What is the purpose of your online community?

A decade ago as colleges were adopting online communities for their alumni associations, the primary reason was to capture more email address and address changes so they could communicate more frequently with less effort. Jerold Pearson, a researcher for the Stanford Foundation did very exhaustive research to discover the more you communicat with alumni about the good news on campus, the more alumni give, and those that give, give more money more frequently!

However today, your online community HAS to be built around the needs of your alumni. In 2000 your only online competitor was Classmates.com. Today you have Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin and thousands more. So what the heck is so great about your online community? To your graduates it stinks! They prefer Facebook. To your Boomers, its' a waste of time. You have to think about what your online community is going to do that is different than others. Consider developing your online community around the following:

1) Become more of a career/mentoring community! Encourage alumni to help each other do business and find jobs
2) Provide "nostalgic" moments. Scan your yearbook and enable alumni to rate and interact with the photos
3) Life long learning. YOU are in the learning biz. These are your customers. Deliver more education to them

If you don't have an "alumni" focused purpose, you'll end up wasting a lot of time developing your online community because alumni will not use it.