Facebook vs. Alumni Organizations

Yes, we're witnessing a watershed moment for college alumni associations. Facebook has rendered them almost useless for what alumni care the most about... finding updates on classmates. The New York Times has a great article on this phenomenon, focused primarily on how social networking is competing with alumni magazines. According to the article:

"The advent of social networking on the Internet has created a quandary for these magazines, which want to maintain a conversation with alumni but have been slow to embrace the Web. Most schools have set up password-protected sites where graduates can change their contact information, drop a class note or donate money.

But younger alumni, accustomed to second-by-second updates from friends and classmates, are exchanging information in real time on Facebook and MySpace. Why wait for your alma mater to churn out a quarterly journal when you can Twitter all day?"

I'd argue that limiting the conversation to alumni magazines is short-sighted. In fact, Facebook and MySpace have threatened the whole idea of alumni associations, and could render them obsolete. So why haven't more universities embraced this new medium? Here are a few ideas of how universities could use social networking sites to embolden alumni organizations and make them more relevant:

1. Create an official Facebook Page for Alumni
   This provides a single point of contact for alumni to connect in Facebook. Also, pages have advantages over groups, such as more flexibility with content and better "badging" of fans on their own profile pages.
   
2. Create a Facebook application for donations
   Applications such as Facebook Causes are doing it, why not alumni organizations? Soliciting smaller donations can allow rabid fans with less financial means the ability to contribute. What's more, an application like this can enlist alumni to spread the word to other alums.
   
3. Provide assets to help them show their pride
   They're already creating assets themselves, but empower them with better assets. For example, a widget that counts down to football games. Assets will turn alumni into advocates.

These are a few simple ideas, but quite simply, the universities that don't get engaged will see their alumni organizations becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Read the complete NY Times article here.

Comments

[Allison Shapira]

This is a great blog post, thank you. Do you have any examples of universities that are successfully using Facebook in the ways you mentioned? I'm doing a benchmarking project for my class at the Harvard Kennedy School, and I'm looking for subjects to interview. Thanks for any help you can offer.