Building a University-Wide Community: New York University’s Violet Network Story

Alright. Let's get started. So good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you don't know me, I'm Morgan Walbert. I'm PeopleGrove's Vice President of Campus Partnerships, and I am super excited to be here leading this conversation. Before we get started, I wanted to share a few housekeeping notes. So everyone is joining us on mute today, but we do really want to hear from you. So please drop any questions you have into the Q&A at the bottom of your screen as they come to mind throughout the session. We'll be saving roughly the last ten minutes or so of our time together to go through the questions, so keep them coming. We'll get to as many as we can. But today, we're talking about something that I know is really top of mind for many institutions, which is: how do you create a truly connected alumni community across a decentralized university? So at institutions like New York University, who we're talking to today, engagement happens in so many different places. Right? Across schools and colleges, alumni relations teams, career services. We've got regional clubs. We've got volunteer programs. We've got mentorship programs, and lots and lots of other opportunities for alumni to engage with us. And each one of those groups, I want to say, is doing really incredible work, but bringing all of these efforts together into one cohesive community is a challenge many universities are actively trying to solve. So I'm excited about today because you're going to hear directly from the team at NYU about the journey that they've been on over these past several years to build the Violet Network, which is a university-wide engagement ecosystem that supports their students, alumni, volunteers, and their schools while still allowing NYU communities to maintain their own unique identities. So we'll talk about how they built internal buy-in, how they scaled adoption across campus, and all of the lessons that they've learned along the way so that you can take those back to your own campuses. So with that being said, let's get started by introducing today's panelists. So I am super excited to be joined by three fantastic colleagues from NYU, each of whom is going to bring their own unique perspective on how the Violet Network has evolved over the years. So first, we have Tim Valentine, Executive Director of School Alumni Relations at NYU. Hi, Tim. Tim's been really instrumental in shaping NYU's broader alumni engagement strategy and has helped lead the vision for creating a more connected alumni community across the university. Next is Jesse Tompkins, Assistant Director of Volunteer Engagement. So Jesse has been deeply involved in growing and expanding Violet Network across campus, partnering with schools, with departments, with volunteer leaders to build adoption and bring new communities onto the platform. And joining us from NYU's Stern School of Business is Sarah Beth Watson, Associate Director of Alumni Relations for the School of Business. So Sarah will share what it's been like to create a customized experience for the Stern community while still benefiting from being part of a larger university-wide network. So thank you to all of our panelists for being here today, and I'm looking forward to the conversation. But before we get to that, to kick us off, I'd like everyone joining us today to think about a question that I think really sets the stage for our discussion, which is: what becomes possible for your institution when alumni engagement stops being something that happens in silos and starts being something that connects everyone? Right? So at most institutions, as we said, alumni engagement doesn't live in one office. It's happening across the institution in really countless ways. Each team involved has different priorities, serves different audiences, but we're often really working towards what I would call the same overarching goal, right, which is building stronger lifelong connections with alumni. So the big challenge that we all know is that those efforts are so easily fragmented. Right? Alumni end up navigating multiple systems. Staff don't always have visibility into what's happening across campus, and opportunities for really interesting collaboration can really easily be missed. So today's conversation is really about what it looks like to take a different approach. Right? So over the past several years, NYU has been building the Violet Network into a university-wide engagement ecosystem that brings together the entire NYU community while, like we said, still allowing the space for highly affiliated groups. So with that, we're going to take a brief look into NYU's journey before diving into the conversation with Tim. So just to set the stage, NYU has partnered with PeopleGrove since 2019 to power Violet Network, their university-wide engagement community. For those familiar with our different hubs, as we call them, Violet Network utilizes our Engagement Hub. It actually utilizes three Engagement Hubs, as the Violet Network is a really great example of what we sometimes call internally a multi-hub system. So it consists of a space for the entire NYU community as well as two distinct school-based places, one for the School of Professional Studies and one for the Stern School of Business, who we'll hear from shortly. So today, it connects more than 20,000 students and 55,000 alumni across the institution and really continues to grow every day. And to me, what is especially impressive isn't just the scale, which is very impressive. It's how the network has evolved over time to support the NYU ecosystem. So with that context in mind, Tim, I would love to start with you. So I know you and your team have been thinking about alumni engagement at this institutional level for quite some time, and I know the Violet Network has evolved pretty significantly since it first launched in 2019, immediately prior to COVID. There was a lot that happened. Right? So when you think back to where NYU was before this initiative, what challenge were