RECORDING ALUMNI RELATIONS - WHEN WESLEY WENT TO WINCHESTER

If you missed it I would encourage you to listen in the next few days to the 30 minute BBC Radio 4 documentary ‘When Wesley Went to Winchester’ on the BBC iPlayer before it is taken offline at 11am on Monday 27 June (click here).

To my mind the programme serves as an excellent example of the potential for collecting rich audio (and video) material around reunions and other events.

Once collected, this material can be edited to create alumni podcasts and vidcasts that not only engage alumni and the wider School, College or University community now, but also serve as valuable archive records of the institution’s life through the decades as remembered by former students. Some of the material can also be re-edited for marketing and promotion purposes too.

It is a great pity that more effort isn’t made to collect the memories and insights of alumni who actually attend reunions and other events. There is often so much energy invested in producing a successful alumni event that the opportunity to capture the stories of each person attending is sometimes neglected.

It is understandable that the alumni secretary and team may struggle to speak to everyone attending a reunion, and then only briefly, but a concerted effort by one or more alumni, staff or current students to interview those present and record their stories could prove extremely useful, helping to extend the interest of those attending far beyond the event itself, and also connecting and engaging all those former pupils who didn’t attend.

In the past this might have required considerable investment and expertise but now audio and video technology is relatively cheap and user friendly, and the storage and distribution channels (online via YouTube, iTunes etc) are open to all and free to use. All Schools, Colleges and Universities have current students, staff, parents and alumni with the necessary skills and interest to take responsibility for digitally capturing not only the event itself but the memories of those attending.

The BBC programme ‘When Wesley Went to Winchester’ explores the experience of the 33 former pupils who were some of the 300 or so ‘Fleming boys’ who won places at private schools through a national and county bursary scheme which ran from the 1940s to the 1970s, initiated by Winston Churchill, MP Rab Butler and Lord Fleming.

It focuses particularly on the experiences of broadcaster Wesley Kerr who beat the odds, as a black foster child from a working class background in Hampshire, to attend Winchester College in the 1970s and later became the BBC's first black television reporter and royal correspondent.

The programme begins with talk of dusty school trunks set against the sound of choristers singing, evoking an atmosphere of school days past, and goes on to feature the experiences of the former students returning to Winchester College to attend a reunion lunch.

The alumni interviewed seem largely pleased to be meeting old classmates again and sharing a collective memory far more detailed and rich than their own, recalling teachers who had a positive impact on their learning and development, their struggles with an enduring sense of displacement but also of opportunity, homesickness, the challenges of studying Latin and their attempts to avoid bullying by rising up the pecking order.

They remember too the old school names for what are long gone (and out-dated) facilities, such as the ‘tub room’ for baths and showers where they were instructed to “leave the water for the next boy” and the ‘the galleries’ where up to 30 boys slept in dormitories.

They recall the culture shock of arriving at the College and standing the wrong side of the front door as their parents left for home and they were left to establish themselves in their new school.

One alumni talks about his sense of “feeling like slightly an outsider”, something that has remained with him throughout his life, and explains that one of his reasons for attending the reunion was to see if any of the others “had the same feeling of never quite belonging or not”. (Reminding us that alumni will attend reunions for a myriad of reasons, not always wholly positive.)

Other alumni talk of how attending the College “opened up a new world”, was “quite hard… with no privacy whatsoever” and “completely changed my life”.

Wesley meets his former housemaster, who taught at the College for 37 years, and remembers him with affection as a “precocious, extrovert, probably intelligent” pupil and a “charming and intelligent near-adult”– reminding us of the importance of having former staff present at reunions and other events and of capturing their memories and stories for the archive, as the people who remember the alumni when they were young (perhaps better than they do themselves) and who have valuable insights to share, especially when the alumni’s own parents have since died.

In a poignant part of the programme the alumni talked about how they could not afford to send their own children to the College even if they wanted too, because of the fees (about £30,000 a year, compared to £762 a year in the 1970s). Some talked about how new bursary schemes might make it possible, but they didn’t give the impression that they would be too receptive to requests for donations to the College, however grateful they might be for their own education, given that the ‘old School’ was effectively closed to their own offspring and others like them. One went further, talking about the “divisive nature” of private Schools that were inaccessible to the vast majority of the population.

It was striking to hear Wesley talk about how he finds it “so special always to come to this place and to be hit by what a spectacularly beautiful environment this is on the edge of one of our great medieval cities, 93 listed buildings, and I spent so much time in these buildings learning, singing, playing, studying… so it’s a wonderful thing to come back and soak up that atmosphere and remembering the amazing privilege of coming to this astonishing school”.

Why not try it? If you have a reason to hold a special reunion on a particular theme or topic at your institution you might aim to produce an audio and/or video programme from it and make it available online for your alumni, old parents and staff, and the current community, to listen to in real-time and download. Ensure you have mechanisms in place for collecting the comments and additional stories that are likely to be generated as a result. Good luck, and remember to send us the link!

