Fran Zablocki

This post is cross-published on the official mStoner blog.

Think about some of the world’s most popular web technologies for a minute and notice just how much they enhance the human conversations and relationships. Facebook is a living canvas of our relationships and now with timeline it can be a personal history of all of these human connections over our lifetimes. There is sophisticated technology behind all of this, but it is entirely focused on enabling the human relationship.

What is Twitter, technologically speaking, but a series of short, tagged content managed by an ever-growing number of pieces of hardware to serve it? Looking at it from the human side, it is so much more – a method to communicate emergent human experience and foster global human relationships on a scale unlike anything that we have had before.

LinkedIn is an incredibly sophisticated, powerful database – but its value lies not as a database, but with the professional human relationships it helps to build and facilitate.

In much the same way, college websites are built on many different kinds of technology but exist primarily to help human beings communicate with each other. The sites we use in higher education crunch numbers, model data, run queries, tag information, and much, much more from a technical standpoint, but the reason they do all of these things really isn’t technical at all.

When thinking about what features, functionality, layout, and structure your website should have, it can be beneficial to start with the human relationships you want to build, conversations you’d like to have or stories you want to tell and work backward into the technology that accomplishes those in the best way.

For example, take the major gifts officer who is trying to convince a donor that the university is worth giving to – this is a deeply human relationship, one that requires a long period of one on one conversation and a building up of trust and rapport. The website should make the case for giving through donor stories and then provide clear information on how to connect with the human being on the other side.

A good, engaging admissions site includes lots of human conversations or ways to initiate conversations later on – student blogs with comments, a live chat feature, and information on visiting campus or one on one interviews – all with the end goal of connecting people to other people.

mStoner produces websites for higher education; but launching your website isn’t our ultimate goal – we are looking to enhance the human relationships that you have with your various constituents.

We want your prospects who visit your admissions site to feel connected to the students who are already there. We want your alumni stories to resonate with other alumni so that they remember what those human relationships were like in the past and rekindle them in the present. We want information to be easy to find so that people can contact the right people for the right human conversations.

This approach even applies to the purely transactional elements, such as filling out forms. A good transactional page is one that gets you through the process as quickly and intuitively as possible, leaving you with more time and avoiding you sitting at your keyboard shouting “I just want to talk to a real human being!”

Our web project process at mStoner emphasizes people first as well – at the beginning of every one of our projects, we send a team of people out to an educational institution for two straight days of just….talking to each other. No technology necessary. We want your human stories and insights. We want the beginning of our relationship with you to be a very human one just like we want your website to be the beginning of a very human relationship with your audience.

The next time you begin a new technology project (website or not), begin with the human conversations that need to take place and think about the person to person relationships that need to be fostered. Ask yourself if the technology solution that you are proposing is something that will enhance the human conversation or hinder it. Starting from this vantage point will help identify what’s truly important to the success of your project, and what is simply technology for technology’s sake. Trust me, your humans will thank you for it.

I recently had a really interesting conversation with about a dozen of my 30-something friends. The question that sparked the discussion went like this. I asked the group:

Do you give money back to your college?

Almost none of them actually answered the question directly. Instead, I heard:

• Why would I send them money when I barely have enough for myself?
• Don’t they realize there is a recession?
• Don’t they realize we are just starting out?

Whoa. Overwhelmingly negative, knee-jerk reaction to that one.

But the one answer that really stuck with me was:

• I would have given money eventually if they didn’t hammer me all the time to give!

Ouch – someone who started off with a positive inclination towards support had been turned off completely.

I followed up with this question:

What is the one experience you had in college that you feel most positive about?

Everyone had an answer for this one:

• A sports team they played for
• A scholarship they received
• A professor / program that helped them
• A club or greek organization they were a part of

Ok, so there is some connection there about something. Next question.

Would you give money to this group/sport/program/scholarship to insure that someone else could benefit as you did?

One person said they would not give no matter the situation. Most, however, said they would give money to specifically meet this need, if they were able.

What does it all mean?