you trying to solve, and what made you realize there was an opportunity to create something more connected across the university? Of course. Thank you so much, Morgan. Nice to see you. Nice to see everybody. Hello from New York City. And first of all, I mean, 70,000 people connecting online — it's just staggering. And it's impressive across the board what our team has done and continues to do. And so just looking at those numbers — that's why I had to give it a little raise the roof because that was incredible. And what I can say to start this off is when we selected PeopleGrove and went in with a great partnership with you, it was purely as a mentor program platform. That is what we thought we were doing. We were meeting one need is what we thought. We were meeting a need of our trustees and our alumni who are saying, we want to mentor students, and we were saying, how can we do that at scale? Because it's happening in multiple layers and multiple pockets, but we needed to be able to bring something that would unify it at scale. But what we've come to learn is that we could leverage the Violet Network, PeopleGrove, in so many other ways, very much different than just a mentor platform. So what I think everyone will hear today is much less about careers and mentor programming than how we utilize this platform as an online community for the NYU family as much as possible. And New York University is one of the largest private universities in the United States, with around 60,000 current students, about half undergrad, half grad. Yes. We have 30,000 graduate students every year, and we have over 700,000 living alumni. So to have 55,000 of the 700,000 in a platform is truly incredible. When we look at the average number of alumni who are engaged at most schools, it's under 10%. So that's the average number reported by CASE — that we would have, you know, 70,000 alums that we were engaging across the year. And if a lot of those people are on this platform, that's really incredible. So it's pretty staggering to look at those numbers. We also have a big challenge. We — as New York University, our largest space on campus, as a New York City-based institution, holds a thousand people. So where would we be able to bring more than a thousand people together at one time to connect? Nowhere here. And so we don't have a football stadium. Right? So it's very different what challenges we have. We have 15 schools and colleges and numerous institutes that are very decentralized, or naturally decentralized. We're a mega institution. So how do we connect a graduate student in our Institute of Fine Arts with a graduate student in art history at the Steinhardt School? How do we connect an alum from real estate at the Stern School of Business with an alum from construction management at our engineering school with an alum from the law school who works in real estate? Where — what is the mechanism, and how can we do that at scale? So we needed this online space to extend past our campus walls and allow students and alumni to connect across continents and time zones. And so the opportunity for alumni to give back and volunteer when they can't even make the journey from New Jersey to Manhattan. Anybody on this call who's been to New York could understand that even our colleagues really love a remote day if they live in New Jersey, because the commute from New Jersey to Manhattan or Brooklyn to Manhattan can be an adventure on any given day. So our size and complexity offer so much opportunity that we needed a central tool. We needed a tool that schools and units could use to manage their communities, communicate with students and alums, build connections. We had a regular meeting with our schools and units to sort of learn about those needs, but the most important thing that I think any school and institution should do is create a focus group that brings together student affairs, career services, alumni relations, and the schools and units in one conversation to think about the connection between students and alumni. And so we did that across the year. We had a regular meeting of a focus group of representatives from all those units to think about the holistic version of where do alumni and students connect, what pockets, and how can we scale that, unify it, and give tools and resources. We also have 100 alumni clubs in three regional, affinity, and career. But we don't have bandwidth to add more than that unless we are going to be adding staff. So resource-wise, we really needed a way to use our resources the best way. And so we can have volunteers. We can have department staff manage clubs and groups within the Violet Network, and without increasing our staffing. It's not extra work. It's actually just giving these people something that they want or have, and that is access to information. So my last point here before we kick into what we actually did — how many people out there hear the question about access to information? The list of NYU alumni with contact information is our office's most precious resource, and it's our job to maintain that contact information on that database, but also protect it at all costs so that our alums, students aren't just hearing from anybody and everybody under the sun and getting, you know, mass emails and mass contacted. So how many times might you have heard, like, can I get the list of alums from a faculty member, a department chair, even another alum? And so this — where it's going beyond being a mentor platform — is giving us an alumni directory. It is access to information that is in a space that's controlled and available to anyone that we can give it to. So we needed that space where alumni could be opted in and want to be contacted on a specific topic, on a group based on their career, their department, and so on. We can give academic departments group access. When a faculty member says, I need a speaker for a class, we can say, go create an account on the Violet Network and search it yourself. You can find an alum to speak to. When an academic adviser or a career adviser wants to be able to