The Original 8
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 these founders felt that was only part of a bigger story.