[BOOK NOW: OMTAC provides training in how audio podcasts and video (using iTunes, YouTube, Vimeo, Real-time streaming on your website etc) can be used to enrich alumni relations etc – book your place(s) now at: http://www.omtac.com/go/alumnirelationstraining]

*** PLEASE COMMENT AND/OR EMAIL US WITH YOUR EXPERIENCE, INSIGHTS AND IDEAS - Do you create audio podcasts and video of alumni events? How do you use it? What are the results? How could audio and video be used more effectively to engage alumni? ***

ABOUT FACE? IS THE END OF FACEBOOK NIGH?

I have noticed in the last four months that less of my friends are posting status updates on Facebook, and those who continue to post appear to be doing so less frequently.

So it wasn’t surprising to read in the Sunday papers that there might be “the first tentative signs that the attractions of Facebook may be peaking”.

But just how tentative are the signs and should we be worried that time spent exploiting the Facebook network for alumni relations might be wasted?

Not very worried at all! Last month 100,000 fewer British users logged on to the site. Not a small number, granted. But at the time of writing there are 29,773,240 UK profiles on Facebook.

Were Facebook scanning the Sunday newspapers over brunch the words of Mark Twain might have been appropriate… “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”.

We know how the British media loves to sensationalise and never more so than with a phenomenon like Facebook which is rarely out of the headlines – whether for it’s own misdemeanors (such as recently introducing facial recognition technology in the UK without notifying users) or the misdemeanors of others (such as the pitiful case of the woman juror jailed for eight months for contacting a defendant via the social networking site).

Reports of Facebook's demise are especially premature given that the network has yet to begin exploiting the earning potential of the data it is gathering from the use of the Like button …and what about the likely impact of the investment it will make after raising up to $100 billion in a stock market floatation, rumoured for Spring 2012? (This will follow the success of the LinkedIn floatation last month, when its IPO price doubled).

Facebook remains one of the most ‘sticky’ web experiences online, and is working hard to stay that way. The news feed on the Facebook home page is constantly updating users on news from their friends, family and favourite Facebook Pages, and Facebook’s photograph storage and sharing functionality, perhaps the most popular feature on Facebook, continues to rule supreme over other photo sharing sites.

As reported on Mashable, a record-breaking 750 million photos were uploaded to Facebook over the 2011 New Year weekend alone. Currently over 6 billion photos are uploaded each month on Facebook and it is estimated that 100 billion photos will have been uploaded to Facebook by mid-Summer (2011), compared to 8 billion on Photobucket, 7 billion on Picasa and 5 billion on Flickr. (To better understand photo usage on Facebook see the helpful graphic at: www.photoweeklyonline.com.) Inevitably 100 billion photographs on Facebook will represent one massive family photo album that most Facebook users will find hard to discard any time soon!

Another important factor in the future popularity of social networking and digital communications is the spectacular rise in smartphone sales, providing a much better user experience online, any time. According to Ofcom, smartphone sales now account for at least 64% of all phones sold in the UK and about 75% of the phones Carphone Warehouse sold over the three months to January 2011 were smartphones.

Given these factors, it was surprising to learn that the ‘Industry Insider’ quoted by the UK's Sunday Times (19 June 2011) as having said “Facebook has shot its bolt” doesn’t work for a completely different industry! Apparently he is ‘a partner at (an) online marketing agency’ but we would be astonished if he and his colleagues are not daily recommending Facebook advertising to their clients, as we are.

Facebook's advertising tools are incredibly powerful - how else can you quickly and inexpensively target people by age, sex, location, interests etc anywhere in the UK, or worldwide?! Not forgetting all the cool stuff Facebook will be launching over the next 2 years to help with more effective campaign management and targeting.

That said, Alex Burmaster (European Internet analyst at Neilsen Online) is right to point out that people are gravitating to smaller sites (but in relatively small numbers): “…real growth potential lies in the niche networks – those based on a particular lifestyle or interest, such as travel, music, wealth or business".

Whatever the pessimistic forecasts of newspaper headlines and carefully selected ‘Industry Insiders’, the fact that a slight drop in user numbers in one month can prompt a full page article and an Editorial comment in the Sunday Times is amazing, and evidence enough of Facebook’s influence. Even if the number of Facebook users in the UK halved this year it would still represent a considerable resource, and that’s not going to happen!

Meantime user numbers are growing rapidly elsewhere, with nearly 12 million new users in May worldwide, bringing the total number of Facebook users close to 700 million. Facebook is growing especially rapidly in developing countries such as Brazil, India, Indonesia and Mexico.