find an alum in a specific career field or a specific location around the world, they can go on themselves and sort of do the search with a student in real time to find that informational interview. So we've really found that this was us listening and trying to create something at scale. So our goals started as a mentor platform, but it became quickly an alumni directory and a community-building space. And as you mentioned, the pandemic reshaped how we all work and connect, and it really reshaped our work in alumni relations and how we engage alums. And so the Violet Network has become a solid element for our success. So, again, I suggest you build that bridge between student affairs, alumni relations, and career services, have a conversation about where those things all intersect, and then go back and scale out. Thank you, Tim. That is so insightful, and I really appreciate you sharing the vision for where you wanted this to be, or as the vision developed. But I also think, like, vision is one thing, and bringing that entire institution along with you on the journey is another. And so that's why I want to bring Jesse in here to talk a little bit about how NYU functionally approached strategy around adoption across campus, because that is also something we hear often as a concern. You know, if we try to bring the entire campus along with us on this journey, will they join us? Or will we just be another one of the silos? Right? And how do we do that? And I think you've been super successful with that at NYU. So with that, I'm going to pull up the three-year roadmap that I'm excited that you're sharing. So looking at this, I think it's clear adoption didn't happen immediately. Right? This was a long-term plan. So can you talk us through, Jesse, how NYU approached building this internal buy-in and what that journey looked like over those first few years after you first brought the system on in 2019? Of course. Thank you, Morgan, and thank you, Tim, for setting the context for what led us here and setting the stage for my journey at NYU. I started my job in 2024, working as the Assistant Director for Volunteer Engagement in the alumni relations office. And most of my job is actually not with PeopleGrove. It's working with our alumni clubs and communities. So I work with a portfolio of our clubs, helping them plan events in the tri-state area. And then 20%-ish of my job is being the program manager for alumni relations and the Violet Network. So when I started my job, the Violet Network was in sort of a place of stagnation. There had been a lot of turnover in terms of staff. The pandemic was a great place for people to connect online, but we were kind of getting out of that and thinking, how can we use the Violet Network strategically to meet our current needs? And so I felt as, you know, this was 20% of my job that it could become very ambiguous, very overwhelming, and I worked with my supervisor to make sure that that did not happen and that we developed a solid plan that would get us to a manageable place given that we have limited staff. So we developed this three-year adoption roadmap to get us in a good place. The first year was really focused on educating — or reeducating — our community about the platform, and also kind of figuring out what the issues were. We recognized that we had an engagement problem, that a lot of alumni were creating profiles but then not returning to the site, just because they didn't know what all there was to offer. Students were reaching out to alumni and not getting a response. So we really started to think, how can we make sure people know what this is, that they can come in with a goal and accomplish that goal? So we started by upgrading in the first year to the new user interface, working with our partners at PeopleGrove to make that a reality, as well as launching a marketing campaign to our community to reeducate them about what the platform is and how it works. We rebranded. We got new marketing assets to use for that communication strategy. And then year two was really focused on taking action. We focused primarily on revitalizing the groups on the platform as well as consolidating existing mentorship programs across the university onto the platform, as well as launching that communication plan. And then year three, which we're heading into this year, will really be focused on scaling that, making sure we're continuing to provide best practices on managing groups and mentor programs, and making sure that folks are kind of taking ownership of their individual parts on the platform. So we've spread the responsibility across multiple campus partners and really trusting them and empowering them to manage their own groups and mentor programs and educate their own communities. Yeah. That's super helpful to know, and I love that journey as well because I think, you know, especially for our partners who have platforms for ten-plus years, right, your community changes, your students change, leadership on your campus changes. It's not uncommon for platforms to go through phases. Right? And I think seeing how you all really saw the value in the Violet Network and were able to make some strategic tweaks to what you were doing and are now seeing so much more success is really a story I think many folks on this call are going to resonate with and understand — some of which are in different phases, some of which are where you are right now or where you were. So I think it's great to hear that. I love what you're saying about building support across multiple stakeholders, how that's helped you with the other classic problem of, you know, we all have a limited number of staff. How are we going to manage this? Right? And so as a follow-up question, I'd love to hear — I know that you've tried multiple strategies, I'm sure, and some have been successful and some haven't when thinking about the stakeholder engagement. So if you could give folks one piece of advice or maybe one lesson learned about the stakeholder engagement side, is there anything that you'd share with us? I think I would say, you