How can a University build a loyal and vibrant alumnus when students can't get to campus?

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James. And this is a podcast for all those business leaders who have a lot of value locked up in their businesses. And they're just looking for ways to communicate that, but to use public relations because it's very effective. And frankly, quite often it can be free. On this episode, I'm going to talk about the problem of higher education and about the need to retain the proposition for universities and organisations that are dedicated to providing information which they can't deliver now due to social distancing. The solution can be engagement and retention through social media platforms, and dedicated ones at that. So we're going to look at the, the desire of organisations to retain a proposition of access to high-quality learning or experiences and to high-quality of information, but also to creating networks in the case of higher education to alumnus. And I'm looking at that today because I do some work with a number of universities in China, including, for example, Queen's University Belfast. I've worked for York and Kent. And at the moment, universities in the UK especially and all over the world are really suffering because they can't all have all their students back. Social distancing is going to be impacting universities, but also all manner of organizations that relied on people being together to create value. And the solution can be in some of these platforms that are built and dedicated that help to take people away from the Facebook and LinkedIn and the sort of generic social media platforms. So the key to long-term engagement, for example, with students or with staff for that matter, is to connect with them on their first week in the campus or in the, in the factory or in the company. So when, when students or members of the team join a new company, there's already a network there. It's already the other people, for example, that have been hired, or the other students that are there, or the faculty. But often the job then of the, of the company owner or the administrator at the university is to connect those people and to provide a platform and an ability for the people across the organization to tap into that platform and to gain value from it by taking part. So social media in the form of, for example, Facebook company pages, it can be a good place to sort of have existing customers or existing students to build a community. But, but the platform itself is too generic. But also, for many people, there are issues of the distraction and of the lack of confidentiality, and perhaps above all, the complete inability to brand it. As we all know, any business that we build on Facebook or LinkedIn or Instagram or Google, we are simply tenants. We're only renting the space. We don't own it. So it's much more prudent to build out a community on one of these platforms, these software platforms that I'm going to talk about today, where the conversations and the experiences and the content all reside within the control of the brand owner. Now, if we take a look at universities for one example, because universities in the UK and America, in fact all over the world— Singapore, Australia— universities are frankly quite big business. And they're big business not only, you know, for now, but into the future, because they underwrite the well-being of societies. As we know, Many views about Silicon Valley are that it's it's the center of innovation, not so much for the companies, but due to the universities that create all these great learning opportunities and connections for people. So what we found, of course, now is that as people are writing about and talking about on the radio, university fees are coming under pressure. Because as we found in many countries, for example in America, where some universities then are being mandated to not hold classes in person, if all the training is going online, then one of the essential elements of the value proposition for the university is gone. Now, for example, my My niece has just won a place to Cambridge University in the UK. We're very proud of of that. Obviously, she's worked very very hard, and she's looking forward to going up to Cambridge and and still is. But now they may be taking all of their courses online and not meeting their tutors, and not sitting in their learning tutor groups with the people, their cohort, who they're going to learn from, but who are also going to become, by and large, their partners in life. The next 3 to 4 years of studying together will form bonds that those of us who have been to university, we, we keep in touch with those bonds because those become our social networks, but also quite often our professional networks. So universities now have a challenge, as indeed do, for example, all those secondary education and language institutions, for example. The question will be how to continue to add value when the infrastructure that was the value as much as the content is no longer available. The answer could be a couple of platforms that I've been looking at as a prelude to a conversation I'm going to be having with a former client who is hopefully going to come back and talk to us about helping them market their university. One solution I found is called Hivebright. Now Hivebright—that's H I V E B R I T E—has an alumni management portal, and their their proposition is that they can release the potential of the community. It was founded in Paris and in 2015, and has also a New York office now, and is funded. And it has a number of features which I thought really make a lot of sense, because what people are looking to do with an alumnus, of course, is to create a distinct entity. We don't want really just to be a general group on, for example, Facebook. If you think about how proud universities are and how proud people like my niece will be when they finished university at Cambridge, some degree of exclusivity is part of the value of the network and the alumnus. So if we look at, for example, the Hivebright, it has a number of features. One is the ability to build a full, a full database, to reach out to all the students and to get them connected at the outset and make them all part of the database. Now, whilst people are at university, they're able then to connect with people that have been to the university before and find Alumnus not only for the college, but also by course and by location. They're creating connectivity to existing staff and existing students, but also to those students that are looking for work and those alumnus that have got jobs to offer. So they have a jobs board as well. They have a business and projects. Area so that people that are looking at starting businesses can find fellow entrepreneurs and collaborators, or people looking to start projects can find other people with common interests no matter where they are around the world. It has a full content management system and an RSS feed for third-party content. Also, this stands for Really Simple Syndication. Now what it also does is, I think, quite interesting. It's allowing the direct marketing from the administrator to members, but it's also allowing alumnus to create their own alumnus groups, which could be by geography or by course, for example. So really, they're creating an extension of what would happen in the offline world, but all within the community that is governed and hosted by the university. So instead of this slightly random finding people on Facebook or LinkedIn or, or Twitter, everybody that has been through the college can be part of the system and remain part of the