ALUMNI
LOOKING FOR COURSE & CONTACT INFO ON YOUR
SITE
According
to Campbell Rinker’s AlumniPoll
2002, more than half of alumni who visit an institution’s
web site (59%) are looking for information about academic
courses and programs, far outpacing all other purposes
for visiting your web site. This finding supports the
idea that your alumni are frequently your best prospective
students. The idea of aligning alumni relations and
enrollment management continues to be voiced by DePaul
University’s David Kalsbeek, most recently at
the Academic Impressions conference in Seattle.
Following academic info, the next most frequent reason
for a web site visit is obtaining contact information
for faculty, staff or alumni (42%). This was followed
by those seeking campus news (31%), alumni news (30%)
and alumni event information (30%).
While placing
lower than other areas, many alumni officials will
be glad to know that a quarter of web
site visitors are seeking information about association
membership. Meanwhile, only 15% are seeking sports
news on an institution’s web site, suggesting
that fans tend to obtain their news from other sources.
KEY
TO ALUMNI SATISFACTION IS CURRENT NEWS & EVENT
INFO
Knowing
what people are looking for on your web site is
one thing -- but just as important is identifying
the influences on alumni satisfaction with your
site. This is especially true given the finding
in last month’s issue that satisfaction correlates
positively with the proportion of alumni who visit
your site.
So, we
used a statistical procedure to compare overall
site ratings with the types of information being
sought. The results
suggest that keeping info up to date is the greatest factor in ensuring a satisfying
web site visit (or, more likely, avoiding dissatisfaction).
Campus
news was the most important influence on satisfaction,
followed by information about alumni events and
activities. These time-sensitive items require
much more frequent updating than academic course
info, contact info or membership info, and making
the effort to keep those items updated -- or failing
to do so –- is noticed by alumni.
To see
a chart of results of what alumni are looking for
AND what matters most to them, check out this quadrant
map. A quadrant map is a terrific tool for looking
at two dimensions of information, and can be used
to easily categorize areas of key consideration,
underemphasis and overemphasis, and less prominent “extras.”
Quadrant
Map
METHODOLOGY
NOTES
Influences
on satisfaction were calculated using multiple
regression analysis, with prompted, yes-no survey
responses about reasons for visiting a site as
independent variables and a five-point overall
site rating as the dependent measure. Influences
on the right side of the chart cited above have
statistical significance exceeding 90% confidence.
The data
were drawn from AlumniPoll™ 2002, Campbell
Rinker’s syndicated online survey of more
than 3,000 alumni from four-year and two-year institutions
across the U.S. and Canada. Data were weighted
to match national proportions for public/private
and four-year/two-year enrollment, as reported
by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
LOOK
AT YOUR OWN DATA! IT’S FREE!
The great
thing about web sites is that data about site visits
is automatically captured and tracked, which (in
theory) makes it easily available to you! Ask your
local techie to give you a printout showing page
hits for all visitors in a given time period who
clicked on an alumni-related page. See which pages
(not just alumni pages) received the most hits,
were viewed for the longest average time, and were
the most frequent entry and exit points for visitors.
It will help you to see what your alumni are looking
for in your web site. |
