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ALUMNI RELATIONS
Recommend to a Friend?
q YES q NO
“So, Jane, how was your event last night?”
“It was fabulous! A lot of alumni showed up, and everyone seemed to have a great
time. They loved the speaker too.”
Cornell “Great. Congratulations!”
“Thanks! Gotta run. I’ve got three more events next week!”
University Walk the halls of the alumni affairs office at New York’s Cornell University, and this
uses new tool is the type of conversation you’ll overhear a few times each week. We spend millions of
dollars and thousands of staff and volunteer hours to produce more than 1,400 events
to measure around the world each year. That’s one event every six hours.
effectiveness Is it worth it? Do the 40,000 alumni, parents, and friends who attend feel closer
to Cornell after these events? Do they disengage because we didn’t deliver the experi-
of events ence they expected? To find out, we are using a new tool to quantify the quality of
“customer” relationships.
By JENNIFER
MEANINGFUL METRICS
LYNHAM
CUNNINGHAM I put customer in quotes because the early adopters of the tool we use, the Net
Promoter system, are businesses. NPS users believe building long-term relationships
with customers leads to higher and more sustainable profits. The thousands of busi-
nesses that use the tool include major corporations such as American Express,
Apple, General Electric, Home Depot, JetBlue, LEGO, Procter & Gamble, and
Zappos. NPS is both a metric (or score) and an approach to conducting business
that focuses on the quality of customer relations.
Businesses that accept this premise calculate the metric using some form of this
question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend X to a colleague
or friend?” Answers to a second question, “Why did you answer that way?” initiate a
customer feedback loop and help employees identify and fix problems.
In this system, people who answer 9 or 10 are considered Promoters. These are
the organization’s best friends. They’re the people who not only like the product or
36 O C T O B E R 2 0 1 2©2012 BRIAN STAUFFER c/o THEiSPOT.COM C A S E C U R R E N T S 37
service but will sing about it to others. For most alumni engagement, the currency of our industry.
businesses, they account for more than 80 percent When asked about the crossover potential of NPS
of referrals. for nonprofits, Reichheld responded in an email,
People who answer 7 or 8 are called Passives. They “Net Promoter is particularly relevant for nonprofits
liked the experience but not so much that they’re because it offers a practical and systematic process for
willing to risk their social capital for it. Their repur- creating accountability for excellence across the wide
chase and referral rates are as much as 50 percent range of constituents that comprise a nonprofit.”
lower than that of Promoters. To explore how nonprofits are using NPS, Bain
In this system, people who answer 9 or 10 are considered Promoters.
People who answer 0 to 6 are called Detractors. & Company started a branch of its established NPS
They may actively tell people about a bad experience; Loyalty Forum, a semi-annual conference for senior
in fact, 80 percent of negative word-of-mouth reviews executives from several of the companies mentioned
come from this group. earlier and dozens more. The first two of these new
The Net Promoter score is equal to the percentage Social Impact Forums have assembled about 20 non-
of Promoters minus the percentage of Detractors. profit organizations, including Cornell, Dartmouth
College in New Hampshire, Babson College in
ORIGINS OF NPS Massachusetts, DonorsChoose.org, Big Brothers Big
Fred Reichheld, called the “godfather of customer Sisters, City Year, and Ascension Health. Rob Markey,
loyalty” by eBay’s president and CEO—another NPS co-author with Reichheld of the book The Ultimate
advocate—developed Net Promoter in the early 2000s Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in
with his team at Bain & Company, an international a Customer-Driven World, is a driving force behind
consulting firm headquartered in Boston. As the the Social Impact Forum. He stresses that NPS can
founder of the firm’s Loyalty Practice, Reichheld be used to better comprehend and meet the needs of
wanted to know how accurately traditional customer various constituencies, including donors, alumni, and
satisfaction surveys predicted actual customer behavior. service providers.
