Symplicity Blog

Using Career Services Manager to Track Alumni Engagement

Thank you to Joseph A. Testani, Associate Director for the Office of Alumni and Career Services at University of Richmond, for contributing this article. 

Last summer, our office (University of Richmond, Office of Alumni and Career Services) transitioned from the Student Development division to the Advancement division and aligned with the Office of Alumni Relations to create the Office of Alumni & Career Services. For the past few years, we have been increasing our emphasis on tracking alumni involvement– as program volunteers, recruiters and users of our services (programming and advising). The merge made those efforts more relevant, and it is now becoming a cornerstone of our office evaluation and assessment efforts. We have used our CSM system in a number of ways to track this data and continue to review the system functionality for opportunities to better capture alumni interaction data. Below are some modules that we have used to track the involvement of alumni with our office.

Program Volunteers

Many alumni want to give back to the institution. Our office provides a way for alumni to volunteer and engage with their alma mater, via career programming and offering opportunities for students and fellow alumni.

Contact Activity Tab: We have explored using the “contacts” section to track when an alumnus hosts an event, participates in an on-campus program, serves on a panel or visits a class. We developed a drop down menu with a list of these programs and recently had the Symplicity engineers add in a date field to track the timing of the volunteer activity. We will now create reports to identify the number of unique alumni participating in our programs.

ProNet Module: We created the UR Career Network as a way for alumni to volunteer to serve as a career advisory resource for students and fellow alumni. We reached out to alumni in targeted industries to invite them to participate and have begun to market the resource to students and also as a supplemental resource to networks such as LinkedIn. We currently have more than 700 alumni volunteering in our network.

Recruiters

Like many campuses, recruiting is a key function of our office, and alumni involvement in this area has taken on even more relevance.

Form Builder: We added new fields to our forms to capture which opportunities are posted by and sourced through alumni. Now when running reports, we can follow up with employers who we know are alumni or have been referred to us by alumni and track how many of our students are obtaining positions through alumni. This allows the University to better track who is engaged and “giving back” to the institution.

Campaign Manager: We have used campaign manager in the area of targeting employers – many of whom are alumni – for special events that we are doing. The module allows us to track who we are inviting and where the status of their attendance is at any given time. The notes and follow-up features are also integral to reviewing a history of interaction with employers, which gives us better context when contacting them for future programs.

Users of Our Services (Programming & Advising)

Our core mission continues to revolve around serving students and alumni in a professional development capacity. We began tracking attendance at all our events by using the kiosk module, and we track all our advising using the counseling module. Our goal is to identify the number of unique users for both services and to identify unique users for our services overall – both alumni and students. This data will aid us in our strategic planning, as well as our efforts to lobby for additional staff and resources to serve these populations. There will most likely be an increase in demand for services among alumni, and we want to be able to address that need.

Efforts to track alumni engagement and involvement in our office can be a laborious effort, but I think we are putting systems and processes in place that will help us in the long run. We are also trying to connect all this data to our central University database (BANNER) in order to provide accurate data to our partners in Advancement and the University overall.

Joseph A. Testani

Associate Director Office of Alumni and Career Services

Career Development Center

University of Richmond

Posted on: Apr 10, 2011 2:09 pm