This conversation is about as anecdotal as it gets. I can’t with any certainty say that my group of friends represents our entire generation as a whole. That said, I think it is pretty telling when a group of otherwise socially and philanthropically involved adults, who have given to charities willingly (albeit in less than ‘name-the-building-after-me’ amounts) would have such a hard time coming around to the idea of giving to their alma mater. There is a disconnect here, and a serious one at that. I don’t have statistics, but I do have trustworthy results from one source: me.

What I care and don’t care about

What motivates me? Excites me? Compels me? What takes me from passive observer to active participant?

I care about how the Nazareth College basketball team is doing, because I used to be on the team and I like basketball. I care about how the student athletes are doing, especially those on the advisory committee I used to be on. I care about certain professors because they cared about me. I don’t care about the annual fund. I don’t care about “Academics” or “Student Life” or “Scholarships” in the abstract, but I do care about the Information Technology minor, the annual thanksgiving basket drive and the William McGowan scholarship for business majors that I received one year.

The truth is, I don’t care enough about Nazareth College on the whole to just throw money in its general direction. I do care enough about pieces of Nazareth College, though. I think people give to parts of their university, and that the collective parts ultimately make for a better whole.

Make me feel that my help matters

People give to specific causes because they are assured their money will do what they want it to do – or even better, because they will actually witness the impact on the exact thing they care about.

I can’t afford to endow a scholarship, or name a building, or present a big check to the president. I won’t (probably ever) be a ‘top prospect’ as a donor.

I can, however, afford to give fifty dollars to buy a new basketball for the team this year, or buy a turkey and fixings for the thanksgiving basket. The amount of money is less important to me than the idea that something meaningful has been accomplished with it, and you know what – if I have proof that a little of my money was well spent, I’m more likely to give a little more next time.

The technology for achieving this type of philanthropy is out there, higher education just needs to start using it. I’d encourage you to take a listen to the awesome podcast of the presentation that Jeff Stevens from University of Florida did on this topic at HighEdWeb 2011.

The takeaway

Operate under the assumption that every alum cares about something your institution does (or could do) enough to support it and you are left simply with the task of finding out what that something is and how you can enable people to support it. If you’ve done a good job of lifetime engagement management, you should already know what interests and affinities people have based on the data you’ve collected, how those connections have evolved throughout their relationship with you, and what will most likely resonate with them. Stop asking people to donate money into ambiguity!

The biggest crime anyone could commit right now would be to just keep on living like they always have. We have such an unprecedented opportunity, as individuals and collectively, to better ourselves through learning. New technologies are putting the collective wealth of human knowledge at our fingertips. Institutions of higher learning are beginning to share their intellectual pools with the world freely. There are no more excuses not to realize our absolute fullest potential. There is no better time to learn and teach when the entire world is our classroom.

I like to think I am a pretty tolerant person when it comes to other people. I accept the fact that we are all human and have flaws and that I’m no different, and tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. I can’t say the same thing about my relationship with technology. I am way more intolerant with technology than I am with people, and it is getting worse. Much worse.

Used to be that I was willing to take some of my own time to fix or work around a problem I was having with a piece of hardware or software I was trying to get to work. I spent hours building custom personal computers for people, tweaking this setting and downloading this driver and setting this or that pin on a motherboard. I even wired my parent’s home with ethernet drops so that we could have the internet on every floor.

I gave up hardware support years ago, though, because I grew intolerant of spending my own time to fix issues that I felt should have been fixed by the people who made the parts.

I’ve traveled the same path with software. I used to be completely accepting of restarting my computer every time a small patch came through. I was tolerant of the fact that my Word document wouldn’t open in your Word program because we didn’t have the same version. I learned how to use ipconfig and network management tools so that I could troubleshoot my internet connection if it was being weird. I saved my documents religiously just in case things crashed, and copied critical files on to cd just to be safe. Eventually, I could no longer tolerate these either, because I had found better operating systems, autosave, google apps, dropbox and the cloud.

I used to be ok spending a premium on software if I really needed it. Then I started using OpenOffice, Gimp, Mint, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Grooveshark, Turntable, and a host of other software. All free. All better than what I had been paying for. I can no longer tolerate spending money on software without trying it for free first.

