be able to attend the conference this year. Our BCI team will be well represented, however, as my colleagues Amanda Terhes and Dr. Hal Koenig will be there. They are really looking forward to meeting the many CASE VIII attendees and learning more about how BCI can give educational institutions a direct link into the minds and hearts of their alumni population! Our team had a great experience speaking at CASE in the past, helping professionals form, strengthen, and sustain relationships with alumni donors. Good luck to all who will attend CASE VIII, and please be sure to stop by the BCI booth.  We look forward to reconnecting with our friends and meeting new colleagues!

For those of you who are not familiar with CASE:

Since 1974, CASE (Council for Advancement and Support of Education) has been striving to unite educational professionals in hopes of fostering ideals of advancement, development, and support for educational institutions worldwide. With headquarters in Washington, D.C. and regional offices in London, Singapore, and Mexico City, CASE is one of the largest international nonprofit organizations in terms of worldwide membership. In becoming a CASE member, organizations are given access to a multitude of resources to support the marketing, public relations, development, and alumni support of their organizations.

Dear readers, it has been too long since my last post. It has been a busy time for me, and for BCI too. I am now on a six month sabbatical leave from OSU and serving as Visiting Professor of Marketing at the University of California Irvine. It is important to note that I am still actively engaged with the Close to the Customer Project and the Building Community Initiative (BCI). We have recently completed a BCI survey for a university in the North West and currently completing the preparatory BCI work for two large western Universities. We are delighted to be helping our colleagues better understand and strengthen their relevant communities of giving.

I have asked a graduate student that is working on the BCI Project to share his recent experiences in our shop. Here is Brandon:

A few days ago, I spoke with a development officer associated with a client university’s Foundation. This development professional is currently using the BCI analytics to aid him as he builds relationships with alumni. While he finds the BCI data to be valuable in his work, he finds that BCI is especially important to him when he is working with those alumni for whom he has little familiarity. He had many positive things to say about BCI and how it assists him on a day to day basis. One of the biggest factors that made BCI attractive to him was how the results are clear and easy to use. The scoring is simple, which helped the development officer get straight to the information he was most interested in. Speaking of simplicity, another thing the development officer brought up was how BCI had impressed the IT professionals at the Foundation. He said that the ease of implementation into their current database has made it very painless for the tech team to get their hands on it and put it to work.

We also discussed the fundamentals of fundraising, and how BCI helps him accomplish his goals. One of the most important aspects of fundraising, he said, is discovering the means of giving, the affinity, and the charitable intent of each individual alumnus. According to the development officer, the Foundation had all sorts of information on giving capacity and charitable intent, but affinity was always the most difficult piece of information to find. BCI filled that gap of knowledge. An essential aspect of affinity is perception of the organization in question. BCI helped this development officer to better understand alumni perceptions of these diverse markers of affinity and across a great number of alumni. He really appreciated the value of discovering these perceptions among alumni with whom he had no relationship. Perhaps more intriguing was that he found significant value in uncovering the perceptions among the alumni he does have a good relationship with. This, he said, helped him improve his connection with alumni with whom he already had good rapport. In addition, he said that the survey gave him a good chance to hear the honest thoughts of his alumni, which was always difficult to detect. Having this sort of information clearly made an impression on him, and allowed him to build new relationships, and renew old ones.

We are just now wrapping up another BCI Project for a University Advancement client.    As always, there is a segment of alumni who do not participate: “the Non-Respondents.”   This is true of any survey, as the legal system frowns upon finding ways to compel people to participate.  Our team became curious about the alumni that chose not to complete the survey.  So we approached our client and shared with them our curiosity and our willingness to do a bit of unfunded follow-up work to see if we could learn anything about them.  My initial thoughts were that the non-respondents just didn’t “care enough” to take the time to do complete a short survey.  Fortunately, our client shared our curiosity, so we moved forward to create a short telephone study of the non-respondents for whom the Foundation had phone numbers.  We turned to our statistical and survey guru Hal to put together a randomly selected sample (looking for generalizability to the database as a whole) and to crunch the numbers.  So, development professionals, what do you think we learned?  Don’t move forward to the next paragraph until you give it a little bit of thought…

I suspect most of you have a sense for the problem: it is virtually impossible to keep databases current.  When we went to the phones, we discovered that nearly one-third of the phone numbers were no longer in service or were just inaccurate/bad (including business numbers and fax machines).   Of the valid phone numbers that we called, we were able to get 60% of those alumni to answer their phones (we made two call-backs to the numbers).  Our first interest in the call was to learn why the alumni did not participate in our survey.  90% of the people we spoke to claimed that they did not receive the email invitation.  When probed, we learned that the email addresses of these alumni in the database are not “active,” as they are not addresses that are monitored closely or at all.  Of those alumni that answered the phone about 32% were willing to complete our “short-form” BCI Survey.  Nearly 70% of those that answered were “not interested” in answering our survey questions, and a portion of those alumni conveyed to the interviewer that they were not happy with the university.   The responses of those that completed the phone survey mirror the results of the on-line respondents.

With respect to the question that motivated the follow-up phone survey, what did we learn?  The most compelling lesson has to do with the challenges of maintaining an up to date alumni database.    All benefit when we have alumni engaged in ways that bring them back to us.  Moreover, we want our alumni to be motivated to maintain connections to us.  To accomplish this, we must devise programs, content, and activities that provide a value to alumni that matters to them.  Wouldn’t it be splendid to have alumni reach to us?

A second lesson has to do with the Non-Respondents themselves.  It appears to us that the Non-Respondents should not be looked at as a uniform group, there are segments within this population.  For those that completed the phone survey, we find them to be very much like the mail survey respondent group.  These were generally happy alumni, who value a relationship with their alma mater.   Obviously it would be wrong to write this group off as either unhappy or apathetic.  For those that refused to participate, we find segments of alumni apathy and alumni unhappiness.   A portion of these alumni will never find joy in our alumni community.  There are, however, others that might be cultivated.  Of course, the challenge there is to gauge the degree to which these disconnected alumni should be a development priority.

Recently, I was talking with one of my colleagues about a BCI client who was focusing attention on the alumni that had reported on the BCI Survey a strong dissatisfaction with the alma mater.  The client observed that it is worth noting that unhappy alumni that take the time to respond to the survey, “care enough to complain.”  In a very real way, these alumni are providing “voice,” and a voice that matters.  The BCI Survey reveals the points of disaffection and can offer guidance to advancement professionals as they might seek to repair difficult relationships.  So, a question for mulling today: Have any of you, dear readers, had success in repairing alumni relationships that have been strained in challenging ways?  If so, it would be interesting to learn about your experiences and outcomes.  I am particularly interested in knowing about the initial interactions with them….Any of you have stories you can tell?

Hope your summer is going well!

James McAlexander, Ph.D.
Dean’s Professor of Excellence
College of Business
Oregon State University