Alumni clubs swell coffers

Alumni organisations are mushrooming in Germany in response to increasing competition among universities for funds for students and competition among graduates for jobs.

A decade ago they were virtually unknown - old-boy networking was the preserve of the stuffy and exclusive Burschenschaften, all-male student fraternities with a dubious reputation for sword fighting, fancy uniforms and far rightwing views.

But now about 50 German alumni organisations are members of alumni-clubs.net, an association set up in 1997 to help fledgling alumni clubs get off the ground.

Many of them are small subject-oriented clubs that were established by students and graduates eager to make career networks, said Oliver Figur, an IT consultant in Frankfurt. He helped found the association after his own alumni club was featured in a business magazine and he was inundated with requests from people wanting to know how to set up their own career networks.

But now the universities are realising the marketing potential of running their own alumni clubs. "Within ten years every German university will have set up an alumni organisation," predicted Rudolf-Werner Dreier, spokesman for Freiburg University and founder of Alumni-Freiburg, which claims to have been the first alumni organisation for a whole university rather than being subject-specific when it was set up in 1996.

Unlike their role models in the United States and Britain, the emphasis in Germany's infant alumni organisations was on "friend-raising before fundraising", he said.

Germany does not have a culture of sponsorship like the US; the tax incentives are not great. For many years it was taken for granted that the state would pick up the entire bill for higher education. Equality and homogeneity were the buzzwords of Germany's mass universities in the 1970s, and, as a result, few students developed an emotional bond to their alma mater. Indeed, the first Herculean task for the fledgling Alumni-Freiburg was to seek its alumni and construct a database of the names and addresses of 200,000 graduates worldwide.

It was helped by the City of Freiburg, which sponsored an advertisement in the news magazine Spiegel and has funded two employees for the organisation.

The organisation also appealed to the university's academic body for its graduate contacts, and to "competitors" in the local traditional student fraternities in the city. "There is a traditional antagonism there because Freiburg is traditionally a green/leftwing city, but some of the fraternities did help us," Mr Dreier said.

Before Germany's alumni organisations can expect anything back from their students and graduates, they have to offer them something. So the alumni association in Freiburg lobbied for better-quality degree certificates and the reintroduction of graduation ceremonies. Alumni members are offered a magazine, newsletter, a contacts exchange, a lifelong free email address and discounts on continuing-education courses, among other benefits.

Their engagement is already paying dividends. "We find our alumni are already offering us donations," Mr Dreier said.

Oliver Figur of alumni-clubs.net believes the larger universities can start reaping the rewards of their labour within five years. "I believe a university with 20,000 students will be able to generate €100,000 (£62,000) a year in the medium term from its alumni."

But alongside income generation, Germany's young university alumni organisations are also becoming a new driving force for change in the reform-resistant higher education system in other ways.

Alumni-Freiburg has already become a central marketing tool for the university, helping it carve out a distinct profile, find partners abroad and lobby for higher education causes.

The stronger and older universities can draw on their prominent alumni for strategic issues and to lobby on higher education issues, student recruitment and career placements.

However, this can backfire as Bonn University alumni organisation found when it attracted negative press for a brochure boasting of its famous alumni, who include Josef Goebbels alongside other famous sons such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Heinrich Heine.

Alumni organisations in Freiburg, Heidelberg, Mannheim, Tubingen and Ulm have joined forces to establish a consortium called Alumni.Med.Live to offer virtual continuing education for their medical graduates.

From here, it will be only a short leap to joint marketing initiatives, especially if Germany ever breaks down the taboo on student fees. "In future, groups of alumni organisations could help develop a sort of 'Ivy League' in Germany," Mr Dreier said.