PART 1

Customer/User Job-to-be-Done or Problem

Individual Alumni contact information (correlated to our other data points on Alumni) is very valuable to institutions' enrollment marketing and advancement teams for outreach purposes. Specific jobs to be done include:

1. As an enrollment marketer, I want to be able to target and contact alumni who are most likely to be interested in completing or furthering their education so that I can help create new prospects for the institution.

2. As an Advancement coordinator (or similar role), I want to be able to identify likely alumni donors and be able to contact them to further philanthropy and giving efforts at my institution.

3. As an Alumni Relations coordinator (or similar role), I want to be able to identify the right alumni to reach out to with communications and event invitations based on their location, roles, companies, and other characteristics.

Value to Customers & Users

• Customers can get lists of contact information for target groups of alumni without having to go elsewhere.

• Up-to-date contact information for some records that they may not have, or may have wrong information for.

• Customers can segment alumni based on Lightcast data characteristics (e.g. Working in region, Salary ranges, Job Titles, Companies, etc.) to build lists for outreach

• Allows customers to take direct action on alumni outreach and marketing from the insights and analytics provided in Alumni Pathways.

• Customers can update other systems they have for this information such as CRM’s to improve their existing data sets.

Value to Lightcast

• Unlocks a reason to use and buy Alumni Pathways for a suite of customers that have typically not purchased this kind of information before.

• This will bring us closer to the capabilities of our biggest competitors like SteppingBlocks and LiveAlumni who we lose some sales to for this reason.

• This work is a pre-requisite to moving away from the manual work that @Dave Wallace (Deactivated)’s CDOT team is doing to produce and securely transmit excel files that contain this contact information – once complete, we will experience time/cost savings of fully automating that piece.

Target User Role/Client/Client Category

Users/Buyers in enrollment, marketing, and advancement.

Delivery Mechanism

We expect to initially deliver this feature through exports and csv downloads from the Alumni Pathways vertical of the Analyst Platform. The ability to access this data will be controlled and accessible only to select users.

In future phases, this will, additionally, be delivered as one or more new reports/features in Alumni Pathways itself

Success Criteria & Metrics

Ultimate Definition of Done

• The Alumni Pathways database and API contain the relevant contact information for each profile/alumni.

• This information is able to be ingested by the Analyst platform.

• Alumni Pathways supports downloading PII data via exports and bulk downloads.

  • Additionally, based on research and scoping outcomes, future phases will offer new features to access this information in the tool supporting user’s needs.

• Proper security and privacy measures have been taken to conform with our legal requirements and safeguard customer data.

Definition of Done by PI (e.g. proposed distribution of work)

PI-6: see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K11u825jxt2gmtA2JmgxhRAbiHasYkYekfNnDi6T_JA/edit?usp=sharing

North Star Metric

Alumni Pathway’s current North Star Metric is Filtered Reports per Month by Account (as a proxy for answering institutional users' questions and supporting their work). We believe this feature will move that metric via:

• Providing additional report(s) to filter

• Being useful to users and groups at institutions who have not had a reason to use AP before. We expect this to increase both users at existing accounts and increase sales for Advancement buyers in particular.

• Adding value that attracts more accounts and higher retention (e.g. more opportunities to see/use this and other reports)

Our target improvements for this metric are:

• >25% more Filtered Reports per Month by Account within the first 3 months after the first feature is released

• The higher level of Filtered Reports per Month by Account is sustained (e.g. does not drop back to previous levels over time)

Aspects that are out of scope (of this phase)

In this phase we are not yet looking to build infrastructure to easily integrate this data with customers CRMs/other systems.

Additionally, there will be no API access to this data initially.

PART 2

Solution Description

This epic is planned to be worked on in phases to allow us to deliver optimal value to our customers.

Phase 1 (PI-6):

• Research and scope issues for building in PI-7:

  • User controls or limitations on which users can access PII/contact information. These should be able to be reactive to both customer wishes and security/privacy requirements.