The team analyzed dozens of satisfaction questions and
found that responses to questions about a customer’s CORNELL’S EXPERIENCE
likelihood to recommend a product or service corre-
For about three years, Cornell has been using NPS
lated most strongly with repurchases, referrals, and
primarily for event and meeting feedback. The prac-
other actions that contribute to a company’s growth.
tice started following conversations with Barbara
But, you may say, we’re not a business! True, in
Talbott, a friend of Cornell and former chief market-
alumni relations for educational institutions we don’t
ing officer for Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts,
headquartered in
Toronto. Our alumni
People who answer 0 to 6 are called Detractors. affairs staff had
already embraced the
idea that delivering
think in terms of customers or profits, but we do “wow” customer service at events would lead to more
aspire to nurture loyalty from alumni as measured in loyal alumni and ultimately more volunteerism and
gifts of time, talent, and treasure. Customer relation- gifts, but we were struggling with how to quantify
ships built on loyalty lead businesses to higher growth that goal and measure it consistently across our pro-
and profitability. They lead our institutions to more gram areas. Talbott pointed us toward NPS. We read
38 O C T O B E R 2 0 1 2ALUMNI RELATIONS
the books, held discussions, and then started incorpo- We’re confident it’s a solid metric. Thousands of
rating the system into our surveys. successful and long-standing organizations, including
We now have a pretty well-oiled system in place Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Southwest Airlines, Logitech,
whereby we send alumni the same five-question sur- and Progressive Insurance, have vetted its validity
vey following all staff-driven events. Typically our and usefulness all the way up through their CEOs.
response rate is about 30 percent, but for special So far, we haven’t heard any compelling arguments
gatherings such as reunion and affinity networking against it.
events it can jump to 50 percent. We haven’t scaled
up to include the 1,100 annual volunteer-driven DATA STORIES
events just yet, but it’s on the table to possibly start We recently analyzed 30 events to see if there were
later this year. any patterns in the feedback among Detractors. The
We have one SurveyMonkey account so we can happiest takeaway is that we have talented program
easily download survey data from across program areas directors and event planners. It turns out that when
into a spreadsheet with formulas for calculating the people are unhappy at events, it’s usually because
Net Promoter score and the number of Promoters, they expected something different, not because the
Passives, and Detractors.
About a week after an event, we
send the spreadsheet, along with People who answer 7 or 8 are called Passives.
suggestions for addressing attendee
feedback, to the program director
responsible for the event. The
spreadsheet also matches respondents’ contact infor- event itself was executed poorly. Reasons for low
mation with their gift officer’s name, so if tracked scores include things such as the recommended park-
prospects respond, we can send their comments ing garage wasn’t close enough, the people an attendee
along to our fundraisers. wanted to meet didn’t show up, or someone didn’t
We have established annual average scores for realize the event had a cash bar. Armed with this type
each program area. If an event’s score comes in way of specific feedback, it’s fairly easy for staff to make
below or above the average, we consider it a yellow improvements.
flag that we should try to fix the problem for next Only about 8 to 10 percent of our survey respon-
time or study what went so well and replicate it. dents are Detractors. However, among all the alumni
Our average score for staff-driven events was 52 per- who have attended an event in the last four years,
cent for fiscal year 2011 and 60 percent for fiscal 25 percent have come to only one. Why aren’t those
year 2012. About 70 percent of respondents are people returning?
Promoters, 22 percent are Passives, and 8 percent We also analyzed Promoters vs. Detractors in
are Detractors. terms of giving and found that donors at every level
Why do we use Net Promotor scores and not are more likely to recommend Cornell events to fel-
another customer-satisfaction metric? There are three low alumni than nondonors. Alas, this is a chicken-
reasons: and-egg scenario: Do they donate because they enjoy
NPS is simple. We don’t need fancy software to events, or as donors, are they prone to view Cornell
implement it or statisticians to interpret it because we events favorably? Does the answer matter?
use a popular web-based survey tool and a spreadsheet Finally, we find that affinity-based events generally
we developed with a few formulas built in. receive higher scores than come-one, come-all events.
It’s consistent. We can compare a career network- Women’s lunches, athletic team reunions, and niche
ing event year to year, and we can meaningfully com- networking events often get scores in the range of
pare it to a completely different kind of program. We 70 to 90 percent. Through the alumni feedback, we
could even compare our events with similar ones at find that it’s not necessarily the programming that
other institutions. generates these scores; rather it’s interaction with the
C A S E C U R R E N T S 39ALUMNI RELATIONS
other alumni, parents, and friends. Conversely, and survey data, then reaching out to Promoters for testi-
somewhat logically, webinars often score in the range monials and information that we can use to attract
of 30 to 55 percent. other like-minded participants,” Thompson says.
