What community can charge a US$100,000 membership fee and expect eager applicants to climb all over each other to pay it? Ivy League universities, of course.
So its no surprise that they - and a host of other costly American colleges - have been targeted by companies hoping to make a profit off alumni allegiance to the alma maters. Several start-ups and established businesses are already building exclusive online communities to cater to the career and networking goals of this upwardly mobile set.
Just last week, 35-year-old alumni-directory company Bernard C. Harris Publishing debuted its first alumni site for Olivet College to be followed by a new one every week until the end of the year. Already signed up are Berkeley's Haas School of Business, Cornell's School of Engineers, and Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
BranchOut Virtual Communities, which has run an "Ivy Plus" networking site for over a year, snagged a contract to create the alumni sites for 28 Jesuit colleges (a total of 2.4 million potential users) and will begin registering users for the flagship Fordham University site on Monday.
And today, Up-Set, producers of Our Square, an online community for graduates of 17 elite universities, shipped 400 "reunion in a box" kits to Ivy League class leaders. The package, priced at $629 per class, attempts to simplify the unwieldy class reunion planning process onto a single bulletin board-like site.
The ease of converting educated, high-income alumni into communities is part of these companies' attraction to the business. Graduates feel a natural loyalty to their schools and most want to stay in touch when their lives disperse them across the globe after graduation, said Paul Gangi, general manager of online communities for Bernard Harris. "Rather than a community that starts from interest, these are people who already know each other who can built on that connection virtually," he added.
To create its sites, Harris is leveraging its long-term role as publisher of printed alumni directories, serving 80 percent to 90 percent of all American universities. In addition to permanent email addresses, indexed job listings and bulletin boards, the cornerstone of the sites are electronic alumni directories, which cost $19.95 for six months of access. The sites themselves are wisely linked from the colleges' own homepages, which helps the company market them in tandem with the universities, noted Gangi.
Expanding the professional and social network for alumni is the central goal, said Lee Newman, head of BranchOut. But his company prides itself on the out-right ambition of its members to climb the social ladder. When they sign up, new members enter a detailed personal profile which they expect will lead others to them when looking for work or contacts.
"The Harris model is dumping a name into a database," Newman said, "and if the alumni directory is outdated you have to cold call. But [at BranchOut], when you look for somebody, you know that they want to network."
James Marciano, who runs Up-Set, is slightly more romantic about his service. "The graduates at these universities like to travel and marry each other," he explained. "If I bring together two people, that's worth the $250,000" investment capital his company has garnered.
In a strange twist for the alumni who have spent as much as $100,000 on their education, most of the services are free. Harris plans to bring in the cash with advertising and transactional services like ticket sales for school events. BranchOut makes money from the career services centers and executive search companies, which pay them to post their jobs. And Up-Set has started developing communities for other companies like the Associated Blind to supplement its school business.
"[These companies] have read their copy of NetGain and they're out to make a fortune," said virtual community pioneer Howard Rheingold. While the instinct to extend the university atmosphere to their alumni is a good one, Rheingold - whose own online community, E-Minds, hit the financial skids and was recently bought out - is skeptical that the businesses can survive.
"Their business problem is that when they prove that it works, why wouldn't the colleges take it over?" he asked. "They think that they are going to get this stuff to work in six months, 18 months, but you won't build a group that you can milk financially for years. They'd better have their financing in place."
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
