TNT7: What's in It for Me? Progressive Personalization for Alumni-oriented Sites

Mark Heiman:  Can you hear me back there?  Yes, all right.  I like to wonder so those of you behind the columnists, if I'm eclipsed for too long, just make a noise and I'll keep moving.  So thank you all for coming out this morning early.  I don’t want to be here either, but I hope before we're done that you'll be saying, who is this guy and why did they let him in your computer?

My name is Mark Heiman and I am the senior web application developer at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.  That title doesn't actually require me to be old but I am contractually obligated to keep this beard.  If I were to shave it off, I would become the junior web application developer but we already have one of those so that's awkward.  And I'm already rambling we're only 30 seconds in.  Backchannel here we come, okay.

Carleton College is one of the nation's top liberal arts colleges.  We have about 2,000 students huddled for warmth out on the beautiful Minnesota prairie but it's not the students that I'm here to talk with you about today.  We're here to talk about that beast that rolls out of our campuses every year to the tune of pomp and circumstance, the alum.

Now, how many of you are from schools that produce alumni?  Okay, how many are from schools that don’t produce alumni?  We should talk; you may be doing it wrong.  So why are we talking alumni?  That's probably because Brian and Michelle really like me in this track to make the other presenters look sane, but it's mainly because we're doing really badly by our alums.  And when I say we, I mean Carleton College and I also mean higher ed as a whole, particularly when we think about who it is that writes the checks that pay for a lot of our paychecks, particularly when compared to the web services that we offer for prospective students and for students.

Why is that?  Well, honestly, it's because it's really hard.  If you think for instance about prospects, prospects are tricky.  Here are some prospects.  All of our prospects are stars, but they really have one goal, to figure out the one true school for them so really, all you have to do is woo them and the closer they get, the narrower their needs become.  You may have seen in other presentations this notion of an admissions funnel.  There's the admissions funnel.  So they're coming in, they're divergent, but they come together and they all get pointed in the same direction eventually.

And students are even easier; they have really discrete needs, and we know who they are, and they spend a lot of time connected to our networks and so we can tailor their experiences really tightly.  So you may have seen this admissions funnel before but have you ever thought about the fact that your alumni are in the anti-funnel?

As soon as they cross that stage gripping their diploma, suddenly they're no longer lined up pointed in the same direction.  They're headed in all kinds of directions and we have no idea where they're going to end up.  So unlike prospects, they're not converging on anything.  In fact, they're diverging, they're scattering.  And if the gravitational mass of their college experience isn't sufficient to counteract their escape velocity, you might never see them again.

And if they do come back, they'll probably come back to your website.  But when they do that, how do we know what they're looking for?  Are they looking for a lost roommate?  Are they hoping to hang out with other alums?  Are they wondering when the homecoming game is?  Are they coming to try to give us money?  Are they looking for a job or are they just pining after college beer?  Are the answers to those questions going to be the same if they're a recent grad or someone in mid career or someone who's single or someone who's married, someone who's old, someone who's young?  How do we know who they are anyway if they just type the name of the school into Google and clicked on that alumni link that all of us have on our homepage?

So how in the world do we serve that kind of population from an institutional website?  It's really hard.  That's part of the reason I think that a lot of alumni websites are really bad.  So we look at all the different possible permutations of all the different kinds of alums with all of their different kinds of interests and all kinds of different places, looking for who knows what from our site.  And an actual reaction is just to throw up your hands and post the phone number of the alumni office and call it a day.  That is not actually our 800 number.  It's not quite that bad but it really feels close sometimes.

So what do we do?  Before I go a step further, let me just say this.  You need to engage your alums with social media.  There's no maybe about that.  You need to be there.  And I'm happy to talk about what we're doing at Carleton in that realm later on, but I'm up here today in the content track and not downstairs in the social media track where they have a really cool screen because social media is necessary but not sufficient.  So let me say that again so you can tweet it.  Social media is necessary but not sufficient.  You wouldn't consider outsourcing your admissions or your student websites to a social media solution, and you shouldn't do it for your alums, though a lot of schools seem to be trying to do that as we'll see later.

So you need social media but I think you also have to have something on your institutional website.  So what else do you need?  How do you build a website for folks who have been through the anti-funnel?  It's a really strange concept.

