University PR Offices and Alumni: A Disconnect?
Many university public relations offices seem to have a tin ear when it comes to the potential power of harnessing alumni voices for strategic campaigns – such as legislative advocacy. And it’s a missed opportunity. Monovision in the PR office is not what’s needed at a time when making the case for investing in education is vital to universities, the workforce and the economy.
Typically lobbying state and federal officials is the role of government relations experts, who work in external affairs, public affairs or university relations – and they are pros. With education funding an extraordinary challenge in the current political environment, the job is intense and requires strategic focus on institutional messaging, timing, politics and relationship-building. Given the stakes, it’s not something you unwittingly want to hand over to amateurs. Well-meaning people you can’t control in their well-meaningness may go off script and do more harm than good.
It’s also understood that university lobbyists would automatically call on those in their immediate field of vision – presidents and administrators, students, faculty and staff — who can make an impassioned showing in state capitals. Often alumni are in the mix but not always in focus. While there’s a long tradition of alumni advocacy on behalf of higher education going back to the 19th century, these activities are considerably stronger when they’re part of a comprehensive institutional strategy.
Things are changing, as I’ve chronicled in this new advocacy whitepaper and best practices summary. The opportunity to engage thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of alumni to build support for their institutions is nothing to scoff at in a competitive global marketplace for talent. What’s more, alumni represent what education actually achieves and why the investment is right – in state capitals and local communities they are putting their education to work on behalf of the economy and the quality of life for everyone. In their five-year strategic plans, the University of Tennessee Alumni Association and the University of Minnesota Alumni Association have joined the growing number of alumni organizations making advocacy a priority initiative aligned with institutional goals.
Dozens of other public universities and their alumni associations have joined for visibility in state legislatures through thoughtful, well-designed programs and collaborations between alumni relations and public affairs. As one government relations director told me recently, “we have the strategy and the position papers, the alumni association has direct access to the alumni we need to get involved with us.” Curiously in California, where the University of California faces $500 million-plus in cuts and has organized various advocacy activities, only the University of California-Berkeley – one of 10 campuses in the system — has positioned advocacy prominently on its alumni association website.
Private universities also are promoting advocacy through economic impact studies and other project-based efforts. Through a broad constituency campaign that included alumni, DePaul University recently succeeded in convincing Illinois state legislators to restore funding for a financial aid program that, if lost, would have put college out of reach for a large number of its students. Describing the campaign at the recent annual conference of the Public Relations Society of America’s Counselors to Higher Education section, DePaul vice president Cheryl Procter-Rogers said. “We’re focused on outcomes. That means creating a leadership position, developing a strategy and building collaborative teams.”
Generating enthusiasm and support for the institutions that higher ed’s PR counselors represent is PR at its essence.
This is a great write up of a current topic – thank you Janis. You give a couple of specific examples of “success stories,” but I’m wondering if there is any quantitative assessment of just how successful any (or all combined) advocacy programs have been when it comes to preventing or restoring state budget cuts to higher ed? For all the protests, write ins, marches, etc., the fundamental question hanging out there is: Does it work? If so, to what extent? It feels like the alumni-admissions issue I wrote about the other day on my blog – i.e., a great way to give volunteers something institutionally-related to focus on – but it’s unclear (to me) whether it’s very much help when the bottom line outcomes are assessed.
Andy, thanks for these excellent points. There are several ways to measure this activity through annual operating plans for the alumni association/alumni relations division and its units and individual staff. That’s the process we strongly recommend in our alumni association counsel. Such annual plans (used also to measure performance and accountability) include annual outcomes and metrics for each strategy and tactic under the advocacy bucket. There are several types of outcomes and metrics — engaging more alumni in the university in an area that through market research they have identified as a priority to them, change management activities, or simple counting. For example, a strategy might be to change the association’s organizational structure to support a more integrated advocacy effort across the institution; the outcome/measurement would be successfully creating that structure, building internal relationships and collaborations with other offices and developing a volunteer advisory committee focused on this outcome. Other outcomes and metrics: growing the advocacy network to X, increased communication to alumni about legislative issues, or completion of a financial resource model to support alumni advocacy. These and other steps are part of the nitty-gritty activities over time that form and sustain an effective program. To the larger point of whether all this makes a difference in state capitals, beyond the anecdotal statements of legislators and administrators who were influenced successfully, it is fair to conclude that increased support to an institution is the result of the collective activities of all involved in legislative advocacy, including the alumni office. In many respects, this bottom-line outcome is parallel to any voter campaign — winning or losing. The DePaul University example demonstrates that — winning back a financial aid program for students as the result of a smart strategically driven campaign. Hope this helps!