PCUAD

As a result of our successful work at a top-tier northeastern university, we were selected by the Association of Private College and University Alumni Directors to work with them on the next phase of an internal metrics project they had conjured up over the past several years. PCUAD (as it's known) is a group of 36 alumni directors from select institutions of higher education in the United States and Canada. PCUAD is a "community of practice", which means they share a common institution size, alumni base, budget range and organizational profile. This similarity extends to their alumni programming and overall attitude regarding the role of alumni in the life of a university. It also gives the group a common foundation from which to develop close working relationships and the resultant sharing of programming, services and ideas.

One of the problems plaguing alumni relations is a lack of good inter-university data on alumni operations. This data would be comprised of data points on budgets, programs, alumni populations, types of services offered and the numbers of consumers of each service. Fairly sensitive stuff for sure, but in a trusted group this could be invaluable for assessing how well you're performing relative to a select group of peer institutions.

So how do you get this data? A simple survey instrument would have been just fine for collecting this data, but PCUAD had more in mind.

For starters, they had refined their model down to 199 datapoints. Then they wanted to run some calculations on those datapoints to generate a total of 245 outputs. Then, they wanted to establish a scoring and weighting system for the datapoints so they could create an overall "PCUAD score" for each institution.

So what did we do?

We built:

• a flexible survey instrument that allows for changes to questions year-over-year
• a weighting engine that allows each school to create their own weighting schemes (as many as they want, runnable against any one or all years of data) based on their own priorities
• a highly granular reporting tool that allows for export to Excel for external data use
• the Dashboard - the top 10 "indicators" of success across all schools, plotted out graphically for a one-screen view of the "state of PCUAD"

In year one, this system resulted in the following:

• Applause from the Board of Trustees at one Ivy League school
• Budget increases at several schools
• New staff being hired at several schools

As you can see, our software combined with PCUAD's deep understanding of alumni relations has resulted in some major changes - and that was from the first year of the system!

To learn more about ARAMP, please view the demonstration presentation here: http://www.pcuad.org/demo

We work closely with some of the best alumni directors in the country and you can believe that a lot of their knowledge and understanding has rubbed off on CounterMarch Systems in a big way. Think we might be able to help you? Let's talk!

Some of the Universities in PCUAD:

Dartmouth, Lehigh, RIT, RPI, Syracuse, Bucknell, Pepperdine and many more.