Alumni Networking

Last week I was an invited speaker on the Workshop on UNICA Strategies for International Alumni Work, January 22-23, 2009 hosted by the Freie Universität Berlin.

Although we have no specific experience in creating online tools for alumni networking, we elaborated on the approach we are going to follow in the European Campus Project.

As you might know the goal of the European Campus Project is to create a website template for International Master Programs. This website will contain different building blocks all contributing to the overall information provision for prospective students.

Read everything about this project on the project page of the European Campus.

One building block of the Master template will be related with online networking.  We can make a clear distinction between professional networking tools and social networking tools. The social networking tools can give us the possibility to provide future students with online support before and during their stay abroad, while the professional networking tools can assist us in enhancing the active alumni networking towards former students.

Social Networking

Social Networking tools allow students to communicate with each other, give each other advice and support, and produce meaningful content that is important to them. Facebook is one of the most popular social networking tools at the moment. One of the most interesting features in the framework of our project is that it gives the possibility to create groups. People with a Facebook profile can join these groups to find people with similar interests and start discussions or share experiences.

In the European campus project it will be stimulated that with every website template installation for a new international master program a corresponding Facebook group will be launched.  Here former and current students can be appointed to become moderators and provide online mentoring for future students. Some universities and student organizations such as ESN are already actively using these tools to support their new incoming students.  Many questions about housing, telephone operators etc are directly solved by the students themselves in a very profound manner. This information provision by peers is vital, as many students leave their normal support network behind when they go study abroad.

Professional networking

Professional networking on the other side is mainly used for job-seeking and enhancing career opportunities. Linkedin is one of most popular business networking tools at the moments and contains over 30 million registered people. Similar as Facebook Linkedin gives the opportunity to create groups. As such we will again stimulate in the European campus project that with every international master website we launch we link a Linkedin group. This group will allow master-course organizers to actively stimulate alumni networking and use the many features these tools provide.

Why would we want to use third-parties commercial software such as Linkedin rather then creating our own tools.
Well this is definitely the most important question alumni-officers are facing at the moment and when I was preparing myself for the conference in Berlin I started to look around on the Internet an I stumbled on the following website:

http://www.alumnifutures.com/alumni/2007/04/online_business.html

This is the blog by Andy Shaindlin, Executive Director of Caltech Alumni Association of Caltech University. I suggest everybody to have look on this website, because it is full of interesting post and presentations. Have a look now!

Here you can find 3 interesting quotes that I selected in my presentation about the use of online networking tools for alumni networking at the universities.

After reading this blog one thing is sure we will never try to develop an new Facebook or Linkedin neither we will try to build new databases for the alumni networking of the international master programs or universities.

Therefore our approach will rather be to develop tools on top of those existing online platforms to bring the information we want to disseminate to those online places the students are already frequenting, rather then asking the students to come to a new platform.

We definitely consider it as a challenge in the European Campus project to research how we can use these networking tools in the most appropriate manner for the alumni-networking of international master programs and universities.

I hope to write soon more about this very interesting topic!
Feel free to comment on this post and start an interesting discussion.

Some of my slides I used in my presentation you can find here.