Engaging your alumni in the attention economy.
This year will mark the 26th anniversary of a seminal essay by Wired magazine's founding executive editor, Kevin Kelly, titled "New Rules for the New Economy". The article made a series of predictions about culture and its direction of travel. One of these was the expectation that the primary commodity of the future would be attention…
"The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention"
In 1997, this idea seemed far more revelatory than it does today, but we have now clearly arrived in an attention economy, one where capturing people's attention (including that of your alumni) becomes more challenging every day.
What implications does this transformation have for professionals in the fields of alumni relations, development, and advancement?
Our users regularly tell us that not only is sustaining engagement with alumni an ongoing challenge, but that competing for resources can be difficult. So how do we capture and keep the attention of our alumni without breaking the bank in a world where even their attention to each other is hard-won?
As an alumni professional the first step toward success in this new world is to understand what your alumnus want from their alma mater, not just as services or activities, but more broadly, as consumers who value interesting content.
Social media is without question a critical tool for you to reach out to alumni in a way that allows them to engage quickly and easily, but is it sustainable?
As the world becomes more and more focused on speed, efficiency, and instant gratification, it's vital to pay attention to how people are communicating with each other. Several of the major social media platforms are seeing a decline in active users as people choose to move to more intimate, private, and decentralised forms of communication offered by platforms of the Web 3.0 generation.
Here are some key principles to keep in mind as you look to engage your alumni. These can be applied to your websites, social media, community sites, event planning, and more.
Keep it short.
Messages should never be too long for the audience to remember what they read, let alone act on the content. If you have a lot of information that you are looking to share with your audience then break it up into segments to avoid information overload.
Keep it relevant.
It’s no secret that people are much more responsive to, and engaged with, content which is personalised to them. Even minor levels of personalisation can dramatically increase engagement rates on communications.
Review your outcomes.
It’s critical to review the efficacy of your communication activities to inform planning future campaigns. Analysing the data and metrics behind outcomes provides objective information and therefore useful guidance.
Keeping it short
You don't want to lose your audiences attention by giving them too much information at once, or by going off on tangents that don't add anything to the messaging. The key is to keep messages short and sweet.
Email newsletters are fantastic and remain one of the most effective ways to keep your alumni up to date, but if they contain fifteen separate items, then only your most dedicated supporters will read them all, let alone remember everything. Shorter notification style emails used more frequently can get messaging to the same audience in a more digestible fashion.
Our attention spans may be shrinking, but at least there are more tools than ever that allow communication in shorter bursts. Pay attention to how your alumni are communicating, both with you and one another, take advantage of platforms which support short form messages when possible, or use alternative formats like videos to get your point across more succinctly.
As attention spans shrink and the demand for information grows, communications strategies must adapt to meet this new reality so keep reviewing your approach and trying different things (see below for more on this).
Keeping it relevant
Relevance breaks down into two elements, relevance to the recipient(s) and relevance of the message itself. Multiple studies have shown that people will engage more with content which relates to them personally, or to their lived experiences. So, taking a ‘one size fits all’ approach to engagement will almost certainly mean that messages are significantly less effective.
Whilst personalising to the individual is unquestionably best, general personalisation can still give that extra few percentage points to an open or read rate, which when multiplied over months or years, really add up. Generalised personalisation can be as simple as adding a relevant image to an announcement, incentivising people to read rather than just skipping over the text. Or tailoring messages to the platform on which they go out, for example, Facebook messages are far more likely to be seen by your alumni from the baby boomer generation than by millennials who’s active numbers there are steadily decreasing).
Take advantage of the technology available today to personalise at scale, this doesn’t need to be something reserved for your major supporters with whom you have personal interactions.
“What gets measures gets managed”
Monitoring the effectiveness of your activities is critical and this is where social media networks aren’t ideal. Yes, Facebook will tell you how many people saw your post and interacted with it…
But how many of those are actually the people you want to be reaching? Most social media platforms won’t give you that level of detail, and those who will charge handsomely for it, because keeping and using that data to market back to those same users is their business model.
Using your own platforms should enable you to see detailed metrics on engagement so you can ensure that you are not only getting your message in front the right people but that the messaging is effective. Without this detail communications may, at surface level, appear successful whilst not actually reaching the intended audience, for example, announcement of a 1970s reunion is not likely to be of much interest to leavers from the 2000s, so a message might reach 500 people but result in no additional event attendance.
Don’t skip this step just because a post or campaign has ‘done well’, whilst the results might be as, or better than, expected, that doesn’t mean that minor tweaks or variations couldn’t mean an improvement of several multipliers when you next run a similar piece of work.
Conclusion
Whilst there is no shortage of ways to engage your alumni, reaching out to them on social media, with email lists, or through digital events. The key is being mindful of how people are using platforms (both your own and social media) so that you can make the most of them for your program needs. Whatever method you choose, remember: keep it short, keep it relevant, and make sure you check its effectiveness!
As Neil Postman wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death (very presciently given it was 1985)…
“The more our attention gets monetized, the more our attention will be filled with quick hot takes that focus on excitement and entertainment over depth and thoughtfulness.”
Most institutions are sat on a veritable goldmine of highly engaging material in the form of photos, videos, and documents from their alumnus’ time with them, all of which can quickly and easily become content of its own, or used to support wider and ongoing messaging.
To find out how SocialArchive® can help you utilise this engagement dynamite email us at info@socialarchive.com.