[Music] so my first case Drive was in Bellevue Washington it was 2018 and I was probably the only alumni relations person there and the question I got most was you know why are you here and my answer to me seemed really simple is because I can't do anything about engagement without having the data to inform what works [Music] thank you everybody wants to be looking at alumni engagement as kind of the natural successor to participation which was the previous kind of uh standard that's not so much the case anymore and engagement it's been the new
uh focus and that's why these were very helpful to uh understand how are these things measured there are only good things that can come out of participating in benchmarking providing your data one way that it's definitely within the University of Washington changing operations with the alumni engagement metrics the conversations really shifting how are we measuring that what are the outcomes of good engagement to be able to go back to the leadership at the University of Tennessee Knoxville and share with them how we compare ourselves based on the way that we engage our alumni within those
four modes I think it's been critical one of the things that we've really embraced at Buffalo is the AEM survey it was a way for us to start talking with our Deans it really gives them almost a custom report for themselves around AEM to get a better sense of why their investment in all this work is a value how it's supporting them and really then how it's supporting the larger University at Buffalo's Ambitions I'm the alumni engagement coordinator at Queen Mary University of London I think the most valuable thing is having the people that you
connect with I just went to somebody from a Coast University in Saudi Arabia and they were talking about how they engage their alumni when they're still students and that's something that we're really Keen to do at my institution I asked her how do they do that and I went away with some really good ideas you only get better results the more that you work with your data and the more that you're working with other institutions data and looking at those and comparing those I can't tell you enough how hard it is to convince people to
give us their data that's the most challenging part but we're trying to change that you know we're trying to be more open and sharing alumni data that we have and really critically looking at what are we doing right now what are we tracking how are we recording it and what are the challenges that people are having within advancement alumni engagement if we see let's say in the alumni engagement metrics if we see that our experiential numbers is maybe tracking below our expectation are lagging that can help us allocate the resources and investment in those programs
to help them be more robust I always go to the alumni engagement survey you can use it to help advocate for a better investment you can use it to Benchmark against programs and say wow they're doing something really neat over there because their alumni engagement has gone up over the last three years it creates that connection and that Community amongst us that's facilitated by case foreign