Let's start here.  What do you need to know about an alumni visitor in order to give them what they need?  I think there two things.  Who are you, and what do you want?  That seems simple enough, except we don't know who they are and we don't know what they want.  And even if we knew the answer; if we knew the answer to the first, it would probably affect the response that we gave to the second and vice versa but we don't know either.  So let's take them in order.

First, who are you?  Let's go back to our funnels for a minute.  It becomes clear why this is a problem.  With our prospects, out here we have no idea who they are but actually we do know something about them.  They're probably all high school students and they're looking to go to college, and that tells us a whole lot right there.  And the farther they get down into the funnel, the more we know about them and somewhere in here we can actually give them accounts to login and come to our site and become part of the application process.  At that point, we know everything about them and we can really give them a great personalized experience.  Our students, again, we know who they are and we can require them to login through things.  And if we make it really easy to login and stay logged in, then they'll probably just hang out on our network and we'll know who they are at all times and we can give them a great personalized experience.

And then we get to the anti-funnel.  Now, we can let our recent grads keep their student accounts for a while and some of them might continue to login occasionally, but the attrition rate is really awful.  We got a fabulous site.  This is a chart showing the percentage of Carleton grads who login to our website at least once in the last year.  So going back five years, we're pretty good.  We're around 50 percent here.  It kind of drops off.  We have a few spikes here.  These spikes are reunion years so folks who had some incentive to come back and look at some stuff.  There's a lot of white space on that chart.  You may be saying that's really great, I wish we had participation rates like that.  It's okay.  It's pretty good until you see this.

This is the percentage of folks who gave money to Carleton in the same time period.  So what we can see is we've got about a 50-percent engagement rate and that's something you can say Carleton is really good at that, at getting out the money, but it tells us that there's a whole lot of people here who are engaged enough and want to be connected to Carleton enough to give money.  That's a pretty high threshold but they're not allowed in.  What this chart tells me then is that there is no correlation between level of engagement with the college and willingness to actually login to get content.

And I'm pretty sure these numbers for the first five years that represents recent alums who really need to get things like transcripts sent to grad schools and employers so they have some real motivation to get at some of that content, but once they're out of that track, they just don’t care.

So why am I showing you this?  Because what it tells me is that the most reliable method we have for determining who somebody is when they visit our website requiring them to login either isn't working or isn't relevant for the vast majority of our alumni population, alums who are engaged enough to give us money.  And not only that but the vast majority of the visitors to our site as a whole aren't even going to login anyway, so this doesn't even apply to them.  We did a survey a little while ago asking our current alums how frequently they come to Carleton's website.

So the takeaway is that 80 percent of them reported that they actually come to our site at least once a year and quite a few of them visit more frequently than once a year, but the takeaway is we've only got 20 percent who say they never come.  We think back to that other chart where our login rates were down about 10 percent so there's a huge gap there.

Let me float a theory for you.  The number one thing you can do to reduce the usefulness of your alumni content is to put it behind a login.  Yes?  In the last few weeks, I did a very unscientific sample.  I went to the alumni sites for our competitor schools or the ones that with Carleton are in the top 10 rankings for the U.S. News Report.  I'm not going to name their names.  You can go out and look them up.  So I clicked around, I went to their sites, I went to the alumni sections, I looked at what they were offering.  On every site within a click or two, I was confronted with a page who's primary content was a login box.  And poking around a little more, it became clear that every single one of those sites, every one of those schools was using some kind of prepackaged alumni community.

The richness of the content outside of the wall of that community varied from school to school, but it was pretty clear that all the good stuff was locked away.  At least it looked like there might be good stuff there.  I mean who can tell?  The login prompt effectively brings browsing to a halt and unless you're part of that really small percentage of folks who's willing to go to the trouble of logging in, maybe you remember your password, if you don’t, there's probably some byzantine process for figuring out what your password is and how to get in and you have to go through and you're just not going to do it.  We have to be honest with ourselves, we're not Facebook.  We don’t promise rich enough content that somebody is going to go through all that fuss to get at something unless they really have a distinct need like I need to get my transcript to send to my grad school.

So no one is going to jump through hoops and login to get content unless there's no other way to get at it.  But wait, all of our alumni content is private, confidential; it needs to be protected.  Sure, it does, but let's think about what that means.  What is it that needs protecting?  This may vary from institution to institution but this is kind of what we think about it.  Contact information, that's an obvious one; names, address, phone numbers, email, that kind of stuff that the alums have given us, it's in our database.  They haven't told us we can give it out.  That's private; that's confidential stuff; we shouldn't show it to people unless we know who they are.