I used to be ok with needing to be in the office to get some work done or in my living room with friends to enjoy playing games. Then I got a smartphone and a tablet and xbox live. Now if I can’t do it now, here, immediately, I have no tolerance for it.

These and a thousand other small but significant efficiencies in the way I interact with technology have honed my intolerance for ‘things not working’ to a very sharp point.

Don’t make me think.

I’d rather spend brain capital coming up with solutions to my own or my company’s problems, not trying to fix or outsmart the problems with your software or hardware. I will not hesitate, not even for a second, to move on if using your program or website or device isn’t immediately intuitive.

Don’t make them think.

There are 20 years’ worth of potential university students in this country who started their journey with technology later than me and likely from a place of less tolerance than I did. Many of them don’t have the perspective of what things were like ‘before,’ when people had to fight to get tech to work every step of the way. They have only ever had it all, and they are spoiled by the advancements in technology that have been made in their lifetimes. This will only become more and more pronounced as time goes on.

Every single year, the incoming freshman class at universities around the country will arrive on your front door less tolerant of bad or even average technology. They will not look at your university’s website on their mobile device if it isn’t mobile friendly, and in turn, will not look at your university at all. They will not want to buy 100 pounds of textbooks to lug around when they have been using e-readers for years. They’ll demand fast internet connections everywhere. They will not wait for you to tell them it is ok to make a video of why they love or hate your school. They will not use your clunky collaboration program for group work. They won’t tolerate archaic systems and formats and methods after growing up in a land of consumer technology that puts them at the center of their digital universe. They (or rather, their parents) certainly won’t tolerate paying a ton of tuition money to be forced to use technology that isn’t even as good as what they can use for free.

Higher education institutions need to become more intolerant of themselves and the technology they use (and how they use it) before their primary audience becomes completely intolerant of them.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with many talented, passionate professionals in my time at both Nazareth College and the State University of New York at Geneseo. Throughout the trials and tribulations of many web redesigns, content management system launches, and social media campaigns, I have known implicitly that my colleagues shared a passion not just for the good work being done but also for the reason the work is done at all.

Higher education is something that has helped all of us to become the professionals we are. Working to enhance, or at least, ensure that same benefit for future and past graduates is something that makes the job worthwhile and fulfilling beyond the work itself.

There would have to be a very, very compelling reason for me to leave higher education. As it so happens, there is.

I am thrilled to announce that in early February (on my birthday, no less!) I will officially start work as a project manager at mStoner. I am still wrapping my head around what this will mean for me, both personally and professionally, but I know without a doubt that it is a very good thing.

The reason I am so sure is because everyone I’ve talked to at mStoner has that same passion and drive for higher education as those who work within higher educational institutions themselves. The majority of my new colleagues have at one time worked for a university, and despite being on “the other side” are very much in tune with what is happening in higher ed today.

This new job is an incredible opportunity to work closely with some of the most talented thought leaders, technologists, designers and strategists in the industry. I’m sure they will push my own abilities and that I will learn a great deal from their collective expertise.

I can’t wait to begin, but I also can’t move forward without thanking everyone who I’ve worked with in the past as well. My sincere thanks to the Geneseo alumni and Nazareth marketing teams for being awesome colleaugues and professionals. Keep on exceeding expectations!

The official announcement from mStoner is here. In the future I may see you from the other side – but don’t worry, it isn’t all that far away. I’ll still be blogging, presenting, and discussing as before, just from a slightly different point of view. I’m leaving, but I’m not really leaving.

In my last post I discussed how the relationship between a university and its constituents is one to one, lifelong, and often damaged over time because of the way that our engagement is divided over different divisions and technologies.

The critical failure I see right now in higher education engagement is that the relationship between the individual and the institution suffers at the transition points – when a prospective student becomes enrolled; when a current student becomes an alumnus. Higher Ed typically uses different data systems and different internally divided teams to manage the relationship at each point. This leaves a great deal of risk that data and affinities will get lost when people are moved from one stage to another. In this way our internal higher ed silos and disparate data sources are directly damaging our relationship with our constituents. I think that higher education needs to begin looking at the relationship holistically. This will require internal staff to be aware and involved in each stage of the life-cycle.

