Community That Connects: How to Scale and Sustain Alumni Engagement

Alumni program leaders consistently face a challenge in sustaining participation, building meaningful relationships at scale, and proving impact with the right metrics – from activity levels to business outcomes.

How to Scale and Sustain Alumni Engagement

Thank you to our guest speakers:

Jono Bacon, Community Director and Author, Stateshift
Linda Triangolo, Alumni Programme Manager, Addleshaw Goddard

Five Things We Learned About How to Scale and Sustain Alumni Engagement

Engaging with your community is a must …

“The one metric everyone should care about is active user engagement. What percentage of your community are actually posting? If you’ve got a million members and no one's posting, then it’s just a vanity metric …”
Jono Bacon

It’s human nature to go with the flow …

“Doing things because everybody else is doing them is very relevant to alumni programs. People think: “Oh, we've got to have one. If we don't have one, it's kind of weird …”
Linda Triangolo

Only some people will naturally participate …

“20-30% of people will show up daily in forums or chat channels because that’s how they're wired to communicate. It's the 70-80% of people who are are tricky, because it’s just not their native way to communicate ...”
Jono Bacon

Events help people to connect …

“You can repurpose a lot of content from events. People love photos, they love to see who was there. They love to see if there are testimonials on social media – what a fantastic night it was, etc …”
Linda Triangolo

Alumni networks show you care …

“Any company that sets up alumni community sees it as an important part of the culture. It’s also an unusual thing as it shows an elevated level of understanding and appreciation of your employees …”
Jono Bacon

Top five Emma quotes

“I don't watch Instagram pet videos because I'm lonely. I watch them because I need a house goat, but that's a completely separate matter …”

“If you're getting people to speak on your behalf, you're giving yourself 35,000 other jobs. But if you get 10, 20 or 50 people who have a particular position in the business, they can effectively be your mouthpiece …"

“It’s surprising who values a $15 Starbucks voucher as a thank you …”

“Alumni are part of your business. They are your employees, they just don't currently work for you …”

“If you want to live in a house, you've got to build the infrastructure. You've got to have the rooms, you've got to have a bed for people to stay. It’s the same with alumni. You’ve got to build a community and give people a reason to come …”

Q&A

Emma Sinclair: Is community engagement becoming more important in business?

Jono: There's a huge opportunity, but it is shifting. Many people see community as a forum or a discord channel, but community is also building relationships at scale. Communities are transactional. You ask a question, and the response can be very boring. Why would I risk getting a boring response from a human being when I can just get ChatGPT to solve the problem immediately? Humans crave social connection and spending time with each other. When you connect customers, it makes the brand more compelling. There’s something even more special within an alumni community because there's a huge amount of shared culture and nostalgia. People can remain friends and supporters of each other for years.

What’s the best way to encourage community engagement from the ground up?

Jono: You have to be clear on who your audience is and figure out what they care about. You want to evaluate loss aversion. Studies show that losing $20 on the street is far more psychologically jarring than finding $20. What are your target audience worried about losing? Secondly, what are the pain points? What sucks for them in their worlds? In an alumni organisation, it could be as simple as finding a new job with the same cultural markers. The final is gains. What do your target audience want to accomplish? Most of us have internal triggers like fear, anxiety, worry, excitement and boredom. If you're bored, you grab your phone, look at Instagram. An external trigger could be a notification or an email. You want that external trigger to trigger an action that is easier than thinking, like replying to a post or participating in a poll. You’ve then got to deliver a variable reward, something that makes the action worthwhile. It’s a reason that AI is so popular – you can type something into AI and get a reward in the form of contextually relevant information. As humans, we overvalue our own creations and content. If you invest into the community platform, it has an outsized level of value. If you do those two things – get clear in your audience and follow through the hooked model – you'll have tons of engagement coming into your community.

How does structured engagement work in practice, so people moving from lurkers to contributors?

Jono: There's a psychological layer, then there's tactics. The psychological layer is that you've got to create the opportunity to interact that generates worthwhile value. The one metric everyone should care about is active user engagement. What percentage of your community are actually posting? If you’ve got a million members and no one's posting, then it’s just a vanity metric. The tactics is to use conversation starters, where you kick off a bunch of discussions that are relevant to loss aversion and pain points. You’re going to have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince. A lot of conversations will get no responses.

What is the catalyst for meaningful alumni connection?

Linda: The catalyst is definitely nostalgia and bringing people together, because you have that common shared experience. When I started the community, it was really important for me to speak to as many alumni as possible to understand: What do you need? How can we help? What are your challenges? What are your goals? How can we tap into the firm and the organisation to help you? It was the same within the leadership teams: What do you need? What are your strategies? How can we tap into the alumni community? It was then a matter of connecting the dots to help people do their jobs better.