Academic records, that's another obvious one.  Only the people who's academic record it is should actually be able to see that stuff.  Membership in some interest groups maybe.  For instance, we've got an LGBT alumni group and the members of that don’t necessarily want their identities published on our website.  Some conversations between alums are private and confidential if we have created the expectation that they're having a conversation in a private space.  Is there anything else?  I don't know.  We can talk about that.

Well, let's ask in another way.  What doesn't need to be so closely guarded?  I'm not suggesting that we just post this information in a big list for people to scoop up.  I'm trying to think about what information can we make some use of without having to wall it off from the world.  So some of these fall under what I think of as the phone test.  If somebody calls up your alumni office or your registrar's office and asks a question, will you give the information out?

Association with the institution, at least for Carleton that's a matter of public record.  If somebody calls up and said, did so and so graduate from Carleton College, we can answer that question.  Last year major, we can answer those questions as well; they're not protected information.  Some volunteer roles, we've got alums who work with prospects.  We want the prospects to be able to find the alums so they can make that connection and do cool stuff.  Membership in some interest groups; if we've got an alumni cooking club, there may be no reason at all for that information to be private.  Some conversations are perfectly good in a pubic space even though they're between our alums.  And there may be contact information that our alums have provided to us but they want to make available to other people.  So the default doesn't necessarily need to be to protect.

Now it might seem that I wondered off track a little bit here, but I do promise this is all going somewhere.  We just need to back up a little bit and consolidate some of this.  So we started back here with these two questions.  I was asserting that ideally the answers to both of these questions should direct the content that we present to an alumni visitor to our website.  But the customary way to answer that first question involves logging in, and as we have been going over at length, alums especially the older ones are not doing that, which means that we either need to make logging in a whole lot easier or we need to find other ways of answering this first question.  Or, best of all, we need to do both.

I need to pause for a moment and make a confession.  This is the point in the presentation where after lots of hand-waving and big picture stuff I roll back the curtain and I reveal the fully implemented solution to all these problems that we've been talking about.  When I submitted this proposal months ago, Carleton's web team was scheduled to roll out a new iteration of our alumni web presence sometime around October 1st, so that seemed like a fair bet.  But between June and July of this year, our team encountered four major disruptions to that timeline.  Their names are Oliver, Jordan, Casey, and Astrid.  A lot of our team was out this summer.  In the absence of the other parents, I can state without fear of contradiction that Oliver is the cute one.

So we haven't actually launched the site.  In fact, we haven't actually gotten very far in developing this site.  What I have to show you however are some really cool wire frames.  So I'm going to show you these wire frames and I'll continue to wave my hands in a very distracting manner in an attempt to keep you from realizing that none of this actually exists.  So okay, where were we?  Right.

How do we answer the who-are-you question if our alums are not logging in?  Let's break this down.  What do we mean by "who are you"?  What does "who are you" encompass?  What are the key things we care about in an alum who's visiting our site?  What things matter most in order to answer the other question, in order to draw the answers to the other question of what do you want?

I think there are two things.  There's "where are you" to know where you are.  We know a whole lot about you actually.  We can show you upcoming events that are likely to be relevant to you because they're in your area.  We can present opportunities for connecting with other alums who might be close to you.  We can present you with volunteer opportunities that are specific to where you are.  So that's a really powerful thing to know.

"When" are you from is also a really powerful thing to know.  If you we know your class year or even your era which we can use to describe that whole time period that you were in school, all the classes that you overlapped with, that tells us a whole lot.  First of all, your class year gives us some clue about how old you probably are, and we may want to present information differently to recent alums versus folks who graduated in the 1930s.  They have very different needs.

Second, your class year tells us who you might know, so we can show you activities from your classmates if they're kind of public realm, sponsored class events and more informal stuff.  We can push reunion information that's specific to your class era, other social opportunities, and we can point you to other web and social media resources that are relevant to the time that you were at school.

So both of those things, where are you and when are you from, are really powerful on their own.  But if we have them both, it gets crazy good.  Look at the math.  Carleton's got about 35,000 living and findable alums.  I know some of you have that many students but bear with me here.  A visitor to our current website could be any one of those 35,000 people.  There's not a thing we can do for them that's at all personal, so they're just kind of lost in the sea.

