In 2017, the University of British Columbia celebrated its 100th anniversary. For it, the alumni UBC team wanted to showcase the power of its global alumni community: 325,000-plus alumni living in 143 countries around the world. But how could UBC bring those data points to life and make that message resonate? That was the big question, says Steve Kennedy, director of marketing and communications at alumni UBC.

"What we ultimately decided on was the idea of celebrating the global family," he says.

So, alumni UBC set out to create 100,000 connections over the course of the year. Based on feedback from alumni focus groups across Canada, it created a menu of 10 specific ways for alumni to engage. The alumni UBC 100 project is a case study in building community and measuring engagement.

"This milestone was an opportunity for us to create a challenge that would be motivating to alumni, attached to an emotional message: Celebrate this. Be part of this," says Kennedy.

Over the course of the year, from May 4, 2017, to May 3, 2018, alumni UBC 100 brought alumni together in a variety of in-person and online ways—all about "letting our alumni be the star of the show," says Kennedy. It launched a 100 Dinners project, which invited alumni to sign up to host a dinner for fellow graduates in their home or a restaurant; 943 people dug in and participated during the year. At its homecoming, alumni UBC hosted an Alumni Day that drew 1,173 attendees; it sent "We Are One" branded postcards and at events, snapped photos of alumni with the branded signage to build connection. Some 10,000-plus alumni added themselves to alumni UBC's  digital global alumni map, or connected on social media; others visited the Robert H. Lee Alumni Centre on campus, or donated their time as a volunteer, or made gifts.

Together, all of these activities added up to not 100,000 alumni connections but more than 163,000. The project netted alumni UBC a Circle of Excellence Platinum Award for Best Practices in Alumni Relations.

Key to alumni UBC's success: research and planning to determine what alumni engagement actions mattered most, and making sure each was measurable. Every activity—attending a reunion or a lecture, participating in a dinner, adding oneself to the alumni map—had to be trackable, says Kennedy, and there had to be a variety of ways to join in.

"We wanted to give alumni a menu of options, so they could land on something they wanted to do to participate," he says. For 10 years now, alumni UBC has used a point system that tracks individual alumni engagement. The alumni UBC 100 project used data from the metrics UBC was already tracking within the point system—like event attendance—and combined it with other data sources, like social media following.

UBC's quest to forge and tally these connections dovetails with best practices that have emerged from CASE's ongoing work in alumni metrics. According to CASE's Alumni Engagement Metrics Task Force, which was formed in 2016 and released its initial findings in a white paper in August, engagement should be measured across four key dimensions:

• Volunteer engagement: participation in formally defined volunteer roles, such as serving on advisory board membership or being a career mentor;
• Experiential engagement: participation in alumni activities that promote the institution's mission, celebrate its achievements and strengthen its reputation;
• Communication engagement: engaging in interactive, meaningful and informative dialogue (online or in person) with the institution; and
• Philanthropic engagement: making meaningful investments that support an institution's strategic direction.

Research, says Kennedy, is essential to determine which engagement activities to focus on during a big project like this. Leading up to the centennial, the alumni UBC team convened focus groups of alumni across Canada to test ideas. Alumni feedback, along with UBC's brand health survey (which it conducts every six months) helped the alumni team shape the alumni UBC 100.

"We had a really strong underlying premise that was proven in our research; without it, we wouldn't have had the right parameters," he says. "[Research] gives you the quantitative results that you want to validate the impressions you get when you do qualitative stuff."

For UBC, investing in these connections has added up—but this is just the beginning. The project kicked off the university's five-year strategic plan, says Kennedy, that involves broadening and deepening engagement.

This article is from the October 2018 BriefCASE issue.