Proving Alumni ROI with Connected Technology

Your business case for running an alumni program might focus on recruitment, revenue, brand, network intelligence or all the above. But when it comes to your data, how can you better track and provide attribution for your goals?

We spoke to Shensi Ding, Co-Founder of Merge,  about the role of integrations - to your HRIS, CRM, ATS and more - in opening up the possibilities of your data, adding instant value to company programs, and providing a way to report on Return on Investment objectives.

Five Things We Learned About Proving Alumni ROI With Connected Technology

Alumni networks have moved with the times …

“10 years ago, alumni networks were run with pen and paper or maybe an Excel spreadsheet. Now, organizations have technologized their alumni networks to build fantastic collections of people …”
Owen Geddes

Data is more important than ever …

“Data is becoming more and more important, especially with the rise of AI. AI is inherently data hungry. Every data source can help provide better insights and provide a better product experience ...”
Shensi Ding

You can only define success by things that you can measure …

“If you can't measure it, it's intangible, and you have no idea if you’re doing well. It all always boils down to: what are the objectives for your business? Just because you start an alumni network doesn't mean that people want to be part of it …”
Owen Geddes

Privacy is there for a reason …

“We only pull data that our customers are asking for. Our customers select exactly what data that they want to sync from the API providers on behalf of their customers. The customers have to go through an authentication flow to give access to their data and agree to our terms of service …”
Shensi Ding

Compliance is everything …

“We have to treat that data as the most precious thing because it is our customers’ reputations ultimately that are important. Both EnterpriseAlumni and Merge treat that data with the compliance certifications that is core to both of our companies because compliance is the most important thing to our customers.”

Owen Geddes 

Acronyms and abbreviations explained!

AI = Artificial Intelligence
ATS = Applicant Tracking System
API = Application Programming Interface
CRM = Customer Relationship management
GDPR = General Data Protection Regulation
HRIS = Human Resources Information System
ISO 27001 = International standard for Information Security Management.
KFC = Kentucky Fried Chicken
LOL = Laugh Out Loud
ROI = Return On Investment
SOC = Security Operations Centre

Bonus behind the scenes chat!
Emma Sinclair: Owen's never done an EnterpriseAlumni online webinar before. 
Owen: Which is why I've lined up books behind me to look more intelligent throughout. 

Q&A

Why are integrations important when it comes to alumni?

Owen: 10 years ago, alumni networks were pretty much run with pen and paper or maybe an Excel spreadsheet. Now, organizations have technologized their alumni networks to build these fantastic collections of people. All these people have some affinity to your organization or your brand. They're super useful to you. They can refer employees to you. You can rehire them. They can help you market your business. But we still often see alumni networks as a best-kept secret in any organization. You have this fabulous pool of people who are willing to help you. Integrations is about how you share that with the rest of the organization and how that becomes more visible.

How is what you do different from other products on the market? 

Shensi: If you're building a product that needs customer-facing integration, you need to be posting thousands of updates every minute. Merge focuses specifically on the product integrations angle. We're not meant for internal or non-technical use. We’re meant for engineers and product managers who want to add integrations to their products.

Why is this more prevalent and relevant than ever?

Shensi: Data is becoming more and more important, especially with the rise of AI. AI is inherently data hungry. Every data source can help provide better insights and provide a better product experience. Merge helps these companies accelerate a lot cheaper. Previously the only option was hiring a lot of engineers. Merge is really helping to even the playing field.

What are the typical hurdles, objections and blockers? 

Owen: Originally we built open APIs that any company can build into. But we wanted to make it as easy as the push of a button. We figured the only real way was to talk to all of the vendors directly to integrate them individually, but that was going to take us years. So we started to look for a partner and came across Merge. It's like we'd hired a big engineering team and have become integrated with 100s of vendors in hours rather than years. Now anyone can build anything into the APIs, however complicated, and connect any system to ours. What are the blockers? I guess it comes down to three things: money, time and the availability of IT teams. 

What are the other benefits of sharing data and avoiding silos? 

Owen: We've got a really cool piece of tech that we are rolling out to customers this year, which keeps everybody's profile data up to date. Knowing where somebody's working is really hard because people tend not to update their own profiles. Now, for every alumni, whenever they change job, their profile gets updated. If you want to rehire somebody or do business with them, that’s really important. 