know, we all operate in our own worlds and in our own silos, and the most important thing is to get people in a room talking and sharing ideas. So what we've done is created a monthly stakeholder meeting where everyone who operates a group, a mentorship program, or is an administrator on the platform gets together and has an opportunity to share ideas, talk about what they're doing on the platform, what's been successful, what's been challenging. I think that's the most important thing. So even though we're existing across campus in all these different areas, we're still getting together and seeing that we're doing the same sorts of efforts. Yeah. Like, ensuring there's that communication. I know I hear from other clients too — there's also a lot of information sharing. This is going really well. We tried this, and it didn't work the way we expected. Does anybody have any ideas? Just kind of making sure everyone feels supported and feels like they are part of this one NYU team even though they're sitting in really diverse areas of the campus. Does that feel correct? Absolutely. Yes. I love that. So we're going to move on and talk a little bit about this visual, which I love because I think it does a really good job of bringing the story to life. Because I think one thing that really stands out to me about the Violet Network and some of our other larger full-campus platforms is that the intentional Violet Network work is not to replace these existing programs and communities. It's to serve as this one singular — I'll term it — the connective tissue, right, between these. So whether it's a mentorship program, alumni clubs you mentioned, you know, school communities, volunteer groups, they're all part of this one larger ecosystem. So can you talk a little bit — you know, we have been talking about stakeholder management. Right? But I think the other side of this is sometimes the tension with groups that really need to maintain their own goals, their own identity, and sometimes have very distinct ways of engaging their own audiences. So can you talk a little bit on the strategic side of things? You know, when you go out to engage with these folks who have all of these different goals and needs and norms sometimes, how have you been able to do that and ensure that the Violet Network does serve all of these different units and areas? Absolutely. So I'll say that this ecosystem developed kind of organically. Our goal was not really to make it a hub of alumni clubs, mentorship programs, school communities, etc. But it's what happened when we started educating people about what the platform does. People would come to us and say, hey, we have this group, and we don't have a place for it. They're using WhatsApp, but we'd rather be in a centralized space under the NYU umbrella. And we say, hey, we have this platform that does this. Let me educate you about it. The goal is not to reinvent the wheel or tell people how they should run a mentor program or a group or a community, but rather to provide the resources to allow them to do it on their own. So really, it's just been a game of educating people about PeopleGrove and what it's capable of, and then they see where it fits their needs. And what has resulted as we've educated the community is that this ecosystem has developed. So we've consolidated existing mentorship programs across the university on the platform. We have 8 currently hosted on the platform with more coming. And yes, here's some examples of those programs. So you can see they're not all under our office. We have a couple on there that are run through our alumni clubs. Then we partner with NYU schools to run programs that we're already running, but now they're just hosted on the platform, as well as additional campus partners outside of alumni relations, including the Wasserman Center for Career Development and even our campus in Shanghai — which is another one of NYU's four-year degree-granting campuses — is running their executive mentorship program on there. So really proud to bring those programs and host them on the Violet Network. Super exciting. Yeah. I think this is a great example just seeing the different names represented here. And two things I know that I hear in my conversations: one is flexibility and customization. Right? When you go out to these different teams, if you try to tell them, here is the exact template, one-size-fits-all, the conversation's going to end pretty quick. Right? So I think one thing that clients like NYU value about PeopleGrove is that within the same system, there can be a lot of flexibility for different groups. You know, none of these mentorship programs needs to look the same. None of them needs to operate with the exact same goals or matching or, you know, timeline or anything like that. So we often hear that that's, you know, a real benefit to have in your pocket when you go out to do this kind of socialization across campus — is how much it can really look and feel like your specific individual units. I'm wondering, Jesse — and honestly, this is a question for Jesse, Tim, or Sarah Beth, maybe more for Jesse and Tim — when we think about these programs up here, are you hearing anything from your community? I think one thing that we often see is that, you know, your alumni might have many affiliations. If I look at this list of mentorship programs, there could be a single alum who maybe qualifies for three or four of them. Right? And prior to a singular system like this, it can be really tough for alumni to find all of these individual opportunities. So having them centralized in one space where they have more opportunity to say, hey, I'm a dentistry alum, but I was also a first-gen student. Right? And I also, you know, now live in tech. That would be a really interesting person. I would love to talk to them. But I'm curious if you're hearing anything from your alumni, your students, or just the community in general about the impact it has made on them to be able to see all of these opportunities in one space. Absolutely. Yes. We're definitely getting the feedback