Community college professionals tasked with building alumni engagement face an uphill battle: historically, institutions don't successfully integrate alumni once they've left campus and community college alumni don't engage easily.

But what if they could change that storyline? What if community colleges could do more to make alumni feel like part of the institution and its history, and alumni started responding?

That's the conversation that Lauren Brookey, vice president of external affairs and president of the Tulsa Community College Foundation, started with Jeff Johnson, the Lora and Russ Talbot endowed president and CEO of the Iowa State University Alumni Association (the university's first nonacademic endowed position) at a CASE board dinner last spring.

It's a conversation the two continued by telephone a few months later. CASE writer Julie Bourbon listened in and wrote about the conversation in the September/October issue of Currents.

When they first met, Brookey had recently obtained TCC's most comprehensive list of alumni to date and wasn't sure what to do with it. Johnson, who started his academic career at a community college in Mississippi, had some ideas.

Awards and Rewards

Seek out alumni stories and reward those individuals by telling their stories in alumni publications, through social media, and other publications and communications, Johnson suggested. A reward is recognition, and can be more inclusive than an award, although those are important, too. Ask them to talk about their connection to the institution. "What was your favorite building? Who was your favorite instructor? Where did you have your most important academic experience on campus? What are your best memories?" says Brookey. "Not what degree did you earn and what job do you have, but what meant something to you when you were on our college campus?"

Says Johnson, "People love their institutions. You just have to find a way for them to express it."'

Institutional Affection

Alumni should feel like more than just prospects, and too often, institutions convey to them that that's all they are.

Johnson stresses the importance of "institutional affection." Members and donors are those alumni and friends with institutional affection who put that affection into action. Not every alum is going to be a donor or a member, but they all start out on the journey as nothing more than students. That's what they all have in common.

Read more of their conversation in "Building From Scratch" in the September/October issue of Currents.

This article is from the September/October 2018 issue of the Community College Advancement News.