As promised in my previous blog post, dated 7 March 2012, I will spend time expanding on Surrey’s progress starting by explaining the creation of a new team to lead this project.
Unfortunately due to Nayla’s long-term sickness, the team took the decision to regroup and progress with the project on her behalf. Since Nayla’s return back to work, in February 2012, Nayla has taken the decision to leave the project team.
The new core project team has consisted of our Communications Officer, Steve Tyler, our Alumni Relations Manger, Trudy Monk , our Alumni Relations Officer for Faculty of Business, Economics & Law , Lucy Evans and myself still as Project Officer.
Despite Nayla’s sickness the team has been taking the project forward and has made good progress.
There are numerous learnings we will be able to share with the sector as a result of our testing to date and we are very excited about the live launch of our Forever Surrey Live programme on the 16 March 2012.
As discussed with the group back in November, the programme will climax with at least one talk being streamed live from our inaugural alumni day on the 14 July.
Nayla wanted me to say a big thank you for the support you have all provided to date and both Nayla and myself look forward to hearing about the successes of all projects in due course.
Claire-Marie Lamport
Alumni Relations Officer
University of Surrey
foreversurrey
ian
janecoughlan
lorettauwic
Sarah Pymm
Sharon
sushmakiri
Hi Ian,
I think we’re quite lucky to be living in a time where the majority of those we are targeting do not need much of a push to go online as they are already there. The challenge, as you rightly point out, is converting them from passive readers to active participants.
Our approach to solving this particular conundrum has been to use the carrot approach and ensure that we always offer an incentive to be actually take part in our various alumni activities.
Sometimes this is done through a long-term, intangible outcome such as career development; on other occasions we offer an immediate “return” on their participation, for example through coverage in one of our communication channels.
We have also had a lot of success in converting alumni from passive to active through the use of social networks. We regularly post open-ended questions on Facebook, Twitter and Linked In to encourage feedback and discussion in a public forum. That, combined with our graduates reposting our material on their own feeds, means that we have fostered a sense of community that a growing number of people want to take part in.
All of this is underpinned by our approach to communications. We now have a greater degree of frequency and consistency in our messaging and almost everything we do drives people online.
Having said all of that, there are still a large number of our target audience who we know through our analytics are reading our various communications, but who are not contributing in any form. The number reduces with every piece of online activity, but we would be interested to hear if anyone else has any effective methods!
As a quick summary, we encourage alumni to become more active by:
* Encouraging our alumni to “go digital” through all of our communication;
* Driving all communication online – including news updates, Forever Surrey magazine, Network Newsmail etc;
* Acting on existing behaviour online by encouraging alumni who are already active to help promote us through their own channels;
* Driving online participation through our existing social networks to post questions surveys, events etc;
* Responding to existing communication online within a quick time scale to keep conversation active;
* Driving our brand online via web & social networks;
* Connecting with internal & external organisations within our social networks to increase the value to alumni & students of being active online;
* Developing new accounts, i.e. creating a specific account for Forever Surrey Live, setting up a Google+ account and looking for new ways to engage our alumni such as using Storify for our major events and for Forever Surrey Live.
Perhaps click on this link as it’s useful for seeing why we need to engage our alumni online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SuNx0UrnEo
Well done on moving the project forward and I am sure we all look forward to hearing more of the learnings from Surrey. Did you have any ideas to share with the cluster group on how to change alumni/student behaviour and encourage them to become active online?
Best wishes
ian