that it's great to have opportunities available in one space. But I would also add that the main positive feedback I get is from actually our staff partners and our volunteers who are serving as administrators on their programs and on the platform. It's really taken the load off of their plate and made it easier to run their programs, and easier for me to train folks on how to run their program because they're all using a similar sort of process. And that's something I would add — is that both volunteers who are alumni giving their time and full-time staff members are able to use this feature and have fun with it. I would say the mentor matching process really helps them and takes the time element of — makes it more manageable. I'll jump in too, Jesse, to add to what you're saying. There's the — larger the institution, the more the politics, and the larger number of people, the harder it is to get people to see things. So, you know, we have alums that — every school would have this — where you have alums who really care about NYU. Go NYU. We don't even have NYU chants, but, you know, there are people that, like, care about NYU, and then there's people that only care about their department. They did their program, their school, they went to the Tisch School of the Arts, and that's all they know, and that's the only email that they're going to — right? They'll open an email, their alumni newsletter from the Stern School. They'll open their alumni email from whatever. And so we have to think about it on all the layers. That is one of the reasons why Jesse has been so successful, and you can see that we have an assortment of multi-collaborative mentor programs as a result of that. And so — I always say this — that you have to build your pyramid scheme. So you might be the alumni person, and maybe 5% of your job is your PeopleGrove account and trying to get people to get active and get in there. And so you need to build then layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of people that you can impact and motivate and champion under that. You can't expect to send a mass email to everyone and expect them to respond and do it. You need champions at multiple layers. And so that's where — we are lucky in that each of our schools has an alumni person or an alumni team, so we started there. We knew that we couldn't even impact student affairs and the career center as much as possible because we own the platform. Even though they're our partner, we don't manage them. So we still need to get buy-in. So then, okay, well, now the PeopleGrove and Violet Network is being mentioned and utilized in the school newsletters. I'm sort of also answering some of the questions in the Q&A, where it's like, yeah, the way to get out there is you have to find multiple avenues and pockets and layers and champions and get people really excited about it — as I think the other aspect to what your question was hitting, Morgan. Yeah. Perfect, Tim. And thank you. We'll have some time for Q&A, but I appreciate you bringing what we're hearing from the community here into the discussion. And actually, this is a fantastic segue because we're going to talk to Sarah now. So we talked about the university-wide strategy. Right? But I'll share one question we hear from institutions all the time, and also particularly often from business schools: if we move to the centralized forum, right, can our individual schools and programs still maintain that identity that, as you mentioned, Tim, is deeply important to them and deeply important to alumni? So, Sarah, I'm excited to bring you into the conversation because I think Stern is a really great example of how these two things can coexist. So I would love to invite you to talk a little bit about how Stern has been able to create this distinct experience for your alumni, your students, your community while still very much being a part of the larger Violet Network. Yeah. Happy to share more about this. For us on the Stern end, it was really important to have our own hub because our identity really is so distinct. Our Stern alumni and students, especially at the graduate level, feel very strongly connected to Stern and not always necessarily at the NYU-wide level, thinking about how we have so many different programs, like our part-time, for example. They're going to work all day, coming to evening. They're spending all day in the Stern building and Stern classrooms and maybe don't have the capacity to really tap into all the resources, the events that are being hosted on campus across NYU. Our undergraduates definitely have a stronger affinity towards both NYU and Stern — kind of that more balanced. But because Stern is such a strong identity as its own, having our own hub where we had the ability to customize it to meet our own needs was really important. And another piece to that is we do operate very differently from Central NYU. We have our own alumni relations team. We put on our own events and have our own student clubs and even a different career portal. So a lot of different pre-existing platforms that we were working with before even launching our Stern Network. And so being able to really customize the features and programs on Stern Network to really meet the specific needs of our alumni and students was really so valuable to us. That's super helpful. And I think you bring up a great point. Right? But I also imagine that there are Stern undergrads that are very much affiliated with NYU, or folks that are definitely kind of flowing between the hubs and being able to choose their level of engagement and choose their own adventure, right, when it comes to this. Is that something you all are seeing — that there is some crossover? Like, you definitely have the Stern-only folks, but are you also seeing crossover with Violet Network and the rest of the NYU community on the platform? Absolutely. We do have a lot of students and alumni that want to be part of both. And I think having that kind of cohesive experience where it's essentially one platform where they can toggle between the hubs makes it much easier