Frequently Asked Questions
- How would participating in this Study benefit my organization?
- I already do market/alumni research – Why should I do this?
- How much time and effort will be required of my staff and me?
- What issues are addressed by the questionnaire you send to my alumni?
- We are very careful in sharing information about our alumni. How do you manage confidentiality?
- Why email/internet? Isn’t there a bias by only using email/internet?
- How do I get signed up?
- What do I get?
- Can I send the survey to more than 5,000 individuals?
- How often should I participate?
- What about demographics and market segmentation?
- I want to make sure my results are useful and actionable. How detailed are the results?
- I don’t have enough email addresses – can I still participate?
- What if I want to add some questions?
- What if the survey questions don’t exactly match the way my school provides services?
- What do you do with my results?
- What do you do to ensure that my alumni participate and respond?
- What response rates do you expect?
- How do you determine which alumni to contact?
- How would participating in this Study benefit my organization?
- Learn what issues drive alumni loyalty and financial participation. With multi-level qualitative and quantitative measures, you can design more effective operational strategies and communications.
- Establish a baseline of measures that can be used to identify key trends and track improvement efforts over time.
- Compare and contrast critical alumni relations issues with peer universities or Study norms.
- Cost-effectively apply the “Alumni Partnership Model©.” This program allows your constituency to define their goals and motivators, and provides you with clear information without demanding a significant amount of your staff’s time
- Continue to build your brand/image with clarity of direction. The use of high-quality survey instruments with your logos, taglines, and other important brand elements can build membership participation.
- “Keep your finger on the pulse” of your alumni as their needs and perceptions continue to change at a rapid rate
- I already do market/alumni research – Why should I do this?
- The Vietnam-era graduate in his mid-50’s with an income of $75,000/year?
- The 1995 graduate in her early-30’s with an income of $42,000/year?
- How much time and effort will be required of my staff and me?
- Assign an individual to be the main point of contact
- Participate in conference calls to surface issues for the survey instrument (optional)
- Extract the database of alumni contacts to survey
- Forward logos and colors
- Review and provide final approval for your survey instrument before distribution
- Schedule and participate in meetings to review results
- What issues are addressed by the questionnaire you send to my alumni?
- We are very careful in sharing information about our alumni. How do you manage confidentiality?
- Why email/internet? Isn’t there a bias by only using email/internet?
- How do I get signed up?
- What do I get?
- Your detailed results in an easy-to-understand graphical format
- Spreadsheets of your score and comparable data
- A copy of your survey
- All your verbatim comments from open-ended questions(optional)
- Can I send the survey to more than 5,000 individuals?
- How often should I participate?
- What about demographics and market segmentation?
- I want to make sure my results are useful and actionable. How detailed are the results?
- I don’t have enough email addresses – can I still participate?
- What if I want to add some questions?
- What if the survey questions don’t exactly match the way my school provides services?
- What do you do with my results?
- What do you do to ensure that my alumni participate and respond?
- What response rates do you expect?
- How do you determine which alumni to contact?
The Alumni Attitude Study© measures both qualitative and quantitative information in one affordable program. While you may have certain statistics on hand today, can you accurately predict, among your alumni, who of the following would like to see, for example, more intramural sports events?
Knowing what inspires alumni by era, lifecycle, and income is crucial in today’s customized economy. The AAS supplies descriptive and frequency analysis to let you know what attitudes and perceptions your alumni hold about your school and association.
The AAS uses both performance and importance criteria to isolate the most important issues with the highest member agitation. We are able to identify issues from a one-dimensional view (higher or lower performance) and also factor in the relative levels of importance for those issues. We call this gap between performance and importance alumni “agitation”. “Gap Analysis” identifies areas of high and low performance, and also how important those issues are to your alumni. We can then identify areas in which your institution might be over-investing time/resources (high performance/low importance) and areas for concern (low performance/high importance).
The AAS survey process is designed to minimize your time commitment. You and your staff will be expected to:
The issues covered include various aspects of:
| Loyalty | Programs |
| Overall experience | Giving |
| Alumni experience | |
| Communication |
Although most of the issues covered by the survey instrument are universal and most likely will remain constant, we recognize that important issues change over time. We also know those issues change by demographics, i.e., era, income, lifecycle. The survey is under constant review to ensure its relevance, but remains 85% unchanged since its inception.
The Study treats your alumni information with great care. When you forward your alumni data to us we pledge to keep it strictly confidential and secure. Performance Enhancement Group (PEG) will gladly execute a nondisclosure agreement with you. We do not sell or rent or otherwise share your alumni data in any way with anyone. It is used exclusively for Study purposes (i.e. distribution, analysis).
