Hi George,
We have had a concerted effort devoted to collecting employment data on our
alumni for the past 4 or 5 years. We went from having 1% of our alumni
records with employment data to having over 25%. We have found HEP to be
the most reliable source of this information other than from the alumni
themselves.
We ask for verification of employer information in our phonathon outreach,
in every event registration form, surveys, and we have a link in our alumni
newsletter that populates the current info on our alumni and they can click
to update it through our portal system right away.
When all else fails, we have an Administrative Assistant who devotes a good
percentage of her time to researching on LinkedIn and she has metric-based
goals for collecting and entering this info (currently 1,000 new employment
updates/month).
We have found purchasing this information in large quantities via LinkedIn
is not always accurate, mostly because our institution's name is easily
confused with our other system schools in the system of Maryland, and also
we have a high percentage of former students, current students, non-alums
who list our school in their education history. So it's just not as
reliable that these are actually our alums, and it takes longer to vet them
and match them to our data than it's worth. We did purchase Live Alumni a
few years ago and were using that as a separate platform.
The additional struggle is unless you send all of your organization records
with IDs and have the data service append that info as well, it's largely
manual data entry no matter how many results you get back. We take the
approach that we don't enter employers as records in our database unless
they are donors or event attendees, viable prospects, etc. so many of our
alumni are employed at small companies we don't have records for and it's a
matter of matching up the ones who do have records, then processing the
remaining as free text.
All in all, it's worth the effort but it is a lot of human resource to
collect and maintain this data, and it's still missing for a large
percentage of our alumni.
Lastly, we do also input retirees and unemployed alumni, so we can keep
metrics and stats on those who HAVE employment info and we have searched
for vs. those we haven't yet researched.
Hope that helps!
*Rebecca Boughamer*Assistant Vice President, Advancement Services |
University of Maryland University College
3501 University Blvd E | Adelphi, MD 20783
Office: 301-985-7561 | Fax: 301-985-7111 | Mobile: 301-892-1277 |
rebecca.boughamer@umuc.edu <
rboughamer@umuc.edu>
UMUC Advancement Services Intake Form
<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScbK2bxhD80G_TWxn-FFjOYHG3j7uZXPL23BEjEoJA5fKn9_Q/viewform?usp=sf_link>
UMUC IA Data Request Form <http://goo.gl/forms/eKbIEUBqKF> | UMUC IA
Research Request Form <http://goo.gl/forms/dw7EMtguDR>
On Thu, Jan 31, 2019 at 4:22 PM Firican, George <
george.firican@ubc.ca>
wrote:
> Hello Fundsvcs,
>
>
>
> There’s a constant ask from our executives to have more current employment
> data. Our current challenges:
>
> 1. The data needs to be recorded in such a way that answers multiple
> questions:
> - At the individual level, what their current
> employer/position/industry and their employment history is
> - At the organization level, how many of our constituents work
> there, are donors/alumni, etc.
> - At the overall level, how many C level executives you have in
> your database, how many founders, etc.
> 2. Getting good and current data in the first place. Self-reporting
> does not seem to be enough. Note: we’ve purchased some LinkedIn data in the
> past, but the matching rate wasn’t that great (even though the service
> provider said it was)
> 3. Tt tends to be a lot of manual work involved into importing it into
> our BlackbaudCRM - Due to the complexity of the data architecture, the
> multiple data points that need to be recorded, and the quality of data,
> 4. Data privacy limitations we have in British Columbia, Canada.
>
>
>
> Can you please share what your institution is doing to keep up with
> employment data? We heard rumors that Stanford employs students to manually
> research employment data on LinkedIn and this is costing them
> ~$200,000/year.
>
> Do you have any best practices/ guides on how you’re recording this data?
> We try to adhere to a naming standard, have dates when known and link
> business contact data to an employment relationship/node.
>
> Do you just focus on keeping employment data up to date for a particular
> segment of your database?
>
>
>
> Thank you,
>
> George
>
>
>
>
>
> *George Firican*
>
> Director, Data Governance & Business Intelligence | Development and Alumni
> Engagement
>
> The University of British Columbia | David Strangway Building
>
> 500-5950 University Boulevard | Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z3
>
> Office: 604 822 6595 |
george.firican@ubc.ca
>
> Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/ubcalumni>| Twitter
> <https://twitter.com/alumniubc>| YouTube
> <https://www.youtube.com/user/supportubc>| LinkedIn
> <https://www.linkedin.com/edu/the-university-of-british-columbia-10802>
>
>
>
> [image: cid:
image001.png@01D470F7.9562CC20] <https://support.ubc.ca/>
>
> --
>
> *The information contained in this e-mail message and any attachments
> (collectively “message”) is intended only for the personal and confidential
> use of the recipient (or recipients) named above. If the reader of this
> message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that you
> have received this message in error and that any review, use, distribution,
> or copying of this message is strictly prohibited. If you have received
> this message in error, please notify the sender immediately by e-mail, and
> delete the original message.*
>
>
>