for them to be able to use the Stern hub. But then if they want to connect more widely across all of NYU, they can easily do that as well. And it is a different experience. Violet Network offers a lot of, you know, the mentorship programs, a lot of career tools more so than what we offer. So we don't want to take away those resources that they absolutely should be able to have. And the NYU network is truly such an exceptional global network that's huge, and it really offers a lot of opportunity to network cross-school, cross-discipline, and a lot of our alumni want that opportunity as well as being able to network very specifically and very intentionally across Stern fields as well. That makes sense. I think the goal here is to be a value add to both sides, not take away, and give everyone the opportunity to be as engaged as fully as they choose to be. Right? And I love the way you're approaching that. But I think, you know, also something that's interesting is how is Stern's space different? Right? What did you choose, or what are you leaning into that matters for the Stern community? I know we have a fair amount of folks on the call that are in similar roles to you, Sarah Beth, whether at a business school. There are a lot of — shout out to all the business folks on the call. But there are a lot of other schools, right, that also consider things like this as well — engineering, med schools, law schools, folks that tend to have a more specific affiliated experience. Right? So can you talk a little bit about how you have customized the Stern experience and why these particular elements have been meaningful for your alumni? Absolutely. So starting off, with one of the main features of the platform is the ability to connect with each other and message. We've customized a lot of our filters to be very specific to the Stern experience. And one of those examples is with our industry expertise. As a business school, I'm sure many of you can imagine that finance is a particularly big industry. And so on Stern Network, we have 17 different finance-related industry fields that they can choose from, whereas on Violet Network, it's a little more higher-level, all-encompassing, and less opportunity to really drill down and get very specific. And we have, of course, many other fields as well. We also have fields that are very specific to the student experience, such as student orientation groups. So if people are looking to connect with maybe former classmates as well — could just be purely social or it could be networking — there's a lot of Stern fields that, I think if we were to offer all of those on Violet Network and having all the schools do that as well, it could become this never-ending list of fields that they could choose from. And then the filters being so customized to the Stern experience — it also is a great opportunity for faculty and staff at Stern to be able to use those to seek alumni for potential opportunities to volunteer and give back, such as speaking in a classroom. So I know it was mentioned earlier in this presentation, but really encouraging all of our user types, including faculty and staff, to use the platform is really big for us. And then on the alumni group and event side, we've customized our network to have our groups be only available to our alumni and not our students, since our students already had pre-existing platforms to use. So we've mirrored our alumni groups to match the work we do on our alumni relations team — to match the regional groups and affinity groups that we support and have a digital space for them. And so that has been big for us, especially with a lot of our smaller regions, which we might not have a lot of staff capacity to fully support. The Stern Network platform has allowed us to really empower our alumni to be able to use the tools at hand to build emails and event pages and post on discussion boards to be able to really promote the events themselves with very little staff involvement. So it allows them to post more and have a quicker turnaround. And in a perfect world, we'd love to support everyone and all of our alumni. But again, budgetary reasons or staff capacity are some constraints that we're really working with. So that's been huge for us. And we also, because we kind of have full control over our hub, we can get creative with our alumni groups and which ones we offer. And one example is we added — we have a lifelong learning program, which is a really, really popular program where alumni can come back and audit courses for free each semester. And we ended up adding a group on our platform really to drive more registrations onto the platform. We use it as kind of a way to get alerts about new classes launching, and kind of that first notification. And we've really seen that drive a lot of new interest in the platform, and they can ask questions on the discussion board and connect. And it gives us a place to really post about opportunities as well that we might not want to open up to the entire community because we have limited capacity. And then kind of the last area I wanted to touch on is our class notes tab. So we customized our platform to focus in on having a class notes piece. We often get a lot of alumni and students reaching out because they want to promote a lot of the opportunities. It could be businesses that they created or books that they've launched or promotions or anything like that. And our class notes tab has given us the ability to encourage them to self-promote. And in addition to all of the alumni self-promoting, we do regularly take updates that we find from alumni in the news. We use, like, Google search alerts, and we'll pull in a list of alumni, and we'll promote them in kind of a digest-style post on a regular cadence. And our hope there is that it'll inspire users on the platform to see all these cool things that our Stern community is doing and maybe inspire them to reach out to particular users so we can link to their profiles. And hopefully, it kind of creates this sort of circular effort of just connecting. So it's an ongoing