“[Best practices are] like a shoe that doesn’t always fit. You can put the shoe on, and it may even look nice, but it will likely create blisters if the fit isn’t exactly right.”
If you work in alumni relations or in any community engagement role, you’ve likely been approached by a senior leader at some point to consider adopting an aspect of a “world-class” outreach program from a much more established organization — perhaps it’s a rival university with 100 years of maturity or an organization with a $2B endowment head start. Or maybe you work at a medium-sized chamber of commerce looking to refresh your membership engagement strategy, and your boss helpfully suggests you look at Netflix and Costco for tips.
Standing at the digital watercooler, I even recently heard a story in which a university leadership team asked its alumni operation to look at the programming by a well-known U.S. college, in part because it happened to be the namesake of the (much) smaller school on the other side of the world.
These recommendations from senior leadership are, of course, well-meaning, but what is poorly understood — and what rarely occurs — when comparing program areas (or community engagement tactics) against “best-in-class” examples is the need to take specific criteria into account to know what new programs have the highest potential to succeed in your organization’s context. This applies in post-secondary, NGO and not-for-profit settings.
Pamela Hinds, a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University, wrote in Harvard Business Review, “best practices are optimized for a particular place and time and don’t necessarily transfer well.” While Hinds’ research focused on the transfer of work practices across cultures and languages, other more nuanced criteria are just as applicable to alumni leaders when looking to benchmark their programs against, or adopt a similar program from, other colleges and universities.
It’s critical to think about the context of your organization and alumni operation before deciding to adapt an idea from another university. Before evaluating best practices successful elsewhere, it’s important to keep in mind the criteria that will help determine a “best fit” in your organization. For instance, criteria you’ll want to take into consideration when seeking out best practices can include:
· alignment with alumni (or community) engagement goals and organizational strategies;
· your operational or project budget;
· staff and volunteer resources;
· community and reputational considerations;
· organizational culture and maturity, and
· target audiences, etc.
After determining the guiding criteria, the next step in the benchmarking exercise is to engage in research that will ultimately provide you with a curated menu of best-in-class program examples that fit your organization’s context, budget and strategic focus. Once you’ve identified the best practices, they can be mapped for relevancy — for example, using a criteria matrix you’ve developed to show precisely how and why they are candidates for adoption in your engagement efforts.
In our experience, this kind of exercise will not be as effective and helpful for the long-term if you try todo it “off the side of your desk” in addition to your regular, day-to-day responsibilities as a community engagement leader. Nor are you likely to succeed if you bank on good ideas to be discovered and brought back through professional development conferences or online presentations only. It requires some dedicated time and focus on where you want to improve, where other models or examples may exist, and what’s important to consider about your circumstance as you seek to learn from others.
Here are some takeaways when looking at any best-in-class examples of engagement activities you want to incorporate into your organization’s planning:
· Remember that no “best practice” is a one-size-fits-all solution;
· Focus on the intent of the practice;
· Adapt and build on it while shaping it to your organization’s criteria, and
· Ensure you are equipped to measure this new activity’s performance.
Finally, you must manage expectations of achieving success quickly. That best practice somewhere else may have taken years of development and refinement before it became a high-performing practice, and it was designed specifically for and cultivated within that organization’s context. As Jérôme Barthélemy, a professor of strategy and management at ESSEC Business School in Paris, wrote in MIT Sloan Management Review, “Executives tend to take the value of best practices as a given.” Introducing that idea from another institution will require patience and managing your superiors’ expectations for instant success.
A benchmarking exercise will clearly define your criteria and elicit best practice examples that fit those criteria; a tangential benefit of having a benchmarking study in hand is that, as a community engagement leader, you can start to encourage each member of your team to care for and feed a "living library" of best practices in their specific area of activity and build this monitoring into their everyday responsibilities.
Matthew Fox is a partner in the D3 Advancement Studio and has more than two decades of experience in communications and community engagement across the arts, business and post-secondary sectors in Canada and the U.S.
