Alumni Relations Communities of Practice (CoPs)

Meanwhile, alumni professionals are investing time and effort in smaller communities of practice, groups of similar institutions with whom it makes sense to benchmark and to share ideas. The groups’ acronyms are a Scrabble player’s dream…PCUAD, SCICAP, NEAR, SCAD and more (the full names of these groups are listed at the end of this posting). While CoPs like these have existed for a long time, lately they seem to be picking up steam.

CASE’s strongest suit may be its scale: the sheer number of members and participating institutions represents a tremendous wealth of experience and expertise. Furthermore, CASE advocates on our behalf when there are legislative or policy issues that affect support for higher education.

But the CoPs are positioned to take advantage of their members’ unique characteristics. In the (not yet published) April 2007 issue of Currents magazine, RIT’s executive director of alumni relations Kelly Redder writes about one CoP’s contribution to its members’ effectiveness: benchmarking among like institutions. In an upcoming post on Alumni Futures I’ll highlight Kelly’s comments and try to spur some thinking about the value of CoPs for your own work.

• How will CoPs influence CASE’s role in the future? 
• Might CASE become a hub for functional CoPs, instead of an expansive core for the profession?

While CASE remains dominant as the umbrella, CoPs seem to grow in number, sophistication and specialization. CoPs are capable of feeding innovation and improvements in practice to CASE, and it will be CASE’s job in that instance to spread the word through the professions.

Alphabet Soup – A few Communities of Practice:
PCUAD: Association of Private College & University Alumni Directors
NEAR: North East Alumni Relations
SCAD: Small College Alumni Directors
SCICAP: Southern California Independent College Alumni Programs

(There are numerous other groups organized by region, athletic conference and institutional type as well. Tell us about the ones you belong to by leaving a comment.)

Note: This post is by Andy Shaindlin, executive director of the alumni association at Caltech and author of Alumni Futures, who will be our guest blogger until mid-April.