So identifying the problem is all good and well but let’s actually do something about it! In an effort to bite off exactly as much as we can chew, I’ve broken out some of the main areas of issue and have suggestions to get us started towards a more cohesive, collaborative future. This isn’t going to happen entirely overnight, but some of it actually can happen, literally, tomorrow. Each set of suggestions starts with a very doable, simple first step and grows in both scope and complexity until arriving at what I see as the ultimate goal.

Issue: Transitions from Admissions to Student Affairs to Alumni

Tomorrow: Create a list and then email it
Prospective and enrolled students will group together around like interests within the accepted student social networks you create for them. These self-selected groupings should be passed on from admissions professionals to student affairs professionals, career services staff, faculty advisers, and club leaders so they know who to look for at club fair and academic advisement. This can be as simple as a spreadsheet that gets sent out to a list of all interested parties.

This Year: Identify the leaders
In addition to the above, professionals should be monitoring the enrolled and matriculating students who are the most vocal and natural coordinators of these interest groups. These individuals should be noted as potential student leaders and flagged for contact by current student leaders. Current student leaders should be identified by student affairs and systematically passed on to alumni staff. The theory is that active prospects will become active students, who will in turn become active, involved alumni, who will ultimately be the most generous in their giving back to the university. There is no reason not to identify these individuals as early as possible and share this information with as many people as possible.

Ultimately: All inclusive, all the time
Current student leaders should be actively recruiting people for the clubs and activities before they are even on campus. All this information, right from the beginning, should be shared by admissions, student leadership and student affairs professionals with:

• Faculty, so that they can address specifics on their program offerings and even see what interest there may be out there for new and different course offerings.
• Career services, so that they have more information at their disposal when discussing career options and majors.
• Alumni, who can then begin to identify potential alumni mentors and alumni-to-student internship possibilities.

Issue: Data Integration

Tomorrow: Make a list
Think of everything you would like to know about your audience. Demographics, affinities, relationships, and anything else that would make you more effective at engaging them. Put it into a column. Add another column, label it “Lives Where”. Fill in this column to the best of your ability with what department has this information. Include everything you’d like, even if you are sure no one currently has it.

This Year: Get the data
For every one of the items on the list you’ve created, contact the people who own it and ask them to share. They might refuse or be unable to do so; find out why. If it isn’t a good enough reason, push back. If no one has the information you are looking for, identify who has the best opportunity to collect that info. Contact them and ask if they would be willing to add it to their list and share it with you. Don’t be deterred by different database systems. Data is data. It is worth the effort whether you get a nice auto-feed from one system or have to manually process through Excel. I’ll repeat that – just because the data isn’t pretty or isn’t easy to get does not mean you have an excuse not to get it.

Ultimately:  Develop a universal data set
In the end we need a single document that contains every piece of data that could be relevant to anyone at any stage of the engagement cycle, along with the evolution of that data over time. This document needs to show who owns the data, who it is shared with, when it becomes available to certain parties, the data format, other data that is linked to it, and how that data evolves over time – i.e. if you drop email when someone graduates, what does ‘primary email’ become? When exactly does a student become an alumnus – (hint: it might not be graduation day). It is absolutely unacceptable that professionals in one office not be privy to information that might help them do their jobs simply because another department owns or manages that data. We all deal with sensitive information. We should all trust each other to deal with all of the sensitive information from all of the sources throughout the entire process. There are exceptions for truly sensitive data such as social security numbers, but anything else being withheld is nothing more than stubborn territorialism.

Issue: Internally Divided Teams

Tomorrow: Have coffee
How many people outside your division or department could you define job roles and duties for? How many of those people have even an inkling about what you do? Take the first simple step and make it a goal to meet one new person from outside your silo per week. Grab coffee, talk about what you do and find out what they do. Simple, but you’d be surprised how many things you’ll discover over a latte: opportunities for collaboration, duplications of effort, software licenses you could consolidate, etc.