But suppose we know that our visitor is from Southern Minnesota, we got about 4,300 alums in Southern Minnesota in the Twin Cities' area.  Some leaves do not fall far from the tree.  Now we can provide a more customized experience just for those 4,000 people.  And a given visitor is still pretty anonymous but the pond is a whole lot smaller.  So what if we know that our alum is from the Greater Louisville Cincinnati area.  We can get 150 current alums in this area.

So suddenly, the experience in our site can seem a whole lot more personal.  So we can show you news of other alums in your area and there's a pretty good chance you might actually know some of them.

But what if we not only know that there's a visitor from this area but let's say she's in the class of 1991?  There are only two people who meet that criteria.  So we have the ability, if we want to, to provide an extremely personalized experience with no login required almost to the point of being creepy.  So we don’t want to do that.  I'll talk about that a little bit more.  Absolute power corrupts.

So where are you?  Where are you from?  I think there's a third axis or maybe a set of axes depending on how you want to count this.  Let's call it "how do you identify".  This can be any number of things.  This could be your major.  It could be your social, political affiliations, your personal interests, any existing connections you might have with the institution, particular volunteer roles or something like that.  It could be anything like that.  The point is that each of these different points of identity provides yet another way to customize the information that we provide to you and combine with your location and/or your class year, it allows us a way of rapidly zeroing in on the slices of content that might actually be relevant to any given visitor.

So how do we get this information?  How do we get this information from some random visitor to our website if they haven't logged in so that we can look up what we know about them?  Well, the short answer is we ask for it.  The long answer is we ask the alum and we ask their computer.  We just saw how one piece of information, the location of the visitor slices up the population dramatically and here's the amazing thing.  We can get that one piece of information absolutely free.  As soon as they call up their site, we can take the address of their computer and locate them geographically within about 100 miles, which means we know for sure what state or foreign country they might be in and probably we know what metro area they're in.

I'm sure there'll always be a few folks who are visiting from some place other than their home but that's okay.  If I'm an alum and I live in Minnesota and I'm in Cincinnati and I'm going to Carleton's alumni website, I might actually want to see stuff that's happening in the Cincinnati alumni community.  That's really cool.  I might want to check out the events that are going on there.

So if you're familiar with IP geolocation, this may not seem like an amazing thing to you but I want to let it sync in just for a minute in this particular context because I don’t think anybody has done this yet.  We get for free without asking one of the key pieces of information about an alumni visitor, a piece of information that combined with even just one other identifying characteristic allows us to provide a really personalized experience.  And those other identifying characteristics, we can ask for those.  And if we do it in a smart way, it won't even be annoying.

So we'll look at that in just a moment, but one more thing before we look at some wire frames, come back here one more time.  We've talked about "who are you" so let's spend just a moment on "what do you want."  We asked our alums this in the same survey I showed you before.  Keep in mind this is a survey about the status quo.  We asked them what is it that you come back to our website for, existing website.  So we aren't asking them what they wanted to be able to do, just what they were doing.

What's really obvious here though is that the number one reason that people come back to the Carleton website is to connect with other alums in some fashion.  Now that shouldn't be a surprise knowing everything that we know, but it's always nice when the data backs your expectations.

This corridor over here of Carleton is perhaps so vague as to be unhelpful but that really can cover a lot of stuff.  But we can take away one thing.  If we have to make a guess about what it is that an anonymous alum is coming to our site looking for, the answer to "what do you want", if we have to guess that answer, we've got a pretty good chance of being right if we say connect.  And that you might say is almost too vague to be useful, so we need to break it down and we'll do that.

But first, after some additional research working with our alumni relations office and doing a lot of brainstorming, we decided that we can represent all of the other possible answers to "what do you want" using four other verbs.  I'm going to come back and talk about these in more detail.  But these five words have become the organizational navigational framework for our new alumni venture.

So let's take a look and see how that works, wire frame time.  Sorry it's a little bit small but I'll talk you through what we got here.  This is a wire frame set that was put together by our designer, Matt Ryan.  In case you don’t normally deal with this phase of design, just keep in mind that wire frames are meant to be ugly.  They just define the general position of stuff so you can think about the pages functionally without getting caught up in the design aspects.  We've moved some of these pages in to the design phase but I thought it might be easier just to work with the wire frames

So here's all the stuff that we've been talking about in some kind of concrete form.  First of all, those five navigational areas: connect, return, learn, remember, volunteer, and ask.