process. We're always looking for more items and ways to customize our platform, but I think these are a few of the key areas. Yeah. Thanks, Sarah Beth. And it's helpful, I think, to talk about the overall vision, but also some very specific intentional strategies that are working for your group. And this is going to look different at every school, but I think some of the things you've talked about here — including leveraging volunteers, as well as still having that overarching viewpoint, making these really specific customizations so your community can find each other around ways that you know they want to connect — are strategies that we see across the board in our clients that have the most high-performing platforms. So I'm so glad you chose to talk about a few of those. And anyway, I think your perspective really brings the conversation full circle. Right? And before we open it up to questions, I'm going to pause on this slide for a moment and reflect a little bit on some takeaways that we hear from NYU's journey while we share a quick poll with you. So first takeaway is that building a connected community starts with a shared foundation. Right? So by bringing departments, schools, alumni communities, everything within one volunteer hub, NYU has made it easier for people to connect while still allowing each group to serve its own audience. Right? Second, as we talked about with Jesse, engagement isn't one-size-fits-all. And we also heard this from Sarah. You know, the most successful strategies balance institution-wide success and institutional needs with experiences that feel really relevant and very personal to your community. Right? And I think for me, and for many, the biggest takeaway is that it's also a long-term investment. Right? Violet Network didn't become what it is today in a snap. There's so much thoughtful planning, so much building of campus partnerships, and a willingness also that I really see from this team to expand over time — to think about new opportunities, to continue to constantly evaluate the platform, think, is it serving our needs right now? Has our community grown and changed? And are we moving with it? That I really see here from the NYU team, that I would really advise as a best practice to take away from this. So I hope this has given everyone a few ideas back to your own institution as you think about building stronger connections across your campus community. And I think now we're going to open it up for some Q&A. We've got a bunch of questions. I know we're a little bit tighter on time than we had hoped, but we're going to do our best here. And if you haven't submitted your question, please go ahead. I'm going to ask a couple that I find really interesting here. I'll leave it up to the NYU team who wants to take this. So — someone's asking about community standards. You know, as you think about a one-NYU community, is there any — I don't want to say restrictions, but any kind of standardized base that you're asking, let's say, all of your partners to agree to when it comes to things like groups or mentorship? Or are you really allowing each team to set their own standards of what their involvement will look like? So for groups, we have sort of a group guidebook that just requires folks to meet a certain minimum amount of posts and have at least two active administrators on their group. And then we share best practices with our stakeholders for what to post and how to boost engagement, what we found to be successful. But other than that, we really kind of let people run their groups on their own. And then mentorship programs is kind of similar. We just expect that they are operating their mentorship program annually. And if we see that it's stagnating or not being active, then we will readdress whether or not they continue with their program slot. Okay. That's super helpful, Jesse. Kind of similar to that, this is a great question from Melanie Armstrong. When you train stakeholders on campus or when you're having these stakeholder conversations, what was the most effective way to share this information with them and get buy-in? So she's asking: did you record short videos? Did you have in-person meetings? Did you provide lots of documents? You know, what got them to engage? Great question. I feel like I sort of became an expert on PeopleGrove myself. I spent a lot of time just really familiarizing myself with the platform, and then I did a lot of meetings with people. I did record some and share that way, but I found it most helpful to actually sit down with people and walk them through what all the platform can do because I think people zone in on one aspect. Like, it's an alumni directory, or we can run a mentorship program here or a group. But when people see everything the platform can do, I think they're more likely to buy into something. So typically, I'll just walk them through the top navigation bar on PeopleGrove, what each of the features does, and what I have found most useful. I find that leading with an authentic story about my own experience is what has been most successful. That is so helpful, Jesse. Anything you'd add to that, Sarah Beth, kind of internally at Stern or seeing similar things? I agree that those in-person meetings are really helpful. I think sometimes campus partners will reach out with a specific need, but then there's multiple ways we could potentially meet that need on the platform. And so being able to talk it out and hear what some limitations are and what some positives are, it really makes it less black-and-white than if we were just to share it like a recording. But I do think that a combined approach is really helpful — like having a meeting, but then following up to share a lot of other resources. Like, we do have guides that we can share that they can reference, like recorded webinars and things like that. So I think that multiple-tool approach. I love that. And shout out to Tim in the chat, or in the Q&A, answering questions. I appreciate you. And actually just answered one that I was going to ask you to talk a little bit about if you