Alumni are one of the most influential voices in building your brand. And, if you’re in advancement, it’s your job to nurture these voices by engaging your alumni and building relationships, creating a stronger connection to their alma mater. To do this well, it helps to understand their pride and pain points so you can better speak to and with them, celebrate their wins, and ease their grievances.
This post is a deep dive into sentiment among various alumni audiences. Sentiment is categorized automatically by our software and tags all mentions as either positive, neutral, or negative. Analyzing alumni sentiment tells us what alumni enjoy and what they struggle with. It gives more context and depth, and a holistic understanding of your alumni instead of various data points and statistics about their relationship to your campus. This insight enables you to relate to and empathize with the experiences and feelings your alumni go through and offers the opportunity to tailor your campus messages with these experiences in mind.
We analyzed alumni conversation over a three-year timeframe, from July 2016 through June 2019 (see the detailed methodology). When we looked at sentiment over the entire three-year period, it was 18 percent positive, 21 percent negative, and 61 percent neutral. The biggest trend we noticed was that sentiment was consistently most positive in December, May, and June—the typical months for graduation.
Digging deeper into positive sentiment conversation, celebrating graduation was the largest topic—with recognition of the event, nostalgia about past graduations, and acknowledgment of growth experienced both throughout college for upcoming graduates as well as growth that occurred since graduation for those who graduated. But we noticed there was considerable negative sentiment mentioning graduation, too. This conversation varied, but covered everything related to uncertainty about job security, finding a job, and debt and student loans.
We also wanted to better understand how different types of alumni might view certain events and talk about their experiences as graduates. To do this, we broke the entire alumni audience into smaller segments. Our goal was to show that not all alumni celebrate or worry about the same things or process their happiness and concern in the same ways. Recognizing and understanding this can help your team better understand what alumni go through and, in turn, empathize with them to create messaging that resonates.
First up, segmenting alumni by time since they graduated, separated into four different groups.
Recent graduates (graduates from groups 1 and 2) express pride and nostalgia for their alma mater and college experiences; however, they also express anxiety and frustration around feeling their degree didn’t “pay off.” Examples that expressed this feeling include mentions about not finding a career in their field of study, the large amount of debt they amassed, and feeling overwhelmed by adulthood.
Campus Takeaways
Graduates from groups 3 and 4 also express nostalgia, usually with another positive expression such as paying off student loans, feelings about a friend or family member’s upcoming graduation, or appreciation for how far they’ve come since graduation or college in general. Negative sentiment for this group stems from discontent over how long it took to pay off their student loans (most express that they did pay them off, whereas this is a present burden for recent graduates), along with discontent over the changes in the collegiate landscape and random politically charged complaints.
Campus Takeaways
The next data point we examined was the sentiment of mentions from alumni and mentions about alumni from friends and family members. For mentions from alumni, sentiment was 27 percent positive, 32 percent negative, and 41 percent neutral. Mentions from friends and family about alumni was 32 percent positive, 27 percent negative, and 41 percent neutral.
For positive mentions, both audiences greatly celebrated graduation, but there was one subtle difference. Friends and family were likely to only discuss graduation and their pride in the graduate, whereas alumni talking about themselves were more likely to frame graduation in the context of other prideful moments such as securing a job, buying a house, and personal growth they’ve made since graduation.
Negative mentions from alumni surrounded the struggles of feeling as if they don’t make enough money to cover their expenses and debt. Friends and family usually mentioned this by recognizing their loved ones worked hard for their degrees and felt as if they deserved better. With personal mentions, this is often portrayed as doubt—whether or not the degree was worth it and overall frustration surrounding their levels of debt.
Campus Takeaways
The last data point we looked at was sentiment across the country. I found that mentions were relatively similar when separated into geographical regions.
Similar to other segmentations, positive mentions from all groups concentrated on graduation, whereas negative mentions referenced grievances with debt and regret for attending college.
Campus Takeaways
Concurrently, understand that, particularly for newer graduates, debt, loans, and #adulting may present significant financial burdens, but there are other ways for these alumni to feel connected to their alma mater—for example, schedule events for alumni, create social media pages or groups where they can connect, send newsletters that share alumni accomplishments, or establish opportunities for them to give advice to prospective and current students. When your alumni feel understood and heard, they’re more likely to feel and display a stronger sense of connection to your campus.