Connect, we're going to look at in more detail.

Return is about reunions, big reunions, small reunions, any opportunity that people might have to come back to campus and interact with us in a personal way.

Learn is about the various programs that we offer to alums for learning after they have left our institution.  We've got lots of alumni trips that people can go on.  We're working on getting a club op.  We're putting lectures online, all that kinds of things.

Remember is the portal into our campus archives.  Our archivist is blogging, putting up information about historical materials.  That's also where you can get at past issues of the newspaper, the alumni magazine, the yearbooks, all of that kind of historical material.

Volunteer is information about all of the different volunteer opportunities for alums with us.  And it's also an opportunity for a place where alums who are currently volunteers can go to get resources for those roles.

And then finally, ask is a bit of a catchall.  It's kind of that FAQ office contact information, the place where you go if you've got a question you're just not finding the answer to elsewhere.

But connect, remember we saw that 70 percent of folks who are looking to connect.  So this is not only the first section of the navigation.  This is the homepage.  That's it.  The first thing you see is connect because that's what everybody wants to do.  We've broken this up into a number of different areas.  Front and center, we've got a search in our alumni directory.  You can type in a name and click the go button and look somebody up.  But wait, we're not logged in.  How can we search the directory?  Exactly.  We need to be logged in to get the answers to certain questions but we shouldn't have to be logged in to ask those questions.

Let that sync in.  We need to be logged in to get the answers to certain questions but we shouldn't have to logged in to ask the question.  So you can use the alumni directory without being logged in.  If I put a name in there and click through, I'm going to find myself inside the alumni directory application and if my query is general enough, it returns more than a few dozen people, I can get that information that there are 372 results to my search then it's going to ask me to log in so I can actually see who those people are.  And when I do that, I'll find that out.  But the directory is actually functional without logging in because there is a lot of information that in the aggregate is not confidential.

So you can ask a lot of questions and maybe even get some general statistics like how many English majors are working in the food service industry.  You can get that information out of this directory without logging in because that's not confidential information.

So what we think is that getting this far and knowing that there are answers to the question that you're asking is going to provide a lot of motivation for people to actually go to the trouble to figure out how the heck do I log in.  It's kind of like those sites that you can go to that promise to give you all the public records about your ex-girlfriends if you pay them $20 but not quite so slimy.

So back to the homepage here, the other aspects of connect, we've broken this down into different ways that you might connect and this will start to make some sense since we've talked about sort of slicing people into different groups by where they are and what class they're in so we have the area.  The geolocation is happening.  I'm logged in from the Twin Cities area.  You notice that when I hit this page and I've got some personalization already happening right here in the homepage pulling in some upcoming events in the Twin Cities area.

Here's the Carleton area where you can choose your class year.  You can choose a career field.  You can choose your major.  You can choose various interests and affinity groups that you may be part of.  So right here on the front page is an opportunity to provide just that little snippet of information about yourself that allows us to provide you with a much richer experience.

So what happens, say, if I go here under Carleton areas and I choose my class year?  Well, what happens is we give you a cookie, not that kind of cookie, we give you a browser cookie that we can later look at to retrieve the choices that you've made and then we take you to the customized Carleton area's page for the year that you chose.

So this wire frame is actually designed to show you what it would look like if somebody was logged in, but the public view isn't that much different.  Knowing your class year, we can give you all kinds of great stuff.  We can provide you with links to your class website to discussions about your class to your Facebook group to notes about your class to information about your classmates, giving updates for your class.  We can create a customized search that limits your search to just the people that you might be likely to know.  We can tell you a lot of stuff based on what we have.  So if we know you're in the Twin Cities are, we can tell you there's actually not 57, it's like 4,000, but we can tell you how many there are depending on your major because you're logged in and we know it or you've pulled to switch your majors.  We can give you those kind of stats as well, and each of these things can be linked that goes directly to the alumni directory so you can see who those people are simply by clicking once.

Down here at the bottom, we can actually show you conversations, teasers to conversations involving people from your area that are happening in our alumni community.  Yes, we do have an alumni community, and yes, it's behind a login.  But it's highly permeable so we can actually pull out content and teasers of content to give people a glimpse of what's in there and tell them why it is they might be willing to go through that login to get at that content.  That's not something you can do with most turnkey solutions.