want to bring it up, which was — I think this is a great question. There's a question: was there any pushback from campus partners when you were thinking about adopting this network, and were there any overarching concerns that you really had to address when you were kind of — I don't want to say coming down from on high and saying this is the plan — but, you know, when you were sharing this internally and asking people to get on board. I know you typed an answer, but I'd love for you to talk about it a little bit if that's okay. I can summarize the answer, and it's related to what you were just saying, which is getting more people on board. The biggest challenge of any platform that is not Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn is getting people on board. Right? And you've got to get the most amount of people on board. And so that is what our challenge continues to be. I'm not saying everybody is. And the more people that we get on board, the more the numbers grow. So you can see that we've really worked on that. And important to note, there was very little pushback. The biggest pushback was just maintaining identity — that each of the schools wanted to ensure that they could maintain their own identity and affinity within the larger scale. So at an institution as big as NYU, each school wants to have their own identity and communication. And, you know, our deans at NYU act as presidents at smaller schools. They think of themselves in that sort of way. And so we just have to sort of make sure that we're playing in the field altogether and still meeting everyone's needs. And that's why it was allowed when we first adopted this that any school that wanted to have their own hub within the hub, that that would work. And we didn't really focus too much on that, but PeopleGrove has done a great job addressing that need for us and other large institutions so that when a user goes in, they can go into the larger Violet Network and then toggle into the Stern Network and have access to both as an alum. So they can both have their identity, have connection to their alumni groups from their business school, also have connection to the all-school alumni groups, all-university alumni groups, all in one place. And I think that encourages more interaction. But it really goes down to thinking about that pyramid scheme, and your first group of people to sell on this platform is the faculty, the academic advisers, the student affairs team, the Wasserman staff, and that's where we had to restart. That's where Jesse was like, alright, let's get everybody back on the same page. Let's all have our goals out there and all get behind the same goals. And then we moved forward, and then we went to the next layer, which is more faculty, staff, advisers, people out there in the fields, alumni, volunteers. Then we went to the next layer, which is, like, all alumni and all students. So you have to just keep going down these layers. You cannot jump to the big layer. It's not going to be easy unless you have a huge team. Right? But I venture to say very few of us have enough people. So you have to start — if you're a one-person or a very small group, build up and create the access across campus. I love that, Tim. And I think what we hear sometimes is that, honestly, rather than pushback, a lot of people on campus want this. A lot of people see the value in it. It is just hard sometimes to know who is going to own it. You know, who is going to take the first step, who is going to take overall responsibility on campus. We see that most often, I'll say, from career services teams and from alumni teams. So even then, it's a challenge. And I think sometimes those teams anticipate more pushback than there actually is, and the response is more, "oh great, someone else has taken on the big project, and I can just own my mentorship program in it or I can just own my group." Is that kind of the attitude that you found at NYU when you became the ones to lead this project? Absolutely. I think Jesse has done a great job of really saying, oh, you want a group? You want a mentor program? Great. We'll educate you. We'll teach you how to do it. Then you do have to do the work, though. You have to run it. You have to own it. Same with Sarah Beth and the volunteers at Stern. You want to have a space for your community based upon your career field or based upon your specific niche? Great. We'll provide this online space for you and push people and drive people there, but you have to still own it. And so we have to, again, have those layers of champions within. Wonderful. Well, thank you all so much. I want to, again, extend a sincere thank you to Tim, to Jesse, to Sarah for sharing your experiences and giving us this really helpful, truly behind-the-scenes look at NYU's journey. We really appreciate your time and your willingness to share what you've learned with us. And also a huge thank you to everyone who has joined us today. There are a lot of ways to spend forty-five — fifty-one minutes, I'll say. I apologize for going over — fifty-one minutes of your day with us, and we are very grateful that you chose to spend it here. Before we go, I would like to invite everyone here to join us for our next PeopleGrove webinar. It's on Wednesday, July 8th at 2 PM Eastern. We're going to be taking a first look at new findings from the 2026 National Alumni Survey — so I think very relevant for this group — and exploring how volunteer engagement, which is something that was brought up a lot on this call, can serve as a leading indicator of alumni engagement and then later giving. Right? So the session's entitled "The Alumni Giving Signal: Volunteering Signals Engagement and Giving Potential," and we're going to share some updates from the National Alumni Survey before it's actually publicly released. So you'll get a sneak peek here. You can register by visiting our website or scanning the QR code on your screen. Just one last big thank you from us to everyone for joining, and we hope to see you at a future PeopleGrove event. Have a wonderful rest of your day.