Calling All FIRST Alumni!

[Lydia Johnston]

Hello all! My name is Lydia and I was one of the Dean's List winners for this year. Yesterday, we had lunch with Dean Kamen, and he assigned us the homework from 2009--to collect all of the FIRST alumni in a single database.

We are currently working on our own project to do this, but we would like to use facebook as a tool to communicate our progress with the past and present FIRST community.

We have made a FIRST Alumni page on facebook that we will be posting announcements to. If you are an alumnus of a FIRST team, please go to the following link and join our group:

http://www.facebook.com/groups/203615639698314/

Thanks!

[Cyberphil]

Very interesting! Sounds like a great idea to rally the troops so to speak.

I have a few questions though:

Do you know what this data will be used for (besides # of alumni and announcements). I am very curious (and excited) to hear what this is about!

What type of announcements are we talking about? Teams that need mentoring, events that need volunteers.. etc.

All in all, this could be a great tool to see the size and scope of the FIRST community (and hopefully a way to get more alumni to participate in the Brandeis study)!

[EricH]

Some FIRST alumni are not on Facebook. How do you plan to reach them?

[Steven Donow]

Not an alumni yet, but I'm definitely gonna pass this over to the alumni I know.

[ProgramLuke]

I will pass this on to all of the Alumni from KING TeC!

[RoboMom]

Originally Posted by EricH

Some FIRST alumni are not on Facebook. How do you plan to reach them?

The FIRST website has a section devoted to collecting alumni information.

http://www.usfirst.org/community/first-community-alumni

Don't know how this information is used.

[Chris27]

Ever consider creating a LinkedIn group or using the preexisting one?

[Basel A]

I'd suggest joining current Facebook alumni groups (like this one) and inviting those members.

[Chris is me]

I like the idea a lot and I think something like a Fan page would be great for such a purpose, but not a group.

First of all, each time you join a new group on Facebook, you automatically get email notifications of everything that happens in that group. You have to turn this setting off group by group.

Second, being in a group creates a chat room. If anyone talks in it, everyone in the group gets an audio notification. People that want no part of group chat will probably be pretty annoyed.

[rsisk]

Originally Posted by Chris27

Ever consider creating a LinkedIn group or using the preexisting one?

There is a FIRST Robotics group on LinkedIN with close to 2000 members. You can definitely post this information on that group and find plenty of alumni.

There are quite a few FIRST related groups on LinkedIN that have various focuses, like geographic focus, program focus (FLL, FTC, etc), which is great, and there are plenty of professional on LinkedIN interested in FIRST. The key thing to building a group on LinkedIN is keeping the group interesting with plenty of fresh content.

I would probably post in the existing LinkedIN group and drive people to the Facebook group.

[XaulZan11]

To help promote the group, I would contact some of the more popular groups and pages on facebook (like the offical and unoffical FIRST pages, i.am.FIRST, various FIRST related pages and some team pages) to see if they can tag the group in their status to get more people aware of the goup. There are a ton of FIRST alumni that haven't even heard of ChiefDelphi, let alone read it it enough to see this post.

[Siri]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

I like the idea a lot and I think something like a Fan page would be great for such a purpose, but not a group.

First of all, each time you join a new group on Facebook, you automatically get email notifications of everything that happens in that group. You have to turn this setting off group by group.

Second, being in a group creates a chat room. If anyone talks in it, everyone in the group gets an audio notification. People that want no part of group chat will probably be pretty annoyed.

Seriously? That's annoying. Apologies to all the people I just invited.

EDIT: ...the people I just added. Come on Facebook, you don't have to accept membership?

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Siri

EDIT: ...the people I just added. Come on Facebook, you don't have to accept membership?

I completely forgot the worst part: you can't refuse an invitation.

[Cuog]

I don't understand why there can't just be a mailing list for alumni to sign up for and receive info/requests to help. I'm sure I'm not the only one unwilling to fill out a long questionnaire of info that FIRST doesn't need to collect about me for me to be willing to help out. All I need is an email telling me what's going on this month. If I have time I'll contact and help, if not, I won't, not sure why this needs to be more complicated than that?

[Chris27]

Originally Posted by rsisk

I would probably post in the existing LinkedIN group and drive people to the Facebook group.

Just curious, but why do you think that it would be best to drive people from the LinkedIn group to Facebook and not just use LinkedIn groups?