The other sections in connect work exactly the same way.  So the in-your-area page, let's say you're connected from New York, the in-the-area page is automatically populated.  This is a map with points on it showing you the location of events that are coming up in that area.  We've got statistical information about the alumni in that area; how many there are.  If you know your class year, we can narrow that down to how many people are in your era, in that area.  Again, if we know your major or your field of work or your interest, we can give you some of that information as well, all these live links to the directory.

Here's kind of a nice touch up here.  It's small so you can't see it.  It says traveling, see events, people, etc. in Hawaii.  So, say you logged in, we know you're from New York, your computer is in Hawaii, maybe you're traveling.  Maybe you'd like to see events from the place you are or maybe you'd like to see events from where you live.  You can do both.  It's right there.  You don’t have to think about it.  We can detect that discrepancy and give you the chance to choose.

Here's the career section.  If we know your field or you've chosen one at any other place on the site, we can pull out all the relevant data and combine it with everything else that we know about you and provide you again with a personalized experience.  And notice here that you've got an opportunity to change any of those little pieces of identifying information; your class year, your location, your interests, you can do that here, you can do that in lots of places on the site and that travels with you.  The personalization continues to grow as you tell us more and more little bits of information about you.

And every time you give us one of those pieces, we reward you immediately by showing you a more personalized experience.  So there's actually some incentive to do it.  The first time you do it, you'll say it, oh, that's kind of cool.  I don’t have to log in.  I can see a lot of stuff that's really relevant to me.

This is the major section.  This is really cool.  Right here, one click from the homepage, you can a historical graph of the popularity of your major.  I don't know how useful that is but it's really cool.  And all the personalization that we've seen elsewhere is happening here.

But what if you didn't give us a major, you're not logged in, we don't know what your major is, and you try to visit this page?  We've accounted for that.  It's got a basic anonymous mode where it tells you what your choices are.  These are all the majors, how many people are in each of them, and when you click on one of those, you get back to that personalized page for that major.  So this is kind of an intermediate stage that serves the same function of those dropdown boxes of getting you into that personal data as quickly as possible.

Now, the connect area of the site is really the most deeply personalized but the same principles apply throughout.  So in the return section, if we know your class year, we can target that stuff to tell you about events that are relevant to that year.  If you're in the learn section, we can tell you about educational opportunities that might be happening in your area.  In the remember section, we can push you towards resources like your yearbooks or the newspapers that were published when you were at school.  In the volunteer area, if we know anything about your volunteer affiliations, we can push those to you and provide those links directly.  Ask isn't very personalized.  If we think of ways to do that, we can easily do that.

So here are a few basic principles that are embodied in what we're trying to do here.  Personalize pervasively an progressively.  Every place that we can personalize based on information that we have, we should do that, and we should do it progressively based on each new piece of information that we get.  And we should use data from any available source.  If you're logged in, we know everything, we should use that data.  If you tell us something about yourself, we should use that data.  If your computer says you're somewhere, we should use that data, we should use everything that's available to us to provide the best experience.

We should reward disclosure, so every time you choose one of those class year or major or something, something cool happens that encourages you to do that again.  We should require login at the last possible point.  Again, don’t hide stuff.  Keep the login for the things that actually have to be hidden and show everything else that you possibly can because that's where the valuable content is for people.

And of course preserve basic privacy in the public spaces.  We don’t want to do things that will expose individual personal information right up at the top of the site, so we're not actually going to post your address and your email on that homepage even if you're logged in.  There's some stuff that needs to be buried a little bit, so if you want to change your address records, there's a spot for that.  It's a little bit deeper in the system.  It's at a place where you're less likely to kind of walk away and leave that exposed.

So we want to keep some distinction, and part of that comes into the point of don’t be creepy.  We don’t want to personalize to the extent that people really feel uncomfortable that we know too much about them.  It's a difficult line with the kind of things that we're talking about here.  I think the best way we're going to get at that is with some user testing to kind of see what people are comfortable with.  We'll go all out and then we'll crank it back as necessary.

So just two or three more things and then we're going to have a few questions.  First of all, how are we implementing this?  This is all being built in the recent CMS framework which already supports a lot of the functionality that we need.  There's a fair amount of custom coding involved but we're going to push a lot of that stuff back to the community.  It's the end of the reason pitch, but if you're in the market for a CMS, I'm happy to talk to you after.