Jono: Value and ROI is super important. Communities all have psychological elements. They create a space where people can exchange experience and ideas, and derive some kind of value. 20 to 30% of people will show up daily in forums or chat channels because that’s how they're wired to communicate. It's the 70 to 80% of people who are are tricky, because it’s just not their native way to communicate. Companies operate based on the economic model of: can we measure things in a spreadsheet? But you cannot measure the value of any kind of community in numerical terms. You can't measure the quality of a brand. You can measure how people respond to a brand, but you can't measure how a brand resonates with your audience. If we only think purely in numerical economic terms, it severely limits the solution space.

What are the key indicators of a healthy community?

Jono: Any platform should measure utilization. People look at metrics as a personal reflection. Metrics are important because they measure reality. When people start a community, it spikes. When it drops, people start panicking. My feedback is always: that's great data. Let's figure out what's causing the drop. Let's figure out where the spikes are, where there's activity and engagement, and lean into that. I’d also look at: what is the primary reason people join the alumni community and how do we measure that? If one of those elements is staying in touch with ex-colleagues through events, I'd look at events participation.

How have you applied or adapted these kinds of metrics?

Linda: When we started, it was really important to track the basic community growth and understand who the alumni are, what are they doing, and things manually, like event attendance, a comms program, webpage and newsletters. The next step was to understand, from a strategic perspective, how is this making any impact? How is this helping in any way? Doing things because everybody else is doing them is very relevant to alumni programs. People think: “Oh, we've got to have one. If we don't have one, it's kind of weird.” They don't really know what they're actually meant to do, beyond the basics of a newsletter and an annual networking event.

What models work best for scaling community?

Jono: A lot of people scale too early. If you've got people coming in, getting value, then that's the time to scale. Social proof is the number one thing, so being able to see that somebody else is deriving value. If you've got a set of people who are really passionate and have the time, ambassador programs can be amazing.

What is the secret to sustaining year-round energy?

Linda: You can repurpose a lot of content from events. People love photos, they love to see who was there. They love to see if there are testimonials on social media – what a fantastic night it was, etc. But it can be very surface level and not necessarily what helps your network to grow.

How can engagement be embedded into business?

Jono: Any company that sets up alumni community sees it as an important part of the culture. It’s also an unusual as it shows an elevated level of understanding and appreciation of your employees. The biggest risk is being able to justify an hour in the community versus an hour in your to-do list.

Addleshaw Goddard’s alumni program motto is: “When you are out, you are in.” How do you teach that?

Linda: You can get great buy-in from your internal teams, but it's sustaining curiosity and momentum that's difficult. The answer is to embed alumni into processes, systems, templates and forms, so that people remember the alumni community day-to-day. Alumni need to feel a genuine sense that they belong, they're still part of the firm, and the firm is where it is today thanks to the contributions they've made over the years.

Jono: If there’s a great community and collaborative culture, people will miss that when they leave and want to be a part of the alumni community. If the company and the culture sucks, they won’t have anything to do with them.

Should alumni events be strictly for alumni or should they be mixed with current employees?

Jonno: I don't see any reason not to mix people.

Linda: When people come to events, they want to see their old colleagues. They want to see the people that they trained with. They want to reconnect with people that they worked with.

What's the difference between managing a community and empowering one?

Jono: I see them as the same. If you want to manage a community, you have to empower them. If you want to empower them, you have to be able to manage that empowerment effectively.

Linda: If you are a team of one, you are spending a lot of time managing and just trying to-do list done. The secret lies when people start seeing you less as a person that manages relationships and more of a person that can unlock value from relationships.

What trends in tech or behavior do you see reshaping how professional communities will form and function?

Jono: I think communities are going to become way less transactional, because people will go to AI to solve problems. I think this is a good thing because it will place the onus on human-to-human sharing and the experience and expertise and trust building is what people really care about.

Linda: I think LinkedIn has made a tremendous difference and has helped in great ways to keep people connected and curious. I would like technology to help me more, absolutely. Particularly in the case of the legal sector, once upon a time, someone would join a firm and stay there for their entire career and collect their gold watch at their retirement party. Now things have changed so much, people who are members of an alumni community are no doubt members of other alumni communities. So what can I do to incentivise them to open my newsletter, or if they get three invites to an end of year Christmas party? I need to be sure that my community makes them genuinely feel that they belong and that we're excited to see them and engage with them. People will decide where their loyalty lies.

How do you see the value of connection and belonging for alumni communities evolving over the next three to five years?

Jono: Some of our fondest memories are in our careers. Everyone has got a story about a company they used to work for that they loved and that they miss. Alumni is an opportunity to extend that.

Linda: If alumni are genuinely loyal, they will talk about their experiences in a really authentic way. I don't think any marketing campaign can match that.

Presenters:

Jono Bacon, Community Director and Author, Stateshift
Linda Triangolo, Alumni Programme Manager, Addleshaw Goddard
Emma Sinclair, CEO EnterpriseAlumni