When EnterpriseAlumni decided to partner with Merge, what were the questions did we have to ask? 

Owen: A lot of our customers are in regulated industries, military or government. It was clear that we needed a partner that could match the certifications to security. We had to find somebody who was ISO 27001, who is SOC 2 Type II and is globally GDPR compliant. There are very few organizations able to cover those bases. So that was one of the very boring things that we had to ask straight up.

How do you get over the concerns over privacy?

Shensi: We only pull data that our customers are asking for. Our customers select exactly what data they want to sync from the API providers on behalf of their customers. The customers have to go through an authentication flow to give access to their data and agree to our terms of service. Only after that are we able to sync data on behalf of EnterpriseAlumni. Security has always been the foundation for our business and is at our core.

How should alumni community managers define success?

Owen: You can only define success by things that you can measure. If you can't measure it, it's intangible, and you have no idea if you’re doing well. It always boils down to: what are the objectives for your business? What is your investment case look like for starting an alumni network? Then: what can you measure against that? For example: how many people did you hire from the alumni network? How many people were referred into roles? How many leads were effectively developed? How big is your community? How many people have you got in the network? What percentage of people who have left have joined the alumni network? Just because you start an alumni network, doesn't mean that people want to be part of it. You’ve got to do something for them as well. 

What are some examples of how people are using HR integrations?

Shensi: There’s lot of great use cases, for example Culture Amp who use Merge to offer 60 HRIS integrations across every continent to connect their HR systems. Other companies we work with like Bonusly, 15Five, Brex and Ramp also find that having that org chart information is very helpful for making sure their companies have a great security posture.

What are some of the success metrics around community?

Owen: It’s all about how many people you are putting into your community, what percentage of people join when they leave, and which parts of the organization people leave from. During the registration process we can capture data to understand more than just what are you doing with your alumni network and how many people are in it? We now understand about people who come from different business units or geographies, and how they feel about the organization after they leave it. Knowing how happy ex-employees were with the organization after they left is useful not just for re-recruiting or doing business, but also allows you to measure the happiness of your workforce effectively.

What are some of the specific use cases around CRM integrations? 

Owen: CRMs have become the universal bucket of data for lots of organizations. We tend to think of Salesforce as a sales tool, but they are absolutely used for a broad range of marketing activities. You can measure how many sales leads you are getting in from the alumni network and how much of that turned into business. You can also measure marketing outreach. In terms of the ROI, measuring how many things are coming in and how many things are successful out of your CRM is super easy.

What are the broader success metrics around job applications with Merge and with integrations? 

Owen: The most obvious is one click application, which dramatically increases the number of people who apply for roles. The downside is sometimes people are a little indiscriminate. But that still tells us that they are open to work. We tend to think about what percentage of alumni will apply for a role over a two- or three-year period even though it differs because different industries have different lengths of tenure. The percentage of people that they hire from their alumni network is growing. Over 10% of annual hires come from alumni. The easier you make the application process, the higher that percentage goes. Between 38% and 44% of alumni who apply for a job end up getting it, which is phenomenal. If you've got anywhere between 15% and 35% churn, the cost of replacing all those people is phenomenally high. It can be a lot more cost effective to hire from your alumni network. Time to hire is super important.

What are the implications on security and compliance when dealing with integrations? 

Shensi: Because so much sensitive information is being shared, especially if it's HR data or candidate information, you want to make sure that the partner that you're working with is trusted. Are they certified? What is their security posture? If they have invested a lot, that's always a great sign. If you're looking to add integrations for the first time, you have to think a lot about how you're protecting your customer's data. It is a big responsibility to add those integrations. 

Owen: Compliance is absolutely everything. We have to treat that data as the most precious thing because it is our customers’ reputations ultimately that are important. EnterpriseAlumni and Merge treat that data with the compliance certifications that is core to both of our companies because compliance is the most important thing to our customers.

Presenters:
Shensi Ding, Co-Founder, Merge
Owen Geddes, CTO EnterpriseAlumni
Emma Sinclair, CEO EnterpriseAlumni