This is something that we have learned with our project (and there will be a follow up post to discuss this further). In this blog post, I'd like to focus on why we have structured our Alumni Profile form in the way that we have.
A quick bit of background; We are in the process of going out to our alumni to ask them to complete our profile form. Alumni are asked a range of questions relating to;
- The city of Glasgow
- Their course
- University life
- Career experiences/path after Glasgow
Submitted profiles will form part of our Ask our Alumni service, where students can search a bank of profiles based on search criteria of;
- Profession
- Industry
- Country
As you can see from the profile form, we decided as a project team to ask a lot of questions. We did so because we hope to use the information provided not only for the benefit of students, but also to use in university publications and promotional materials both printed and online. It's hoped that the positive messages and experiences of our alumni can assist the university in its domestic and international recruitment efforts. Alumni do not have to answer all of the questions but they are encouraged to do so.
We have deliberately structured the questions to map the journey from undergraduate, to graduation and then life beyond that to ensure that students, regardless of what year group they belong to can take away the information and guidance that is relevant or important to them at that time. What a student determines to be useful infomation when studying in year two can be very much different to a final year student.
As mentioned previously, we are in the process of identifying both domestic and international alumni to complete our profile form to build up a bank of profiles. We will pilot our student mini-site and search functionality with a small group of students and also follow the progress that they make contacting alumni for informal careers advice before full launch of the service.
Thanks for reading and if you have any questions, please do comment!
Pete
To me this seems really promising.
ReplyDeleteHow will you analyse the results that come in, especially those open text boxes?
Hi Peter,
ReplyDeleteThanks for replying!
It will be quite straightforward to measure the results of this, particularly with the pilot group. We are able to meaure click through rates and conversion rates through NetCommunity. Once the profile is submitted, it is slightly clunky on our side in exporting the information into Raiser's Edge (this is a good example of utilising the systems that we have in place at the moment, rather than building something specific and also making the experience better for the user, rather than designing it to make our working processes easier), however, once that information is in there, it's easily exported and reportable.
For example, yesterday we sent out 67 follow-up responses to alumni who attended recent events in Asia.
33 opened the email
12 clicked through to the profile form
4 alumni started to fill out the form
3 alumni completed it
2 alumni provided a LinkedIn url and have become e-Mentors
That gives a overall fulfilment rate of about 12%.
The free text boxes will obviously be more difficult and subjective. There are obviously no 'correct' answers that an alumni can submit, but we obviously have in mind what we might consider a good profile response.
We can however measure what questions are proving more successful in terms of generating responses than others and then look to measure this against feedback from students (asking them which sections they found the most useful information in).