This Year: Cross pollinate your meetings
Everyone hates meetings, so why not make things more interesting by having one department sit in on another one’s planning meeting? Swap meetings once or twice a year and you will all have a better idea of what challenges, opportunities, and projects each other is working on, and where you might be able to work together.

Ultimately: Hybrid employees
I think collaboration between people is great, but an even better option would be employees who work with each stage of the engagement cycle all year long. These individuals become a living, breathing bridge of information. Positions like this would need great autonomy and a reporting structure allowing them to push through change against the grain. This can also be extended to functional working teams between areas – the alumni career services team, alumni admissions team, etc.

An obstacle: what if the problem isn’t awareness, or effort, or silos, but red tape?

Andrew Gossen, senior director of social media for Cornell alumni, had this comment in response to Andy Shaindlin’s excellent post on whether alumni relations was a form of customer relationship management:

“A significant impediment to this is often not insularity, lack of creativity, or absence of good intention but the long shadow of FERPA. The most elegant and user-friendly system in the world isn’t going to help you any if you’ve got people in your institution arguing that any and all data relating to any aspect of what an individual did as a student is off limits because of FERPA. Sadly, many American institutions seem more worried about CYA than positive, integrated relationship management.”

So how do we address this issue? I’m no FERPA expert, but maybe that is just the thing to be. Maybe the first step to tackling that angle is to familiarize ourselves with why there is so much hand wringing over FERPA, how much of it is warranted, and how much of it could be worked through.

Truly effective lifetime engagement management is going to take time to evolve, but the first step can and should happen tomorrow. The above ideas are also very inwardly focused: improving our relationships with each other on campus will lead to improving our relationship with those off campus. My next post will take a look at what we can do with all this wonderful, timely data and shared knowledge to engage our external audiences throughout their entire lifetime.

Ever have to re-introduce yourself to someone who you have already met? Awkward. How about to a place you just spent 4 years and $100,000 on? More than awkward, probably angering, at the very least really disappointing. Yet this is what new alumni do all over the country, all the time.

Let’s walk through the scenario (with our imaginary friend Joe)

Joe: “Hi, I’m Joe. I think your school is kind of cool and might want to go there, can I have some more info?”

Admissions Officer: “Hey Joe! Absolutely, we would love to have you come for a tour, or check out this live chat we have set up where you can talk to real students with any questions. You can also read our student blogs and experience the campus through our virtual tour.”

Joe: “Cool! I’m convinced, I just sent my app in.”

Admissions Officer: “That is awesome! We will let you know our decision soon, but in the meantime here are a bunch of resources you might find useful based on the information from your application.”

Admissions Officer (after reviewing app): “Hey Joe, congrats! You have been accepted and we wanted to celebrate by inviting you to this special Facebook group just for the class of 20XX. You can meet up with people you might room with, join a group discussion on a topic or club you are interested in, or just get to know your future classmates.”

Joe: “Wow, thanks! By the time I get to orientation I’ll already have a great group of people to hang out with who share my interests!”

Student Affairs employee: “Hey Joe, welcome to orientation! The admissions office let us know that you’re interested in rugby and chess, so we circled those clubs and where their representatives are located for club fair later this week. And since you joined the biology group on the incoming class Facebook page, we’ve pulled some materials on that program to get you started.”

Joe: “This is incredible, you obviously really know me and what I need, I’m off to a great start!”

(four years later, after being involved in countless clubs, sports, academic and extra-curricular pursuits)

Joe: “Wow, this college has really been the best four years of my life. I’ve made so many great friends by participating in all kinds of clubs, activities, athletics, and Greek life. I’m going to seriously miss this place, it has been so amazing.”

President: “Congratulations to the graduating class of 20XX. You join xx,000 alumni who have gone before you. You are all going to go out and change the world!”

Joe: “I love this place, I am ready to take on the world!”

