How does a major research university increase alumni engagement? The first step is to understand the current picture.

Alumni engagement can be defined in various attitudinal and behavioral ways: love of the institution, willingness to volunteer, attendance at events, spreading positive word-of-mouth to prospective students, and donating money. Of course, it is all these things and more. Robust alumni engagement is crucial to the long-term health of any educational institution.

Our client had recently made a strong, administration-wide commitment to develop stronger relationships with alumni of all programs and divisions. Two years earlier, the university's alumni and development office had engaged us to conduct focus groups with alumni about print and electronic communications. But now the university wanted to look much more broadly — and quantitatively — at how engagement works and where it can be strengthened. 

Re-enter Slover Linett. Working closely with the Office of Institutional Research for Alumni and Development, we created a plan to survey alumni every three years using a sophisticated sampling method to ensured balanced, statistically representative response data.

For the initial or "baseline" wave of the study, our questionnaire focused on understanding not just how alumni are currently engaged with the university, but also how they would like to be and what barriers stand in the way of that ideal relationship. Despite the long questionnaire, we achieved a strong response rate and collected more than 3,400 surveys.

In our analysis, we developed statistical models which identified the key levers of engagement and suggested strategic priorities to the university. With the luxury of a large data set, we were able to analyze and compare various sub-segments. For example, we created individual reports for each of the dozen separate schools and programs at the university and also did "deep dives" by age cohort, gender, geography, and other factors.

The university came away from that first round of findings with a big-picture understanding of alumni dynamics across the university and a shared sense of what was needed to improve engagement. The research also led to a markedly higher level of collaboration among alumni relations staff from disparate units of the university, including joint alumni programming and unified communication strategies that were developed on the basis of our recommendations in the first-wave reports.

Now, two years later, we're embarking on the second wave of the study. This time our analysis will look at changes since the earlier data, allowing us to put the original, detailed snapshot "in motion." Will those holistic approaches have improved alumni engagement? We're looking forward to seeing the new data as much as our clients are.