Thursday 18 August 2011

Update of many, many things.

Forgive me father for it has been over one month since my last blog post.

The last month has seen a raft of progress for the SAVE programme at Glasgow which includes...

Meeting with an international company to discuss a mentor programme.
Meeting with Blackbaud to discuss potential solutions within NetCommunity.
Laura & Pete delivered a presentation on internal and external findings relating to potential programme content.
Being allocated a Critical Friend by JISC!
Being very, very close to contacting our students and alumni for their opinions about how the University engages with them and what we can offer them in the future.

So quite a lot to get through then! For the benefit of the hoards reading this blog, "I" or "me" means "Pete".

Meeting with an international company to discuss a mentor programme.

The Careers service has over the past year developed a close working relationship with a contact at a large international company, who along with the Careers service has been keen to engage with Glasgow University alumni employed at the company to become careers mentors. The meeting that we had was incredibly positive as we are now close to being in a position to try and take all the discussions that have taken place forward.
What came out of the meeting that appealed to me, with my rather analytical and systematic working brain, was that we have to satisfy and meet the needs of numerous people here; students, alumni, staff within the company and the Careers department at Glasgow University. We also have tp do this in a way that is interactive and easy to use as well as construct it in a manner that fits in with GU World (online portal for alumni) and NetCommunity (software for GU World)! So plenty of challenges ahead but this links me nicely to....

Meeting with Blackbaud to discuss potential solutions within NetCommunity.

This is the sort of meeting that I enjoy. Where someone tells me about all of the excellent features that are already available that aren't utilised and all the exciting updates that are coming!!! We met with Graham from Blackbaud and he helped us in two ways..

1. He confirmed in many ways that the ideas, methods of recording information and potential online structure of our programme that we have been discussing and developing aren't that far away from being realised and are workable.

2. He was able to offer alternative solutions in areas where we anticipated that we might find challenges in operating.

So all is looking rosy on this front.

Laura & Pete delivered a presentation on internal and external findings relating to potential programme content.

The fruition of over 3 months of work from Laura and over a month of work from Pete culminated in a presentation to the project group last week.

Laura was able to present on her findings from Alumni Volunteer Programme's at other HEI's in the UK and internationally as well as put forward initial recommendations on programme content. Additionally, there was a whole raft of other information discussed after the presentation on the key findings that have really been of excellent use in defining what we are hoping to do, as well as stimulating discussion on what our priorities should be.

I presented on the statistical findings of an internal audit of information held within the University, that has been collated over the years. Some of this was online activity and engagement with other information being recorded from existing relationships with alumni across Development & Alumni, International Recruitment and the Careers Service. One of the main points that came out of this audit was that we already have quite a number of alumni who want to engage with us, but we may have not followed up that interest in the past. These people will most definitely be contacted by us in the near future.

Being allocated a Critical Friend by JISC!

A warm welcome to Professor Peter Kawalek of Manchester Business School who is the Critical Friend for our cluster group.

We look forward to meeting him for the first time at our cluster group meeting which we are hoping to schedule on the 13th September in London. I'm awaiting a response from JISC who have very helpfully offered us use of some of their central London space, as the members of our cluster group have quite a geographical spread.

Being very, very close to contacting our students and alumni for their opinions about how the University engages with them and what we can offer them in the future.

Something that I have been working on is pulling together a questionnaire for both alumni and students that can assist us in setting up our programme.

Our main challenge in contacting them is that they're all away having a lovely time in the sunshine, whilst we're stuck indoors slaving over a programme just for them! Therefore we have had to hold off on sending out questionnaire so that we can get the best possible response from them (Amazon vouchers may also facilitate a greater response).

Our audit also output a large number of alumni (800+) that we can contact with the alumni version of the questionnaire.

There were two things that I kept in mind when compiling the questions.

1. Make sure they're not loaded questions.
2. Make sure the answers are comparable and easily output.

Here's hoping we get lots and lots and lots and lots of reponses.

Thanks for reading!