(three months later)

Joe: “Man, finding a job related to my major is HARD. I need some help. Ugh, the email that I’ve used for the last 4 years is GONE? And so is everyone’s that I graduated with? Guess I’ll have to use Facebook to stay in touch. I better grab a LinkedIn account too for professional networking.”

Office of Alumni: “Please update your email  with us by filling out this paper mailer that we sent to your parent’s address!”
Office of Annual Fund: “Give us money!”
Office of Alumni: “Please let us know what types of things you are interested in!”
Capital Campaign: “Give us money!”
Office of Alumni: “Join this Facebook group with all the other alumni from our university!”
Office of Annual Fund: “Did you forget to give us money?”

Joe: “What the heck?! I just graduated with, like, $100,000 in debt and a piece of paper! You take my email address away, ask me for money I don’t even have, and then I’m supposed to be excited to join a group with people my parent’s age in it? Do you guys even talk to student affairs or admissions? And what about all the things I DID at school, you should already know what I like….I thought you knew me, but I guess I’m on my own.”

To be fair, the above portrayal is not accurate for every institution out there. Many really great alumni communities exist and many great fund-raising campaigns have achieved success. The point is that even these initiatives are fighting an uphill battle to stay engaged with their alumni in a meaningful way.

Stop divorcing your recent graduates

From the very first day that a prospect opens your admissions materials, they have a relationship with you. Sometimes that relationship doesn’t last beyond a glance. Sometimes you date a couple times and decide it isn’t going to work. The students who attend your college have an exclusive relationship with you, and breaking it off at that point can be difficult and painful as a transfer or drop out.

Once they’ve graduated, your alumni have put in a lot of time with your institution. They have a strong affinity; you are essentially married. You both need each other and benefit from each other’s success. You have official documents that carry a lot of weight.

Then they leave.

The best four years of their lives living, breathing, and growing on your campus is over.

It is at this point that the relationship that you have with this individual is at its most critical since you initially made that contract when they enrolled. Yet, we often carelessly neglect this relationship, or at worst damage it thoughtlessly right at the point when it is weakest. We sometimes do irreparable harm that resonates for the rest of the relationship.

How many alumni are divorced from you because the relationship has soured do to overuse of asks for money? How many are off the grid since you got rid of their email? How many opted out of email because you spammed them to death?

How many of your graduates feel the same about your institution as the day they walked across the stage? Where did it all go wrong? Why did it all go wrong? When did the honeymoon end? These are questions that all alumni advancement and development offices struggle with as they try to build engagement with alumni, but for this discussion I am less concerned with

How do we get them back? (re-engagement) than with

How do we prevent this from happening every single year? (sustained engagement)

The challenge for higher education professionals

Start thinking like your audience. You see the university as:

• Alumni
• Development
• Admissions
• Student Affairs
• Career Services
• Academics

Your audience sees the university as:

• The University.

You see an individual in your audience as:

• Prospect
• Enrollee
• Student
• Graduate
• Alumnus
• Donor

That person sees themselves as:

• Themselves.

This is a one-to-one relationship, not a many-to-one relationship. When each stage of the relationship cycle is manned by a different team in a different silo with a different technology, our half of the relationship seems schizophrenic, forgetful, and thoughtless.

Today’s prospect is next decade’s donor. This is why your admissions team needs to meet with your student affairs team and your alumni team and get on the same page. Well, what are you waiting for, reach out and introduce yourselves!

The challenge for higher education technology companies

Come up with solutions that work with the whole life-cycle. Not necessarily solutions for the entire life-cycle at once (though that would be nice) but tools that anticipate the major transitions in the life-cycle and make the movement of data and services through those transitions as open and easy as possible so that loss of data and affinities doesn’t happen.

Engage people who work on the entire life-cycle, not just one area. As an outside force, you can work to build the bridges that need to be made between internal silos so that we can maintain a sustained, engaging relationship from prospect to donor without ever missing a beat.

In part 2 on this topic I’ll discuss strategies and tactics to get started with connecting the dots to sustained engagement and starting the right conversations on your campus.

What are you doing to build sustained, seamless engagement? Please share!