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!