Club Leaders Get a Boost from Campus Conference
HASHING IT OUT: HBS professor Kash Rangan leads a case discussion with club officers on creating and maintaining a successful alumni club.
Photo by Tom Fitzsimmons
With over seventy attendees from Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the United States, the HBS Club Officers Leadership Conference was the largest in the event’s history. For two days in late May, representatives from the School’s extensive network of alumni clubs convened on campus to exchange ideas, participate in case discussions with faculty, and learn about AlumniMagnet, a new community-building software that simplifies a club’s administrative and managerial tasks while greatly enhancing its ability to communicate via the Web with its members and the worldwide alumni network.
On day one, Professor V. Kasturi (“Kash”) Rangan led a case discussion on the particular strategy issues involved in creating and maintaining a successful alumni club, while Professor Jeff Polzer focused on team management issues. “Besides being informational from an academic point of view, the case discussions and faculty involvement were great ways to facilitate interaction with our peers,” says Bruce Marcus (MBA ’80), president of the HBS Club of New York. “It was a very open, comfortable environment.”
A presentation on the second day showcased the many capabilities of AlumniMagnet, which every HBS club will be adopting in the coming months. “This program offers a strong suite of tools to help officers establish an engaging, interactive Web presence; manage the administrative details of running a club; and communicate with members,” says Janet Cahill, associate director, Clubs and Associations. “Another compelling aspect of the technology is its ability to bring alumni together as a collaborative global community with a strong relationship with the School and one another.”
Marcus notes that the New York club was an early adopter of the software, along with the HBS Club of Puget Sound and the HBS Tech Alumni Club. Since the New York club began using AlumniMagnet in October 2006, Marcus says that its membership has increased by about 18 percent, while administrative overhead has fallen approximately 25 percent. “It’s an efficient, functional system,” he adds, citing the program’s capability in database management and automatic processing — two particularly useful qualities when it comes to keeping up with a busy, mobile group of alumni. “It’s a great technology vehicle, but for me, as a marketing person, its number one benefit is its communication ability.”
Summing up the conference, Cahill notes that it “generated a lot of momentum and energy in the clubs community, which is already an incredibly strong, vibrant representation of the alumni. Building on that, with the support of AlumniMagnet, puts us in a good position as we kick off the Centennial Global Outreach Program.”
