Alumni Relations as a Blockchain Service

In an earlier essay (Blockchain is the New University), I wrote about the unbundling of the University.

One of the functions has been alumni relations. Specifically, graduates of a university expect their degree to mean something, at a minimum, to other alumni. This should translate to greater access or stronger signaling to potential employers.

However, for many universities, the alumni cache declines over time and provides nominal value.

Here are what I would have expected a degree from my university to have granted:


I felt connecting with other alumni should:

Here's what I experienced instead:

Blockchain tokens can fix this.

Many of the attributes of a token as programmable that enables permissionless behavior includes:

If I were to boil down the alumni experience, it's around events and finding value from being an alumni or a member of the local alumni association.

These are sort of broken, disjointed activities that are low value given these aren't random people, but alumni with shared brand value (this can apply to not just alumni of a university, but to a company or even a major event or even a course).

So, let's consider events:

This turns events into ways to earn reputation, gain access to other members, and provide a sense of connection and community beyond the point-in-time of the event, itself.

Tied together with the events is the experience (benefits) of being a member:

Being a dues-paying member accrues awards, which are tied to events access:

Permissionlessly Grow Without Administrative Overhead

One of the reasons most local alumni associations struggle is the high administrative overhead of creating local value for alumni.

Initially volunteers often participate to drive the activity; but as most volunteer organizations go, the efforts tend to either drift to those who have time (retirees) or just doesn't get done by those busy driving their own careers (stagnation).

The issue is that the nature of the work is largely administrative: who holds which event when and promotes it. This is low-level, boring and time-consuming.

It also means that the bottleneck of the event and activity pipeline sits with those who are volunteering. It ends up feeling largely unfulfilling except to those who find the network access for putting on events has a meaningful return to their own careers.

But this is still largely unsustainable.

The blockchain, through the capabilities described above, enables a permissionless workflow -- meaning, existing alumni can self-organize with some on-chain guardrails for quality and safety.

Permissionlessness can reward different people at different points in time to provide value to the network and get rewarded for it through greater access or rewards provided by the centralized University.

By removing the need for volunteer administrators, the bottlenecks of volunteerism is eliminated.

Because the complex work is orchestrated by the decentralized blockchain and the properly designed incentives and rewards (key, here), the fees paid by the central university and the members is lower than paying a full-time administrator while scaling the value and activities.

How would this get started?

The key with any token-based incentive mechanism is ensuring a few things:

  1. Incentives for rewards are clear: attendance, sponsorship, hosting are examples of key activities that can be defined programmatically so that only those who deliver the service are rewarded;
  2. Value of the rewards are meaningful: if someone receives tokens or recognition for providing value back to the network, how are they ultimately rewarded for doing so?

Let's consider a local San Francisco alumni organization that wanted to do this.

The highest value is probably actual connection: rewarding someone to meet and offer help or advice to an alum. This can be hard to orchestrate, but certainly in scope as part of the vision.

Another primitive for this alumni service would be the alumni event: a speaker, a venue, an organizer, and attendees.

In the old, centralized way, the volunteer would look through the local directory, try to find potential speakers, identify a venue to rent (with fees paid for by their treasury or from the central alumni organization), and then start to publicize the event.

Alternatively, the organizers can simplify it and decide to just hold happy hours, no speakers, and hope for the best.

Let's use the first scenario: an alumni speaks in a venue and alumni are exclusively invited for an attendance fee.

The volunteers can do this, and while it's a hassle and boring, the event is ultimately successful.

But to keep up the momentum, they need to put together another one. And another.

Sending the emails is a hassle.

Finding and chasing down speakers. Securing a reliable venue. All of these feel cumbersome and laden with friction.

Permissionless Incentivized Initiative

The blockchain encourages incentivized and motivated alumni actors to spin up their own set of events.

But the challenge is, if it is truly permissionless as in the blockchain, then anyone could do so.

But, it's still possible to remove the administrative bottleneck and programmatically provide this capability to create and promote an event to those who have earned on-chain reputation.

This reputation might be:

The events will be visible on-chain, and, in the beginning will be few and far between: the committee can vet the individuals and the event themselves.

Preserving the privacy of the alums will be key; the blockchain could allow this vetted actor to send an email without ever knowing the email address (or this could be initially centralized with the volunteers to keep it simple -- the host write the email sequence, uploads it, and the volunteer has access to actually send the content).

Ideally, however, as more members of the alumni network understand that they can host and promote their own events, webinars, coaching sessions, activities -- and can earn not only engagement, but also blockchain-based rewards for successfully holding them.

These rewards could be entirely granted by attendees (for example, attendees have a limited number of tokens and they grant them to events they like) or programmatically (tokens are rewarded based on the number of attendees) or any other function to decide the "value" given to the network.

What would motivate earning these rewards?

The redemption of these tokens needs to mean something.

For example, perhaps the alumni association would provide a free dinner at a nice restaurant in a private dining room for all those who earn above a threshold. The dinner could be $500 all in per volunteer, capped at 10, at a cost of $5,000.

But both the administrative cost to generate this value and the value itself could be much higher: perhaps over the course of the year, the 10 people held events that attracted 100 each, so 1000 attendees got value. If the value exceeds the $5 in cost (we can talk about quantifying the cost shortly), then this reward is leverage: high enough rewards encourage volunteers to put skin in the game.

The rewards, themselves, can extend beyond the dinner to other offers by the university: discounts on extension courses or cohort courses (free would be ideal given the low marginal costs of digital events but high perceived value for the right topic and instructor).

The design space for the right incentives would be the engine to growth and would vary from university to university. Different alumni value different things and these do not need to be monetary (they benefit by not being voluntary).

In fact, if the alumni experience is, in fact, a factor at all (an upstream problem), the act of being recognized for doing something that could, on its own, have downstream benefits (organizing a talk gives the organizer access to the speaker, for example) should itself be some kind of intrinsic motivation. After all, that is supposed to be the foundation of the alumni tie.

As more options have appeared to compete for our social ties, however, the school doesn't become the default social network; therefore, the network must compensate.