Secondly, we have two open positions on the web team.  At Carleton, if you know any great designers or sysadmins, please send them our way.  We actually do work on drones.  It's uncomfortable but it's really classy.  Okay.

Thirdly, a couple of things I want you to think about.  Even if you're not looking to revamp your alumni presence right away, what is the experience for the anonymous visitor on your alumni site?  I want you to really think about that and look at your site and think about what it is like if I'm not logged in and this campus did not know who I am.  Is there anything you can do about that in the short term?

Second, are you hiding nonsense content in the login?  Is there anything you can about that?  If you can't move the content, can you at least point to it and tell people that it's there so they've got some idea why they might want to pass that login.  So think about those two things when you go home, and see if there's anything here that I've said that might be useful in getting you to a good place with regard to that.

So I'm going to take a breath and a drink and we've got a few minutes for questions.  So thank you.

Audience:  So with your earlier line [40:05 Unintelligible]

Mark Heiman:  A large number of our gifts actually do come in online right now.  I'll repeat the question.  Is that what you're saying?  Yes.  If we look at the line graph that shows giving rates, how would online giving correlate?

I don't know if it's the majority but a large percentage of our giving is actually online.  We don’t require a login for that.  So I think what you're seeing is a fairly accurate representation of that.  Yes?

Audience:  [40:40 Unintelligible]

Mark Heiman:  Well, this is not fully implemented yet, but our expectation, we've got all the data obviously in the tables that are drawn from our alumni database.  And what we'll be doing is pre-crunching a lot of it because it's not changing rapidly so a lot of the stats about how many people are in each of the major geographical areas and so forth, we'll pre-calculate that, though the actual queries to get that are not very intensive if things are properly indexed.  So I think we're going to look at the performance and try to figure out what's going to work best there.  Yes?

Audience:  [41:23 Unintelligible]

Mark Heiman:  Okay, two questions.  How do we rate the cleanliness of our data?  I think it's pretty good.  I'm not actually in the advancement office so they might have a different answer for you, but my experience from working with alums and the directory data that they're accessing is that they seem to be pretty happy with it.  We've got a pretty good rate of people coming and updating that information, and we've got an advancement office that's very, very bulldoggish about chasing people down and getting that stuff, so I think it's pretty clean.

In terms of the promotion, we're still in the process of working that out with our alumni relations office, so I can't give you any particular details but I know we're going to be blasting it in all of the media that we have available to us.  I wish I could go into more detail but we're not at the stage of the process I can talk about that.  I'll come back next year and tell you.

There are a number of services out there.  How do we get in-the-area information?  If you Google IP geolocation, there are a number of services out there that you can pay for or databases you can download for free that will take an IP address that your web server knows as soon as somebody connects.  You can look that IP address up in this database and it will give you back a location.  It's that easy.

We have tagged all of the information about events and so forth with different geographical locations and so we can do a match based on where you are against what the data says.  If I know I've got Twin Cities' data and I know you're in Twin Cities, we can pull that stuff live, so it's all coming from live database queries.

The code needs to be aware of I think what I said is we're going to have a threshold somewhere in the dozens maybe, less than 50.  We don’t show you the aggregate data either, but if it's above a certain threshold where there's no chance of being able to uniquely identify somebody then that's fine.  So we just need to keep that threshold in mind.

Audience:  [43:30 Unintelligible]

Mark Heiman:  So two questions.  The second one was have we done any testing on whether people think the IP geolocation was creepy.  We haven't actually tested that with real alums.  We will be doing that.  I don't think they'll react too badly to it.  Just because there are a number of sites outside of academia that are doing that now, it's becoming much more accepted.

The first question was how long do we keep the cookie that we drop?  We're still debating that.  Our inclination is to let it sit there for a long time because, again, the cookie itself is not actually going to contain any identifying information, it's probably just going to be a key back to data they're restoring locally.  So the user experience is really great if you've identified yourself on a number of different axes and you come back and we still know that stuff.  So again, that's going to be a testing decision on where we cut that off.

Yes, one more question, green shirt.  I love goofy questions.  No, we don’t have anything that's non-goofy.  That's classier, so alums back to the class of 1945.  No, we don’t have stats.  No, no.  I turned on our first web server and I think 1992 so I know we don’t go back that far.

Thank you all very much for coming out this morning.  I really appreciate it.  TNT-7, please fill out your forms.