How to Approach your Alumni/Students Community Strategy
How to Approach Your Alumni and Students Community Strategy
Communities are the best way to organize your students and alumni and create an easy separation of content. Your communities should reflect both your career programming model as well as how your alumni identify professionally, therefore, which industries your students will likely enter into post-graduation. When thinking about the Wisr user experience, it is important to think “where will an individual start their exploration?”, “what is the most relevant information I should share?”, and “how will they navigate the site?”
It is also important to think about who will own your communities and what responsibilities they have. Wisr is a great, fairly low commitment and flexible opportunity to ask alumni volunteers to take a leadership role. A community should have at least one alumni volunteer or staff community leader in each community to be successful. In addition to the management of inviting and troubleshooting with members, more importantly this leader will feed interesting content (events, discussions, articles, and videos) to the site. This would also be a good time to consider pulling in campus partners who are actively engaged in creating career programming for students and alumni. Community leaders should be regularly available and will be the first to field questions for your institution’s Wisr team.
Don’t be afraid to start with a small number of communities when launching your Wisr site. It is much better to start small and have active and engaged communities where your alumni and students are asking for more rather than empty communities that will leave a bad impression to first time visitors who then likely will not return. You should also think about which communities and areas are most likely to have strong representation and a lot of content to share at the outset. Consider starting umbrella communities that might cover a broader interest area, you can always split off a segment into its own community if activity warrants it. The other thing to keep in mind is your Wisr site is a living and breathing organism that can shift to meet your changing needs. Just like communities expanding and splitting, if communities are not working, don’t be afraid to archive them, and when new and interesting programs start, you can always form new communities.
While you are creating communities, it is a good time to think strategically about whether they should be public, private, or invitation only. How you are using your overall Wisr site and who is using it could determine who should have access to what information. Keep in mind that public groups are available for anyone to see and join, private groups require an invitation or approval to join but will still appear in the list of available communities to all members, and invitation only communities will be visible only to members of the group set by the admin or community leader.
With these questions in mind, here are Wisr’s suggestions for building communities in your Career and Alumni mentoring site. Ultimately, you need to decide which communities best meet your institution’s needs, but below you will find the commonly used communities among existing Wisr’s Career and Alumni mentoring customers.
Welcome
The Welcome community should be your public one-stop-shop for information regarding the structure of the site, schedules, and where/when to find certain information. This is where you should host any general information as well as instructional posts that let your alumni and students know what to expect in your other communities. This is also a great place to post virtual events that are open to your entire community.
Do not expect too much discussion taking place in your Getting Started community as this is mostly an information hub. We recommend having a weekly discussion post with information and updates for the week as well as a Topic related to which team members are regularly available and links to their profiles so your members can engage in 1:1 chat when necessary. It might also be a good place to track technical difficulties and other issues common to all users of your Wisr network.
Job Seekers and Hiring Managers
One of the most common reasons students want to connect with alumni professionally is in their search for jobs and internships. You will likely find a community like this will serve alumni in all stages of their careers. While you may have an additional job board feature on your website, creating a specific space for job seekers and hiring managers to join and connect will put information in front of the people who need it most. The community can be used to post opportunities, recommend qualified applicants within the community, and just simply ask questions of hiring managers.
Specific College/School Communities
If people graduate from your institution with affinity to a specific school or college, we recommend working with units to determine if they have the bandwidth to support having their own community. If they do, we recommend creating a community with the understanding that their representatives will serve as the community leader. The community can be used for that particular school/college to share content to inform students and alumni about activities happening and resources available that are relevant to the disciplines. Content in this community can be anything from recorded classes with professors to a tour of their state-of-the-art facilities. Each community should also have at least one faculty/staff member related to that subject regularly available to answer questions and act as a point of contact for the community.
Industry Fields
While it would be impossible to create a community for every professional industry your alumni enter upon graduation, there are likely some that have a critical mass of alumni representation. Having industry fields representing the most popular fields in which your alumni work is a great place to market events and speakers relevant to that industry and for individuals to connect over shared interests. We suggest starting broad and narrowing in if participation warrants; for instance: Business, Education, Healthcare, Technology, Entrepreneurship, Legal, etc. This is a great partnership opportunity for career services and alumni relations as career service offices shift their advising and programming from college/school liaisons to work within industries. [Screenshots for Oberlin’s Career Communities]. Staff advisors can drive content for their respective programs.
Affinity Groups
People want to connect with other people who are like them. Creating communities to reflect the diversity of your population will build affinities for your institution that may lead to new connections, new programming, and potentially new fundraising opportunities. We are using “affinity” in the broadest possible sense and these groups could either be set to public or private depending on sensitivity. Some suggestions we have for affinity groups include groups representing different cultures, ethnicities, and religions, LGBTQIA+, Military, women, current and former student athletes, etc. In your Wisr site, you have the ability to allow network members to request the creation of a new community. We recommend having a strategy for approving new communities and guidelines for expectations including who will serve as a community leader and be responsible for adding content. You want to be careful not to add responsibilities for your team in areas you are not planning to expand upon.
Regional/Geographic
Depending on your Alumni office’s regional engagement strategy, Wisr has found varying degrees of success with regional or geographic communities. Regional communities could be used for marketing professional development centered events and programs taking place in regions, but may interfere with regional club management systems your institution already has in place. We also find that without strong volunteer leadership and clear demarcations, regional communities specifically cause confusion between staff and volunteer responsibilities. Our advice is to align your Wisr engagement and regional engagement strategies and determine if regional communities make sense for how you want to use Wisr. From a career related strategy, communities that facilitate alumni asking for advice when moving to a new city have better results.
AMA/Ask Me Anything
Ask Me Anything communities are a great way showcase cool programs and amazing alumni to the rest of your population. Imagine hosting an hour long ask me anything with a beloved faculty member, an alumna CEO of a huge corporation, or a famous alumnus. Use Topics and events to organize which AMAs are live and what topics they cover. AMAs are a great way to highlight engaged volunteers or provide a low commitment opportunity to engage someone new who has an amazing story to tell.
Community Leader Hub
Since your alumni volunteers will be using Wisr on a regular basis, we recommend creating a community for Community Leaders to communicate with each other and staff and act as a home base for their training, materials, and sharing tips and deadlines. This will keep all relevant information about upcoming meetings and trainings in one place and as well as serve a community for your team to interact. We recommend this live as an invitation only community for your alumni volunteers and staff.