User fatigue is inevitable and our enthusiasm for logging in and commenting online will wax and wane, as I have experienced myself with my circle of friends. But inevitably other factors play a role too, such as the time of year, weather, work commitments, exams, holidays etc.

Journalists writing sensationalist articles with headlines like ‘Dropping Facebook’ will often begin by introducing someone who is "reluctantly" cancelling their profile… but there are always going to be people leaving Facebook and other social networks for any number of reasons, often because they haven’t learned how to set their privacy settings to ensure the kind of user experience they want - a case of user’s blaming the tools not themselves! (And of course the media rarely report the drift back to Facebook by those who left it so publicly.)

Certainly there is an argument for better education of Facebook users in how to adjust their privacy settings and also how to customise the way their Facebook friends access their profile and receive their status updates. If you really don’t want your parents or colleagues reading what you got up to at the weekend then simply customise what they see, rather than abandon Facebook altogether in a desperate attempt to flee the apron strings!

It could be argued that alumni associations could take a role here. If promoting an alumni Facebook Page(s) to alumni it might be helpful (and responsible) to provide some basic guidelines on Facebook privacy etc on a 'social media' webpage which could also promote and explain the alumni association's presence in various social and professional networking sites etc.

Certainly anyone working in alumni relations should ensure they are well versed in how to use Facebook (see our digital alumni relations training seminars!) and Schools, Colleges and Universities could do more to train staff in how to use Facebook appropriately.

As reported in the article “10 Ways Universities Are Engaging Alumni Using Social Media” on Mashable, a number of Institutions are doing this successfully and in turn discovering another way to ‘add value’ for their alumni: “…to help its alumni learn how to use social media tools, MSU’s Alumni Career Services office gives tutorials and presentations about how to use social media for a plethora of purposes. Isbell from MSU said the office has done some 25 presentations, engaging 25,000 people – usually piggybacking at events for alumni groups”.

Facebook will not be joining Friends Reunited, Friendster, Orkut, Bebo, MySpace and other fallen social networks in a downward spiral any time soon. Together with Google, Facebook will continue to reign supreme for years to come, not least because there is no alternative on the horizon, not on the same scale or with the same reach to family and friends etc. (Twitter is a different platform with different applications, and user numbers seem to be stabilising at about 5-6 million in the UK, a sixth of Facebook’s user numbers.)

The LinkedIn professional network remains strong too, with rapid growth from the 20 million user numbers I was first quoting in training seminars a few years ago to over 100 million now.

LinkedIn holds detailed, current, searchable career information on alumni and group functionality too, enabling easy association and networking between alumni. Following the huge success of the LinkedIn Corp IPO on 19 May 2011, with the share price skyrocketing to twice the $45 IPO price, we can expect considerable further investment in the networking platform.

The Xing professional network has also recently introduced improvements to its platform and also has potential for alumni networking.

There is no doubt about the potential for Facebook in alumni relations. Invest the time, effort, energy and resources necessary to exploit Facebook fully and you will be well rewarded now, and you will be better prepared to exploit the next revolution when it does arrive.

Any strategic plan for alumni relations, fundraising and development should have Facebook at its centre, alongside the other key website applications of value, such as Google, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Underpinning all your alumni association's social and professional networking should be its own alumni web presence… as important now as it was 10 years ago …and as important as it will be in 10 years.

You own and control your webpages/website and it should be the foundation for all your online/digital communications activity. Your web presence will still be there when it’s just possible Facebook will have been eclipsed by the next big idea… fluffy bunny avatars in the virtual world 3D Internet anyone?? (Try www.secondlife.com and www.there.com.)

[BOOK NOW: OMTAC provides training in how to fully exploit Facebook, LinkedIn, XING, Twitter and other social and professional networks, micro-blogs, digital channels and platforms, email etc – book your place(s) now at: http://www.omtac.com/go/alumnirelationstraining]

*** PLEASE COMMENT AND/OR EMAIL US WITH YOUR EXPERIENCE, INSIGHTS AND IDEAS - What's your perspective on the use of Facebook and other social and professional networks now and in the future for alumni relations? Did the negative press cause you any concerns or difficulties with sceptical colleagues? ***

SOCIAL MEDIA? STILL NEED CONVINCING?!

If anyone you know (perhaps colleagues in your School, College or University) still need convincing about the Social Media revolution underway, and the need to invest in training and resources to utilise it effectively for engaging your former students (alumni), parents and others... this Social Nomics YouTube video does the job brilliantly! Put it on the intranet!

(With thanks to Sally-Anne Rogers at Manchester Grammar School, UK for bringing the release of this latest version to our attention.)



[CREDIT: Part of the world's most watched Social Media video series; "Social Media Revolution" by Erik Qualman. Based on #1 International Best Selling Book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman. This is a shorter version that includes new social media statistics for 2011. Available at: http://youtu.be/3SuNx0UrnEo]