As more and more organisations have been relocating their teams into the virtual space to deal with COVID-19 in mid-March, we hosted our first global webinar. Zooming in on alumni-led networks, we brought together organisations keen to learn from one another about the ways to engage their former students, beneficiaries and participants. As Ján writes, the discussion showed the benefits of having a community to share experiences and get support from each other, as many people responsible for alumni engagement find themselves working in isolation, not only during the time of COVID-19 pandemic.
Written by Ján Michalko
If you work with volunteers, I bet that at some point in your professional life you found yourself face to face with this challenge: how do I translate their enthusiasm and passion, into action?
Many organisations have at their fingertips contact details of people, who say that they are ready to give back – be it to the scholarship programme or a training scheme that changed their life. You hear many of them say that they want to stay involved; but when the time comes, and you send them that email with a subject line ‘volunteers needed,’ you often find yourself refreshing your inbox, hoping that someone will eventually answer your plea.
Alumni networks are no exception. I certainly am guilty of such behaviour! As a high schooler I received a scholarship, which truly changed my life and for which I have much appreciation. During the first few years after my transformative year abroad, I was there to help with recruiting new students or providing advice for their orientation. However, my volunteerism has waned over the years, and now, I leave the alumni engagement team with empty inboxes.
Organisations around the world have tried and tested different strategies to ensure their alumni continue to be involved in a way that is appropriate to them – be it Zimbabweans with master’s degrees or young Indian women who were trained to run their own businesses – and do not drop off the radar like me. As part of our inHive Global Network initiative, we brought together 20 organisations from seven countries to share their experiences on one such strategy: establishing alumni networks that are led by the alumni themselves.
ALUMNI (CO)-LED NETWORKS
Callum has been heading the six-member alumni team at Frontline for the last six months. Or to be precise, he is part of the Fellowship team, as the former participants of Frontline programmes for social workers are the organisation’s Fellows.
His insights and openness are refreshing, as he admits to the webinar audience of over 30 people that the 1100+ Frontline Fellows co-lead the programme, rather than being in charge solely on their own. And there are very good reasons for that, which stem from the nature of social work in the UK.
Social workers, as Callum explained, are extremely busy, which means that it is unfair to put all the expectations on them. Additionally, much of the Fellows’ interests understandably lie in improving their daily practices. However, there are important contributions that can be made towards changing the systems that underpin the social work sector, and so the Fellowship team has been spearheading other streams of activity, such as running a think tank.
At the same time, social workers experience a lot of hierarchical power and so the Fellowship programme is instead based on relational power.
“We have no power over our network and neither we should have that power. But what we [our team] did focus on, was the relational power. We are forming really close relationships with a lot of our Fellows.”
The co-leadership of the Fellowship is nicely captured in many of the participatory practices that Callum and his team use, in order to make Fellows’ voices heard in a meaningful way, many of which sparked interest in our webinar participants. Building on participatory budgeting used in many local governments, Fellows shape how energies and financial resources are spent.
Having a voice, seeing in real terms that your opinions matter, and ultimately, that there are ways you benefit from being part of the network, helps the alumni engagement and shows the benefit of the alumni-led model.
YOUTH-LED ALUMNI NETWORKS
Pauline has a wealth of experience and expertise that are very different from Callum’s. Pauline is the executive director at Future First Kenya, and as the second keynote speaker of the webinar, she brought the discussion of alumni-led networks into the context of youth engagement in Kenya.
FFK’s team have been working with university students and other young leaders, to equip them to go back to their schools and champion alumni engagement. Some of the skills that FFK impart to the young people are volunteer and data management, while also providing them with mentorship support.
Amongst other achievements of FFK was the creation of the Association of Alumni Communities in Kenya (AACK), which organizes an annual conference for its members and is able to effectively promote change in the country. With 100 member organisations, the difference they were able to make is huge, not least in monetary terms, as they raised more than USD1million.
We learn from Pauline that the government of Kenya has been an engaged partner in these their efforts since 2015, as FFK started to re-purpose alumni groups to help schools. With more than 10,000 public secondary schools in Kenya, the support that the alumni can provide in the education sector is immense!
“We had a cabinet Minister, who saw the role of the alumni, especially in managing public institutions. … He also gave a directive for alumni programming to be part of the critical education agenda. That has helped a lot.”
FUTURE WEBINARS AND FUTURE DEBATES TO TACKLE
Pauline’s experience advising alumni associations meant that she was able to also suggest solutions on alumni management systems, some of which are local, Kenyan-incubated IT programmes, while others are well-known global CRM systems.
Deciding which communication channels and platforms are most appropriate for your alumni, is one of the questions to tackle in the complex web of processes that go into creating an engaged alumni network. But what it actually means to have engaged alumni? What are the percentages of participant an organisation should strive for and what ‘participating’ actually look like?
These were some of the queries that transpired through the webinar, and which suggest to us here at inHive that a stimulating online community of alumni practitioners has a purpose and deserves to be nurtured. We are committed to growing the network, so that people like Callum and Pauline can share their insights, but also to get a sense that they are not alone. We are a community, facing similar struggles, which is a great opportunity to innovate and learn.
If you would like to join our Global Network and future webinars, please contact Prerna Aswani: prerna@inhiveglobal.org