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In 1999 a group of alumni directors from 8 private colleges and universities in the United States and Canada began working together to devise a rating system to give them, their constituents, and their university leadership a more in-depth measurement and benchmarking system for their alumni relations programs. For many years, the rate of annual giving by alumni to any given school in a single year has been the only way alumni relations programs were judged. If annual giving is up, the alumni must be happy, and therefore the alumni relations program must be working. But the members of PCUAD felt that was only part of a bigger story.
This small group began twice-annual meetings, organized purely through a sense of community and without formal structure. It was during this time (2002-2005) that the beginning of a common benchmarking standard took shape under the name "Minimum National Standards" (MNS).
As PCUAD grew from the original 8 to 36 members, so did the MNS benchmarking standards. MNS was cleaned up in 2003 and rebranded as ARAMP - the Alumni Relations Assessment and Benchmarking Program. Version 1 was released in 2004 with version 2 (a full rewrite) released close behind in 2005.
Today's ARAMP (3.0) is a sophisticated toolkit that allows alumni directors to compare themselves to prior year performance or against select peer institutions across over 200 individual data points. Rich charting and dashboarding tools make it fast and easy to select relevant data for inclusion in reports to stakeholders in alumni relations - university presidents, alumni boards, peers in advancement and similar constituencies.
ARAMP has been designed by this dedicated group of professional alumni directors to help other alumni directors and advancement professionals determine if the programs they run are fully developed, accurately measured, and ultimately evaluated as successful. Every member of PCUAD has used this data to justify staffing, budget and programming changes that benefit their alumni and in turn their institution. PCUAD's members are committed to continuous improvement of the benchmark survey, the software used to store and aggregate the results and their own professional development as alumni relations practitioners.
