Some photos - Service Design and other tools

Persona templates - courtesy of WeAreSnook

These are twelve of out persona templates, developed by James, Pete and Laura. We decided to defer utilising these until the 100% signed off alumni facing website has been agreed. The site is ready, sitting in the background, waiting to be launched, however as a project team, we have decided to review each service that we are offering and more than likely, stagger the 'launch' of each section. This will require a little tweaking on my part, which will be more of an edit, than a re-design.

Initial project planning exercise - plenty of post-it notes

Possibly not the greatest photograph in the world, but this represents 6 A3 sheets of work compiled by Pete and Laura at the project planning stage of our work. By this point, Laura has been researching examples of volunteering scheme across the country and presented these to the project team. We were now tasked with recommending which programme elements should be implemented. As a fairly ambitious programme, we quickly realised that we needed to see the 'bigger picture' but all together and this was the easiest way to do it.

 

Visual Understanding Maps (.vue). This was the first time that we'd used this software. Again, this, like the picture above, relates to initial project planning.

It's almost slightly embarrassing to look at how primitive and complicated this mind map is. As mentioned in the caption, this was the first time that we had used this software and it's a replication of the picture above. It's actually quite useful to look back and view this document to see how far we have come in streamlining what we offer, how we recruit and how we steward.

Some more Alumni Profile stats.

• 35% of those who have submitted an Alumni Profile have agreed to become eMentors.
• 65% of respondents are male.
• 35% of respondents are female.
• The average age of our respondents is 39.4 years of age.
• The youngest respondent is 23 years of age.
• The eldest respondent is 78 years of age.

•  Of the respondents;
• 31.58% come from the 20-29 age bracket
• 26.32% come from the 30-39 age bracket
• 26.33% come from the 40-49 age bracket
• 7.89% come from the 50-59 age bracket
• 2.63% come from the 60-69 age bracket
• 5.26% come from the 70-79 age bracket

• 65% of respondents are based in the UK
• 35% of respondents are based overseas (mostly Asia)

Recruitment work is still ongoing!

Stats - Alumni Profiles

Just a quick update...

We're in the process of recruiting alumni to submit an Alumni Profile and also to become eMentors.

We sent out 254 email invitations to UK alumni with 23 completed responses. Of the 23, 13 have agreed to become eMentors (56%). Whilst a response rate of 9% (for completed responses) may seem low, considering that of the 254 emails sent out, only 131 were opened (51%). Therefore of the opened invitations, our response rate increases to 18%.

We know it's quite easy to manipulate stats in our favour or to put a positive spin on things, but these response rates aren't too bad considering we are just recruiting for a pilot scheme and that this is the first time any of our alumni will have heard about what we are trying to achieve at Glasgow. It's particularly pleasing to see that the eMentoring aspect of the programme is proving popular.

What we have learnt just in the week since we have started recruitment is that it does take a lot of resource to administer the editing and recording of the profiles. Additionally, the profile form and our CRM are not integrated, so we're moving quite a lot of information around. Finally, the responses will no doubt trigger debate on the questions that we are asking, the responses that we are getting and how they are received by the students. For example, we can see that after the pilot, there may be a need to actually ask respondents to input their profession/sector/industry rather than ask them to log into our alumni portal to do so. This is one of the down-sides to not having integrated systems. Alternatively, it could push us to investigate further the capabilities of Raiser's Edge/BBNC once we upgrade our systems (now pushed back until June/July at the earliest.)

We also recruited overseas based alumni following on from our events in SE Asia. We don't anticipate that these alumni will be utilised as much as our UK based during the pilot phase, but will return with similar stats and blog about them in the future.

[EDIT] - We have 37 active profiles overall!