  • Ability to download/export contact information for a target set of alumni

    • Through the data downloader (being done in this epic: Alumni Pathways: Customer Ability to Generate Excel Files)

    • Through exports. Either as an addition to existing exports, or, more likely, a separate export option in specific reports.

• Begin Product and User research into in-tool features supporting this data for customer workflows.

  • Early concepts include:

    • Contact list builder

    • Deep Dive report into target groups of alumni including individual record information

    • Reports for Alumni with recent changes to occupation, education, contact info, salary, or other notable updates.

    • Likely Donor lists. Including executives, high success individuals, potentially incorporate a future potential donor model.

Phase 2 (PI-7):

• Begin building issues scoped and groomed for user controls and contact info via downloads and exports.

• Research, scope, and groom issues based on user research for in-tool features supporting these use cases.

Phase 3 (PI-8 and maybe beyond):

• Continue and start building towards scoped issues groomed in previous phases to complete the epic.

• Continued research as progress is made to alter trajectory based on response.

Early Concepts (wireframes or mockups)

One early concept for how this might be implemented as an in-platform feature is as a contact list builder.

Open

One of the core pieces of functionality is including this information in our Data Downloader

Open

Another option is having the ability to export contact information right from reports where target groups of alumni have been filtered to. This option would only show up for select users with access to this data.

Open

Non-Functional Attributes & Usage Projections

Privacy/security implications

This is a very large concern for this epic. We have strict and specific requirements in data use, privacy, and security through our partnership with NSC and other regulations surrounding Personally Identifiable Information.

• We need to consider and carefully align to our FERPA and Clearinghouse data compliance requirements and corresponding privacy/security implications

• If our partnership with NSC were to end, we would need to make changes related to this and would lose some amount of PII data.

• Account for and take steps to comply with rules and regulations surrounding PII.

Performance characteristics

• Load times should be at least comparable to other Analyst packets & reports

• Usage (# of users, frequency of usage) is expected to be comparable to other Alumni Pathways reports, and much lower than the Education Analyst vertical at first – rising to comparable levels to Education Analyst over several years

Localization requirements

• Alumni Pathways is USA-only. If National Student Clearinghouse data is used in calculating the metrics to be stored, development for those calculations must be restricted to the USA only (due to security requirements in our partnership agreement with the Clearinghouse).

Mobile & accessibility requirements

• We need to meet or exceed the minimum requirements for the Analyst Platform generally and Alumni Pathways vertical specifically.

Dependencies

For this epic to be finished we must also complete our work on the Data Downloader being worked on in the following epic:
Alumni Pathways: Customer Ability to Generate Excel Files

Legal and Ethical Considerations

Just answer yes or no.

High-Level Rollout Strategies

This represents a major new feature for Alumni Pathways, and thus we would want to:

• Prototype concepts (pre-engineering) with customers and prospects to inform

  • Prioritization

  • Designs/user experience

  • Engineering specifications

• Prepare Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success in advance so that they are prepared to demo, promote, and support it, and also ready to relay feedback to the product for subsequent improvements

• Subsequently roll out to all customers

Risks

• Hosting and displaying PII information poses security and privacy risks that we will need to make sure we have locked down.

• FERPA and Clearinghouse data compliance requirements and corresponding privacy/security implications.

• Having this information in the platform could make institution’s security/IT teams more nervous requiring more hoops to jump through in the sales/support process. This could slow down sales, or put certain renewals at risk.

Open Questions

• What is the most effective way to deliver this information in-platform to fit user needs?

• What additional security requirements will schools ask us to complete/comply with?

• How do we ensure we are addressing all privacy/security concerns?

• How do we properly limit and control user access to alumni contact information for institutional preferences?

Complete with Engineering Teams

Estimated Costs

Direct Financial Costs

Are there direct costs that this feature entails? Dataset acquisition, server purchasing, software licenses, etc.?

Team Effort

Each team involved should give a general t-shirt size estimate of their work involved. As the epic proceeds, they can add a link to the Jira epic/issue associated with their portion of this work.