There are some phrases we use so often that we barely notice them anymore. In my home life, those include “it’s like the Blackpool illuminations in here”, “were you born in a barn?” and “why is Mermaid Barbie in the cat’s bowl?” In my HE life, “student journey” is definitely one of them.
Spend any time with a university recruitment or marketing team and you’ll hear about journeys everywhere. We map them, analyse them, optimise them and occasionally cover entire walls in post-it notes representing them. From first awareness through enquiry, application, offer and acceptance, we think carefully about what prospective students need from us, when they need it and what we’d ideally like them to do next.
And then, several years later, they graduate. At which point our concept of the journey can become a lot less sophisticated.
I’ve been doing some work recently with a university reviewing its alumni operating model, including conversations with comparator institutions about how they approach alumni engagement. And something struck me: while universities have wholeheartedly embraced the idea of nurturing prospective students through a journey, we don’t always seem to apply the same thinking to our alumni.
Perhaps it’s time we did.
We already know how to do this
Let’s start with recruitment. Few universities would now think it sensible to generate thousands of prospective student leads, put them all into one enormous database and send them broadly the same communications for the next ten years in the hope that some of them eventually apply. We understand that applicants are different. We segment them. We think about their motivations and behaviours. We understand where they are in their decision-making, and design communications and interventions accordingly.
We also understand that the relationship develops over time.
Someone who vaguely wonders whether they might go to university one day needs something very different from someone holding an offer and deciding between you and your nearest competitor. So we identify stages in the journey, understand what matters at each one and try to create the right experience to move people towards the next.
None of this is revolutionary. It’s simply how good student recruitment works. So why does our thinking so often change on the other side of the learning experience?
Graduation isn’t a destination
There can be a tendency to think of graduation as the end of the student journey and the beginning of something entirely different, called alumni engagement. And organisationally, that might make sense. The student record closes, somebody puts on a gown, hopefully remembers to return it, and responsibility passes from one part of the university to another. But from the individual’s point of view, nothing so neat has happened. They are still the same person, and their relationship with their university is still evolving.
The fresh graduate trying to get their first job has a very different relationship with their institution from the alum ten years into their career. The graduate living locally may want something entirely different from the graduate living in Singapore. Someone who loved their university experience will engage differently from someone whose connection was primarily with their course, their sports club, their research supervisor or their group of friends. And those relationships will change again as people move jobs, countries and life stages. In other words, there isn’t really an alumni audience. There are just people, at different stages of a very long journey.
1. Start before they become alumni
If we’re serious about lifelong engagement, graduation is probably much too late to start talking to people about what it means to be part of an alumni community. The strongest alumni relationships should be an extension of the student relationship, not a new one created the day somebody graduates. That means thinking about how students encounter alumni throughout their university experience: through mentoring, careers activity, placements, networking, volunteering, events and the stories we tell about where a degree might take them.
It also means helping students understand that their relationship with the university doesn’t end when their studies do. If the first meaningful interaction somebody has with the alumni team is an email arriving six months after graduation from a part of the university they’ve never heard of, we’ve probably missed a trick.
2. Design the journey
We spend a lot of time designing prospective student journeys. What would happen if we put the same effort into designing an alumni one? What does someone need from their university in their first year after graduation? What about after five years? Twenty? Where are the moments when the university has something genuinely useful to offer – careers support, professional development, networks, facilities, events, expertise or simply connection with people and places that mattered to them? And where are the moments when alumni might want to give something back – their time, expertise, connections, advocacy or, yes, eventually perhaps their money?
The important word there is eventually. And that matters particularly when we think about fundraising. In the early stages of the alumni journey, the balance might quite rightly be weighted towards what the graduate can get from the relationship: careers support, connections, opportunities, a sense of belonging. Over time, as that relationship develops and the value exchange shifts, the get can become a give. That might mean giving time as a mentor, sharing expertise, opening doors for students, or making a financial contribution. The point is that the ask shouldn’t appear from nowhere. Philanthropy is much more likely to feel like a natural part of a long-term relationship if we’ve actually invested in building one first. Good recruitment journeys don’t start by asking someone to submit an application before they know anything about the university. So a good alumni journey shouldn’t be designed around what the institution wants from its alumni before considering what alumni might want from the institution.
Relationships work better when there’s something in them for both sides.
3. Know what you’re trying to achieve
This is where it gets a little harder, because designing a journey means being clear about the destination – or, more accurately in this case, the kind of relationship you’re trying to create along the way. Is alumni engagement about philanthropy? Advocacy? Employability? Recruitment? Reputation? International networks? Industry relationships? Belonging? All of the above? There isn’t necessarily a wrong answer. But there does need to be an answer.
And we perhaps underestimate the advocacy piece in particular. Your alumni should, after all, be some of your greatest advocates. At an individual level, they are out there every day talking to prospective students, parents, employers and their own professional and personal networks. Their recommendation – or otherwise – carries a credibility that even the best university marketing campaign can’t manufacture. Collectively, that becomes even more powerful. Thousands of graduates building careers, doing interesting things and talking positively about where they studied are continually amplifying your brand, often in markets and communities your own marketing activity could never hope to reach. Looked at that way, alumni engagement isn’t separate from student recruitment and marketing at all.
One of the things that becomes apparent when you look closely at alumni operating models is just how many different parts of a university have an interest in alumni. Advancement, careers, marketing, recruitment, faculties, international teams and senior leadership can all have perfectly legitimate reasons for wanting to engage them. Without a shared view of what the university is trying to achieve, though, you risk creating lots of individual activities rather than one coherent relationship. And alumni, unlike university organisational charts, don’t particularly care which team owns which bit.
From student journey to lifelong journey
Universities already possess much of the thinking they need to do this well. We know about segmentation. We know about customer relationship management. We know how to create content for people at different stages of a journey. We know about conversion, engagement and propensity. And we know that meaningful relationships are built through a series of relevant interactions over time rather than one generic email sent to everyone on a database. We just don’t always apply that thinking beyond graduation.
Perhaps, then, we need to stop thinking about the student journey as something that ends when somebody walks across a graduation stage. Because an applicant might spend 18 months deciding whether to join your university. A student might spend three or four years studying there.
But an alum could have a relationship with you for the next 60 years. Maybe that’s the journey we should really be designing.
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