This method was selected because of the speed of distribution and data collection, the ease of response, its flexibility to provide customized instruments, and the very low cost per response.
As in the application of any research method, there is some potential selection-bias built into the Study based on the distribution method used (in this case email/internet). Recognizing this, we work with alumni associations to make sure that within this population (those that have provided their email address) the recipient database is as diverse as possible. For those that have concerns about selection bias or simply want to see how responses might be different using a mix of methods, we offer the opportunity to send a written survey via mail or a phone survey at an added cost.
A draft copy of an engagement letter will be sent to you via e-mail. If you wish to participate, revise the letter to meet your needs, return it to us, and we will forward you an executable copy of the contract. Simply sign and return it to PEG. Once we receive your signed contract, we post a draft copy of your survey online and assign you a project manager to help facilitate your Study.
Your results are presented to you via conference call. You receive three copies of the presentation and one binder customized for your school that includes:
In order to manage the cost of participating, PEG has limited the email distribution for each school to 5,000 for the basic participation package. However, if you would like to send more, you can expand your distribution to a larger portion of, or even your entire email database (at an additional cost)
The Study is conducted each year. How often you participate depends on the specific circumstances at your institution. Although every other year seems to be the “right” cycle, those facing fundamental or strategic changes may need up to three years before the impact can be measured.
Demographic information is the basis for our market segmentation analyses. Among the key demographics we capture and use in our analysis are:
| Gender | Ethnicity |
| Age | Financial Participation |
| Generation/Era |
You will receive a complete report of your institution’s results and a comparison to the other participants where appropriate. We also dedicate some time to review and discuss your results with you.
Of course. Depending on how many email addresses you have, we could simply send a lower number of emails. We would recommend sending a minimum of 3,000. Assuming 10%-20% of addresses cannot reach their intended destination (which has been our experience); this number should result in at least 400-500 responses. This total is large enough to yield useful, valid analysis. However, it might limit the validity of more detailed analysis by market segment.
An alternative would be to add a paper/mail or phone survey to the email/internet piece.
Our experience is that the questionnaire we use covers most of the critical issues in alumni relations. However, if there are still some additional questions you want to ask, you can add questions unique to your institution for an additional fee.
We will make a reasonable effort to meet your needs as long as it doesn’t change the intent of the question. An acceptable example would be a change in phrase or terminology that has specific meaning to your organization (i.e. changing the term “Greek Life” to “Fraternities/Sororities”).
The specific results for your school are seen only by your organization. The AAS does, however, aggregate them with the results of other participating schools to facilitate industry-wide analysis.
Also, the AAS reserves the right to publish articles, press releases, etc. using the aggregate-level data. Your institution’s individual results, however, will never be mentioned without your specific approval.
The AAS employs several techniques to ensure your alumni are motivated to respond. Most importantly, we believe that alumni have a general desire to provide feedback to their university and to their alumni association. This predisposition and affinity for their alma mater makes our job easier.
We also feel it is important to “brand” the survey with your information. The survey has your logo, your school’s colors; it comes from your alumni association and is “signed” by your executive director.
After survey distribution is complete, we monitor responses and response rates. As needed, we send follow-up “reminder” emails. Typically, we experience a quick boost in response rate in the 1-2 days after the reminder email is sent.
Our experience shows that there is a great desire on the part of alumni to provide feedback to their university and to their alumni association. On various alumni-related projects we have experienced response rates between 10% and 35%, with an average of 18%. This provides a very robust data set from which to draw inferences both at the aggregate and individual school levels.
The school provides the alumni contact information (names, email addresses, demographic information, etc). We provide you the parameters to apply when selecting the set of email addresses. Essentially, we are asking schools to perform a stratified random selection. For example, we ask that you provide a gender split in line with the gender split within your alumni base. If your alumni base is 45% female and 55% male, the set of individuals should be divided in about the same way – of the 5,000 individuals selected, you should have around 2,750 males (55%) and 2,250 females (45%). From your entire list of female alumni, you would randomly select 2,250 individuals.
If you have any other questions that were not covered or not completely answered in this document, please let us know via our web form or contact us at:
Performance Enhancement Group, Ltd. -- The Alumni Attitude Study
Tel: (713) 527-0078
Fax: (713) 524-4324
Toll Free: (866) 471-8600
Email: ttroegel@alumniattitudestudy.org
2034 Lexington
Houston, Texas 77098
Ask for Tom Troegel or Rob Shoss