WE ARE PROMOTERS OF NPS LESSONS LEARNED
We’ve done several presentations on NPS for peers We’re a couple of years into our NPS journey at
at other institutions, and a few now use it, including Cornell, and the three most important lessons we’ve
Vanderbilt University, Santa Clara University, and learned are these:
Johns Hopkins University. Get buy-in from senior leaders first. Chris
James Stofan, associate vice chancellor of alumni Marshall, associate vice president of alumni affairs, is
relations at Vanderbilt in Tennessee, says his alumni a strong advocate of NPS. He has repeatedly stressed
Net Promoter Percentage of Promoters Percentage of Detractors
Score = (9s and 10s) – (0 through 6s)
association appreciates the consistency of the metric, to staff the importance of sending post-event surveys
which informs decisions about programs to invest in and follow-up. He requests being copied on every
and repeat. In addition, the Vanderbilt Alumni Asso- post-event survey report. He’s also spoken about the
ciation recently started using NPS for board member metric and the feedback loop at board of trustee
exit surveys. Responses will help shape a new initiative meetings and gatherings of advancement profession-
to retain, recommend, and recruit volunteer leaders. als outside Cornell.
Santa Clara University in California started using Without this kind of top-down push to change the
NPS about a year ago with the idea that the feedback thinking from quantity of events to quality of engage-
loop itself could be an engagement tool for volunteers. ment and follow-through, the system would not have
“We were looking for ways to engage a particular launched.
committee of our national alumni board, and around Don’t hype the number. Until you have a bench-
the same time we saw a compelling presentation on mark average for each type of program, it’s not helpful
NPS,” says Kathy Kale, executive director of the to talk too much about the event scores themselves.
alumni association. “We thought ‘What if we gave Instead, emphasize the importance of closing the
the survey results to our board members and let them feedback loop and acting on the comments. As that
contact the responders?’” becomes standard operating procedure, you’ll gather
The tactic worked. “The volunteers derive great more data and the scores will inevitably increase.
satisfaction from knowing they helped turn around Start small. We began the process with a very
Detractors or further engaged Promoters, and of small bang, using it just for events. We’ve given col-
course, the alumni appreciate the outreach,” Kale leagues ample time to understand and embrace it.
says. “Our next step is to analyze how it’s been It took about a year to figure out the mechanics, get
going, which direction to grow it, and which pro- a critical mass of staff using it, and gather enough
cesses we can tweak to make it even more effective compelling data to make an argument for why every-
and useful.” one in the division and across the colleges and
Ridia Anderson and Elena Thompson at Johns units—not just in advancement—should use NPS.
Hopkins in Maryland are using NPS to segment We’re not completely there, but we recently had a
target audiences for affinity-group programs. As they few colleges and units come on board, and last fall a
expand offerings, they are building a website. “To couple development colleagues used NPS for a high-
help us shape the message, we’re analyzing post-event level stewardship event.
40 O C T O B E R 2 0 1 2NEXT UP others, and their participation in alumni activities.
At Bain & Company they talk a lot about the NPS We’ll continue to participate in Bain & Company’s
“journey.” That’s because it really is a mindset as Social Impact Forum, which has been an important
much as it is a process. As your organization starts to learning resource. It’s also been career-changing to
focus on alumni loyalty as a key driver, all kinds of spend quality time with nonprofits in other industries,
possibilities—and challenges—start to emerge. sharing donor and volunteer strategies. The challenges
Now that we’ve cut our teeth on post-event surveys, are very similar, but the ways other organizations
we’re going to do a few more things. First, we want to approach solutions present a learning opportunity.
dig even deeper into the study of loyalty economics— Of course, in keeping with the NPS approach, I
the correlation between Promoters and their dona- have to end with the ultimate question: After reading
tions of talent and money. Second, we want to find this article, how likely are you to recommend to your
out why that 25 percent of alumni who went to an colleagues that you start using NPS? C
event didn’t attend a second. Finally, it’s time to start
talking about broadening the use of NPS beyond Jennifer Lynham Cunningham is the senior director of metrics COPYRIGHT ©2012 BY THE COUNCIL FOR
ADVANCEMENT AND SUPPORT OF EDUCATION;
events. We hope to send an email survey this fall to and marketing in the Office of Alumni Affairs at Cornell University REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE
OCTOBER 2012 ISSUE OF CURRENTS. ALL
all alumni for whom we have an email address. We in New York. She blogs about Cornell data weekly at blogs.cornell. RIGHTS RESERVED.
want to ask questions about their decision to attend edu/fridayta.
Cornell, their likelihood to recommend Cornell to
C A S E C U R R E N T S 41You can also read
