We have recently begun an alumni group on Facebook. Its a great way to be in touch with the younger alums and keep them involved in the life of the school. I've been trying to figure out how to track that information in RE. I would like to avoid the attribute route as I feel we are overloaded but I'm not sure where I can keep the info. It is something that I will need to pull out on a regular basis to update as more alums join the group.

 Thanks,

Stacey

We have begun to track Facebook members that are alumni of our school here at Friends School of Baltimore.  We just added an attribute that is Facebook Member. 

We have recently added an alumni group on Facebook for our institution and I agree it is one means of keeping in touch with young alums in particular.  Using that in conjunction with an online community would be a great tag team approach to bridging the communication gaps.

However, a note of caution.  Our institution has tracked extraneous information (primarily in actions/notes) for the purposes of relationship building but it has not provided much of a springboard for fundraising. 

What is your end goal?  How would the data support actionable activity? Are you friend-raising or fundraising?

It's difficult to track dynamic information -- I am sure you feel the pinch of just keeping up with addresses, phones, email, etc.

Perhaps a conversation worth continuing...good luck.

I know we need to play in  the Facebook (Web 2.0) arena to stay relevant so, we've been promoting Facebook for a couple of years. This was based on an informal survey that showed many of our cadets already had selected Facebook and many more are arriving each year at the Academy with Facebook accounts already established. I figured that, since our job as the alumni association is to help our graduates keep in touch, the best way we could do that is to provide solid guidance and direction to the alumni as to where they should go if they want to do Web2.0.  Our Communications Director started a Facebook group for us however, we are not trying to track the 16% of our grads that are on Facebook. Of course, the Web2.0 space could change on us all over time - sometimes too quickly for my tastes. we need to always be analyzing the space and be prepared to change the guidance in the interests of helping alumni connect in the future.

I have not thought of a reason to bring Facebook membership into RE yet. Frankly, with a growing number of Web 2.0 sites out there, I don't think it would be economically possible to track all the activity. The best we could do is come up with a way to publish our content once and have it seemlessly appear on many  sites simlutaneously.