To affinity and beyond
Enough was enough. The combination of the election season and the global pandemic pushed me to a breaking point. As if professional and domestic responsibilities aren’t stressful enough, the relentless hot-takes flooding my social media newsfeeds were threatening to vaporize any hope for maintaining good mental health. So began the purge. Over a one month period I said goodbye to over 500 Facebook “friendships.” Deciding to shed Zuckerberg weight in the new year is not a unique resolution, but it’s not typically applied to how we manage online communities on behalf of our organizations. In that sense, we strive for giant followings, but for those hoping to engage with a constituency in the digital universe, where we have historically competed in the vast, but crowded waters of all social media, offering smaller, affinity-based communities might just be what the doctorate ordered.
As we become an increasingly digital society, our networks have expanded at a rapid rate and now some of us have shifted from “it’s cool to have my life open to the whole world” to “I think it’s time to remove the noise.” In a world where (using my movie trailer voice) productive/civil social media engagement is hard to come by, affinity-based communities could become more popular. Civic organizations go way back and connected a group of people based on their mutual interest in caring for their city/town. For colleges and universities, we’ve traditionally organized our alumni by class, college, and geography. We create reunions for the class, communication preferences based on college, and organize local “club” events in cities across the country. This has been a successful model, but we can’t ignore that everything about the college experience, from degree to on campus clubs/organizations, has become more specialized.
About two years ago I was scrolling through higher ed twitter hashtags and came across a video shared by EverTrue (@Evertrue) that, as luck would have it, featured a Cornell alumnus speaking about how his alma mater engages him. His summary boiled down to one sentence that has stayed with me to this day: “don’t engage me based on who I was, engage me for who I am now.” We lean heavily on nostalgia for engagement and while that certainly has its place, there is tremendous opportunity to be of service to alumni by offering them a place to reap the benefits of their university affinity. As I once heard at one of my first industry conferences “if you don’t make the diploma a membership card, it will be viewed as a receipt.” We’ve created facebook groups/pages and LinkedIn groups, but those places fall into the previously identified category of large, crowded, and increasingly impersonal. Meanwhile, organizing affinity-based events provides its own challenges with regards to scheduling and cost.
Over the past decade, former Cornell athletes have played an increasingly active role in organizing professional networking opportunities for current student-athletes. In terms of networking and mentorship, universities have traditionally organized this as a relationship between student and alumnus. However, we know alumni “want to be engaged based on who they are” and we also know people job hop more now than ever before. So it made sense to us to create a space where both current student-athletes and alumni could come together in a private space, and offer their professional expertise to future graduates and fellow alumni. Enter: Brightcrowd
It was around this time an industry colleague introduced me to Brightcrowd, a company specializing in digital class books for reunion years. After taking a closer look, it looked like the perfect tool for uniting both alumni and current student athletes of a specific sports program. Even better, it was founded by a Cornellian, T.J. Duane ’99. One of the most appealing aspects was the login simplicity and design of the product. Brightcrowd has done extensive research to understand how to offer alumni enough where it’s worth joining the book, while not asking so much that you scare them off. No one wants another login to create or profile to maintain. This is not a social network and it doesn’t require another username and password. We started with four books in the Fall and have doubled that since. Above is the header for our rowing book, with a heat map of the book members below.
Out of respect for the privacy of the community, I won’t show their faces or pages. However, I can tell you since we launched the rowing book this past fall, nearly 700 people have created pages. In the most recent week, 100 people have come back to the book where they’ve averaged 14 unique page views per session. Weekly automated emails from the book alert current members who recently joined, enticing them to go back and visit the new pages. Book admins can also send messages to everyone in the book. We’re planning on utilizing this tool to post internships and job openings. Open and click rates on these emails far out perform other communications coming out of our office. Book members can easily search for occupations and/or industries and we can see how many people are using the contact buttons to connect with one another. Each person can determine how many contact methods they’ll provide (email, phone, address, social media, etc). In this way we’ve also helped alleviate the bottleneck often seen in understaffed career services offices.
While many products try to capitalize on all available tech at our disposal, Brightcrowd books inspire community by taking a step back in time to when networks were closed. The days when Facebook only allowed you to connect with people at your school. We have to avoid the temptation to offer everything possible, because it most likely makes adoption impossible. We want to create an escape from the noise, not be a contributor to it. Less than five minutes are required to complete a Brightcrowd page. The reconnecting with an affinity group is attractive, but the interface has to be simple if we’re to expect members to share life and career information that isn’t voluntarily sent to alma mater or even reflected on LinkedIn. Brightcrowd checks that box as well.
While we’re still in the early phase of maximizing Brightcrowd, the early results are encouraging and we’re eager to further strategize all the ways we can utilize our books to not only increase our own engagement, but provide a valuable service for our students and alumni. They’ve earned the membership card, now it’s on us to deliver the benefits.
(this was originally written in February 2021)
