Latest news

We're pleased to announce that we have recruited to the Alumni Volunteer Coordinator post. This is a new post, funded by the University for the next two years, to take over leadership of the project and develop it further. This means for the first time since April, we will have two full time staff working on the project. Once the recommended candidate officially receives their contract, I'll update the blog with an introduction.

Additionally, the University has also committed to two years of funding for the role of the Database Officer (Alumni Programmes). The first year of funding was of course provided by JISC.

This undertaking by the University indicates their commitment to developing an alumni engagement programme to enhance the employability of our current students and to ensure that we are able to offer relevant and worthwhile engagement opportunities to our alumni. DAO, Careers and RIO will continue to work together as they have done during the course of the project and we hope that our move to College/School setup, will allow us to work closely with key staff to take forward our initiatives and help to develop theirs. The Alumni Relations team in the DAO is currently working on a series of Alumni Engagement strategies for the Colleges, with Alumni Volunteering taking a prominent role.

On Thursday of last week, the Project Team had their long awaited "Project Planning Meeting". This involved all members of the project team. The main aims of the meeting were to;

• Identify any areas where additional clarification/development were needed
• To sign off web content
• Schedule work for each programme element for the next six months

The meeting proved very useful, highlighting areas where work could progress quite quickly (piloting eMentoring to students in the next two weeks) and areas where work is being deferred pending further engagement/development in other areas (face-to-face mentoring). Following the pilot scheme, we have agreed that we will be launching eMentoring to all Glasgow University students at the start of the next academic year. By this point, we will have evaluated, following a focus group with students and an alumni questionnaire, how our systems work, what tweaks (if any) need to be made and what potential resource we need to put in place to support the programme. I would hope that a blog post to discuss this further will be published either at the end of July or the start of August.

Finally, James and I are also very much looking forward to seeing our fellow Cluster group members and Critical Friend, Peter Kawalek on the 11/12th July for the final RM meeting in Manchester. We will be arriving the night before and attending the dinner.