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Career Services Joining Advancement - Any Experience or Advice?

Tom Klimchak

In an effort to be more efficient our Career Services department has been brought under the umbrella of University Advancement at the private university I work for. I'd love to hear from anyone else who uses Raiser's Edge and/or works with Career Placement/Services information in it.

We've had a few initial meetings and it looks like we can easily do things like:

Track student and alumni appointments with counselors (using Action records with some specific attributes)
Track actual career/job status and placements (Relationships with Actions)
Run Jobs Fairs and Career Seminars (Events)

But I'm also concerned about the amount of work it's going to add four our staff, the complexity of some of the reports they may need and just juggling all the constantly changing contact/relationship info combined with new student, career and internship tracking challenges.

The great thing about RE is that it's flexible enough that it can be used to track almost ANYTHING. The worst thing about RE is that it's flexible enough that it can be used to track almost ANYTHING. ?

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Comments

Katherine Mannion

Yikes! That sounds like a lot of information that doesn't belong in fundraising software. While it CAN be done, SHOULD it be done? Can you look into another product that might be better suited for this purpose? I'm sure you've already thought of that, but I'd be pushing very hard NOT to put this in my RE database. Imagine the data that future fundraisers will have to wade through on these future alumni records.

Daniel Bayer

When I was back in higher ed, we worked very closely with the Career Center, but never put anything in RE unless it could be directly connected to how we would fundraise from someone going forward. We mostly used the Education tab for this (VERY annoying since at the time NXT was brand new and didn't even have those fields to VIEW in Web View yet). We would mostly track what fields the students were interested in and where they got placed for jobs/internships. Connecting them to businesses/alums in certain fields is an important part of Alumni Relations, and the Career Center would often ask us for lists of alums or parents in specific fields. But we would NEVER track appointments with counselors in RE. While I would consider making a Relationship record with an assigned counselor, our Career Center was small enough that the students didn't get one assigned person, so we didn't do that. But appointments should be tracked in their own calendars, NOT in the database. I can't think of a single reason why that would be helpful to future fundraising. If you're fundraising from a parent it MIGHT be helpful, but in such an ancillary way that I don't think it's worth it. That's just me, but if you're concerned about the amount of work for the Advancement staff, that is an easy thing to cut.

I'm happy to get more "in the weeds" about this if you want, but that's an overview on how we worked with the Career Center.

Tom Klimchak

First, thank you both for the responses! My initial gut reaction is to 100% agree with you that this is not really a function of "fundraising" but I'm now of two minds on this...

We have a great Institutional Research and Decision Support department here that has really gotten into the weeds with surveying alumni and former students years after they've graduated and moved on. We've then combined a lot of that data with our alumni giving data and come up with some interesting insights. For us we found that students who received personal help (according to their survey) or who worked with career services or a department with an internship program were MUCH more likely to become donors and more "engaged" alumni in the future. While I can't find many examples of Career Services being wrapped under "Advancement" in schools it sort of makes sense from our standpoint based on our findings: students who received help or who were engaged with the university while students are also more engaged as Alumni...

From our standpoint having some/most of the activity of the career center in RE would be somewhat helpful in a number of ways:

Remind companies of how many of our alumni work/intern there and how valuable we are to the company.
Ask for sponsorships to events based on their engagement with us.
Be able to identify and build career networks within certain companies or fields using our alumni and career services data together.
Probable improve outcomes/professional data and contact info.

We have, generally, found that the more information we have on our alumni the more personalized and more nuanced our outreach can be. We're only starting to leverage some of the extra info we've been collecting for years. While, yes, a lot of this info may be a little extraneous (and probably require a little more work to maintain) the benefits of being able to use some of that career data may outweigh the challenges, especially five to ten years down the line.