system throughout their student life. It's offering ticketing so that people can arrange events and take payments. It's allowing people to send invitations, to use the mobile app, for example, and also to have social network integration to promote those events through through the broader channels like Facebook and LinkedIn. So the, the idea of communication as a higher education establishment, the reason I'm interested in this is because public relations for a university has to try and identify how a university can be special. How does it differentiate in a world where everybody is looking at online learning from companies and courses like Coursera and Udemy. So what we're looking at is joining tribes when we're going to universities more and more. So this idea that a platform like Hivebright can create a community throughout the lifetime of students fulfills part of that brief. They also allow membership programs, which is the other part of it that universities, especially in America— and I went to Manchester University, and that's now reaching out more aggressively as well— getting alumnus to donate funds. And Hivebright allows people to administer membership and alumnus programs. And apparently, uh, one statistic I found via a group called Blackboard shows that 83% of millennials gave a gift to a university in 2012, up from 75% in 2011. In other words, millennials are a generous group. They're donating back to their alma mater. So companies and platforms like Hivebright are creating not only communities but revenue streams for the university to engage with people for a lifetime. Now they're offering, uh, some solutions, and their solutions compete of course with others. Another service is one called Tribe, and tribe.so it is, um, says on its own website that it's a good alternative to Bright Hive, but it's not as good at the alumni management as Hivebright, possibly due to some of the custom modules like the student-led modules or the memberships, for example. Uh, Tribe says it'll give your brand a social dimension and includes features like gamification so that people that take part are rewarded for their contribution. In terms of pricing, uh, Tribe claims to offer a free plan for 500 members and then has a premium membership plan for $249 for up to 500 members on that. Um, and the Hivebright pricing, which isn't, uh, on the website but I found, is about $500 per month for a basic plan. Now Capterra has, uh, both of these side by side and ranks Hivebright at 4.6, and users on Capterra have ranked Tribe 4.7, which frankly for me is close enough to be just, uh, uh, differences of opinion. There are other tools that can be used with different levels of sophistication and integration if you're looking at creating a product or a community. There are others like Mighty Networks, which I've used. There's another one called Honeycomb, and these then are offering again free basic, uh, platforms. Or for example, Honeycomb has a launch fee and then a price of about $300 per month depending on the number of users. So the key point really is that communications now can be really managed within communities or tribes, as Gladwell obviously coined this term of really marketing to tribes. And a university alumnus really is a tribe. It's a group of people who decided to attend a particular institution in the same way that people that joined a particular company. I know that people that have joined IBM, for example, or Microsoft, or some of these big brands have a real affinity and a real loyalty to that company. So one way to start to ensure that the company has a community is to work with a dedicated platform, which is not, not a platform for workflow. It's not a Slack or an Asana. It's not a, it's not a tool, uh, for productivity, but it is one for community. So the, the idea here that public relations would involve 3 audience groups is one that in our Speak PR program I, I I like to talk to. And what we like to think about is the 3 audiences being the internal, the partners, and the external. Obviously, the community is the internal. And the reason it's important to have a platform is because they will have very specific and sometimes private communication needs. But also, a key part of a community is to foster communication within the community. Not top-down, but from person to person. And a platform like Hivebright allows that to happen. Now, in the case of students, for example, as we know, the best ambassador for a university is a former student. So getting existing students to sign up to a platform like Hivebright, for example, or Tribe at the beginning of their experience is key because it's hard to catch them once they've left and started looking for work. And from a public relations point of view, if a university is starting to create a platform which enables the community to exist regardless of whether the students are going in and out of the building, regardless of whether they're meeting their cohort directly or not, or seeing, for example, the lecturer in person, the community bonds that can be created through social can also be very powerful. As we know, people are doing that through conventional mass generic white label platforms like Facebook, but they can also now do them through these dedicated community marketing portals as well. So there are a few key learnings that I've seen, and one mistake being made is not identifying the institution's needs. So let's look at that the other way. The first tip is to identify your institution's needs before deciding which platform, because as we've seen, the difference between Hive, Bright, and Tribe, for example, is going to be in some of the modules and the functionality. Now, setting measurements is the second point. How are you going to measure the performance and the activity of this community and individual members within it. The third is to ensure that you understand the value that there is within this community, in this network, for the people within it. How to take them away from traditional Facebook, LinkedIn, and get them to take a part, play a part in this particular closed community. Then to ensure there is still a human touch. Although some of these platforms are using AI, for example, to drive connectivity and amplification of content, it still needs to be like any community, one that has rules and guidance and facilitation by people. The next, number 5, is that a one-size-fits-all approach to content is not going to work. Different personas, different avatars will have different needs. A first-year student and a final-year student will have different requirements. A new member of staff in one facility will have different requirements to an established member of staff in another facility, for example. And finally, the key is to make sure that the platform is user-friendly. Now, these platforms that I've mentioned today already do everything that you might want them to do and more, quite probably. So building a platform is no longer required. Specifying and engaging and then using that platform to put in there the, the relevant content and make it engaging is going to be the job at hand. And that's why I mentioned it as a public relations function. Because public relations talks to internal and partners and external audiences. The internal audience really can be seen as a community. It has a certain kind of message that it needs. That message needs to be dynamic, and it needs to then be aligned with what the external audience are hearing, because the best possible ambassadors For your university or your business will be your current community and the people within that community. So I hope that this, this podcast gives you—