HSR's Alumni Engagement Blog

Although alumni advancement professionals appreciate the importance of building engaged alumni communities, there is little understanding or agreement about what alumni engagement is or how to best measure this construct.  What do engaged alumni do, say or think about their alma mater that makes them engaged?  What are the behaviors we can expect engaged alumni to perform?  What causes alumni to become engaged?  What types of variables affect alumni attitudes toward their alma mater. How do differences in alumni engagement relate to the decision to give?  How do we objectively measure alumni engagement? 

I am frequently asked questions about alumni engagement - What is it? How is it measured?  What does it mean?  Schools frequently asked about our Alumni Attitudes Survey.  They ask to see the items we use and the questions we ask.  In the next few blog posts, I'll write about our approach to measuring alumni engagement, the variables that are important to alumni, the items we use and some of our findings.  I hope you find it interesting, but first let me talk about how I got started.

More than a decade ago, while serving on my alma mater’s alumni board, I volunteered to conduct my alma mater's very first alumni survey.  They were reviewing bids from vendors and asked my advice.  None looked like what the College needed, and having conducted many employee attitude surveys, I volunteered to perform the survey.  I was looking for something interesting and worthwhile to do as a board member. The alumni survey turned out to be a very worthwhile piece of volunteer work.

At the time, alumni surveys were not that common and Web-based alumni surveys were non-existent. A few schools had published the results of paper alumni surveys online.  We reviewed these items  and were able to gleam a small number of rating items .  There was not a lot of consistency in the types of items schools used. 

To develop additional items, we conducted interviews and focus groups with students, alumni, faculty and staff from the College.  The focus of these methods was to obtain specific behavioral examples of things alumni had experienced which affected their attitudes toward the College.  Our focus was obtaining specific, behavioral examples that related to student and alumni experiences.  Things that alumni had experienced or observed that had affected their attitudes toward the College; that had caused alumni to be more or less engaged.  Flanagan (1954) referred to these behavioral examples as critical incident statements.  We used these critical incident statements to develop additional Likert-type rating items that we would use to evaluate alumni attitudes and engagement. 

Since this initial study, we have continued to conduct interviews and focus groups to obtain specific behavioral examples of student and alumni experiences that affect their attitudes toward their alma mater.  Additionally, on every Alumni Attitudes Survey we conduct, we have used open-ended questions to obtain written feedback from alumni about what their alma mater does well, where improvements can be made, why alumni attend or do not attend events and what affects alumni decisions to give.  This written feedback has also provided us with the critical incident statements we need to continuously expand our pool of alumni attitude items.  When we evaluate alumni attitudes, we use approximately twenty-five Likert-type rating items to objectively measure alumni engagement.  We use factor analytic procedures to identify the variables that define alumni engagement and the individual rating items that relate to each variable.  Typically, three variables are identified and approximately 15 items are needed to define these variables.

The most significant work related to the measurement of engagement has been conducted in the field of industrial-organizational psychology. Macey and Schneider (2007) described employee engagement as a psychological state that is similar to job satisfaction, organizational commitment, psychological empowerment and job involvement, and noted that any measure of employee engagement likely includes some of the same items and evaluate some of the same behaviors found on these other measures. While the field of industrial-organizational psychology may be finding it difficult to differentiate employee engagement from these other measures of employee affect, this construct, engagement, appears to readily describe the types of variables that underlay alumni attitudes.  In developing our Alumni Engagement Scale (AES), we also reviewed these measures of employee affect to identify items that might relate to alumni feelings of engagement.

The relationship between alumni and their alma mater is distinctly different from the employer-employee relationships you find in business and industry, or the volunteer relationships you might find in not-for-profit organizations.  The alumni relationship is unique, but “engagement” appears to offer an accurate description of the variables that underlay alumni  attitudes.  The focus has to be identifying the specific behaviors that define alumni engagement - things that alumni think, do, say, feel or have experienced.

I'll write more about the measurement of alumni attitudes and engagement in my next blog.

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