Summer Search Bay Area Alumni Board

Methods: Interviews | Strategy Workshops

Summer Search is a national college success organization that works to close the opportunity gap for low-income students with high potential by helping transform what they believe is possible. As an alumnus of the Summer Search program, I have been giving back my time and skills as a member of the Bay Area Alumni Board where I am in my second year as the chair. Our main purpose is the find how we can reengage the alumni community with Summer Search and extend the benefits of being an alumnus past college.

At a Glance

Role

• My Role: Alumni Board Chair
• Co-organizer and co-facilitator: Molly Inglish

Goals

• Understand how we can improve from the previous year.
• Determine the goals, metrics, and initiatives for the 2016 - 2017 fiscal year.

Methods

• Interviews
• Design-thinking Workshops

Outcomes

• The Alumni Board took an active role in the Alumni Gift Challenge Campaign for the Bay Area raising $44,000 between August 2016 and December 2017.
• Directly fundraised $6000 as of February 2017
• The Alumni Board has hosted 4 events and interacted with over 70 Alumni in 2017

Alumni Board Interviews

Prior to the workshop, I conducted 1-hour interviews with all 10 members of the 2015 - 2016 alumni board cohort to learn about their perspectives and inform our thinking about the needs of our workshop.

• How were they feeling about the board overall?
• What were the highlights for them individually and together as a group?
• How might we improve in the following year?
• What does success look like to them?

Quick Findings

• Members felt the Alumni Board needed to develop a clear role and mission within the broader Summer Search program.
• Expected there to be opportunities for members to utilize their hard skills and being able to support other initiatives more generally.
• Members wanted to create measurable impact throughout their tenure on the Alumni Board.

Organizing the Workshop

I met with Molly to discuss the findings from the interviews and how we would start heading in that direction in an organic way. We wanted to insure that the Alumni Board maintained autonomy by organically generating ideas as opposed to be directed by internal Summer Search staff leadership.

Afterwards, we met with Summer Search staff to compile any data (background info, quantitative data, and qualitative data) about the Summer Search alumni community for board members. This data was important for giving all of our members, particularly newer members, enough context before entering our workshop.

Molly and I decided to take the following approach for the workshop.

Opening

• Data: Share and discuss all relevant data about Summer Search alumni.
• Idea Generation: Individuals laid out possible ideas of what we wanted to do in 2017.
• Goals: Build consensus as to what our high-level goals were as a alumni board.

Exploring

• Narrow and Group Ideas: Determine which ideas resonate and good starting points for further ideation.
• Explore opportunities: Small groups begin developing more fleshed out concepts.

Closing

• Plans and Proposals: Groups would create proposals for the group.

Key Learnings and Outcomes

The entire workshop was conducted in one day and has provided us a strong sense of direction. Bringing in design methodologies to the Alumni Board allowed us to build consensus and bring in voices that otherwise may have not been otherwise heard. This year has been successful thus far, some highlights include…

• The Alumni Board took an active role in the Alumni Gift Challenge Campaign for the Bay Area raising $44,000 between August 2016 and December 2017.
• Directly fundraised $6000 as of February 2017
• The Alumni Board has hosted 4 events and engaged with over 70 Alumni in 2017