Happy 2012… the year we will unleash AIESEC’s global alumni potential! We are excited to kick off the New Year by sharing the first of ten strategic initiatives that have emerged from our work and are supported by both AIESEC International and AIESEC Alumni International.
The first of these strategic initiatives is to clarify our global alumni mission. An organization’s mission statement should reflect its highest aspirations. It should address the most basic of questions, “Why are we here?” It should be succinct yet specific enough to fit its owner uniquely.
The working group and steering committee have been hard at work on this for several months now. We have incorporated input from our survey and from alumni everywhere. We are pleased to share our results, which are as follows:
Mission statement
“We are a global network of AIESEC alumni with a lifelong commitment to AIESEC’s mission of advancing international leadership for a more solidary world.”
Condensed version in the form of a tagline
“Leadership under AIESEC values delivered for life.”
Click here to see our rationale for these proposals.
We are eager to hear your feedback, and stay tuned for our other initiatives!
The tagline is really great, I love! Congrats to the team, I’m waiting for the next steps!
Thank you, Iulian, they are coming soon!!
Well done! Sounds great!
I like the Mission statement: “We are a global network of AIESEC alumni with a lifelong commitment to AIESEC’s mission of advancing international leadership for a more solidary world.” There’s no need to condense it; frankly speaking, I think we need to determine that we exist, as a “per se” organization, and not “in function of” AIESEC”.
Thank you, Oscar for your support of our proposed mission statement and for your participation in this project!
Can you help us understand better the practical implication of your statement that we exist as a “per se” organization? Our project team would contend that our uniqueness and power as an alumni organization stem to a significant degree from our association with student AIESEC and that there are crucial strategic and operational reasons to maintain a close relationship with student AIESEC. This is obviously the case for our Alumni-AIESEC platform (which is desired by nearly all alumni), where our alumni activities are by definition very closely intertwined with student AIESEC. However, we believe it is the case even for our Alumni-to-Alumni platform, where we depend on support from student AIESEC, for example, for our member database to record new alumni.
Our work to date shows that our challenges today result in part from a historical lack of alignment between alumni AIESEC and student AIESEC and an associated duplication of effort, overlap of responsibilities, and fragmentation of alumni communication channels. We think a closer cooperation with student AIESEC is a big part of the solution and this is reflected in our proposed strategic imperatives.
In your view, have we calibrated this right, or are we missing something?
I love the tagline! And I really look forward to working with you guys!
Re “mission statement rationale”, I particularly like the following:
“We aim to become a true network rather than a loose federation of national alumni associations”
Let’s push this forward.
Really great news and very nice job. With other Alumni I’ve been discussing in the past that for me the “issue” with AIESEC Alumni organizations in different countries was the lack of a concrete and meaningful mission beyond “keeping contact”.
I also see the relevance and advantage of keeping in touch with the student organization, whose members will logically become part of the Alumni platform, specially because many times the transition from being a student AIESECer to becoming an AIESEC Alumni is not smooth (many times is like new Alumni are just out of the AIESEC network without any logical transitional step).
The funny thing is that then some year later you see the new generation of student AIESECers calling out loud to some AIESEC Alumni they keep in touch with asking them to re-connect and invite other AIESEC Alumni, and the cycle goes and goes for year (but that is another topic).
So far, it is great to see this more clear (and I must say inspirational) Mission! And personally, I like the tagline!
AIESEC Alumni:
“Leadership under AIESEC values delivered for life.”
Very well done. I love the mission statement makes me want to belong!
Well done David,
“global alumni potential”
In order to become a real GLOBAL organization please add to our goals to re establish AIESEC in Israel.
As a NCFC of AIESEC Israel 1987 – 1989 I can tell that the current organization is not global till they add back Israel. AIESEC Israel was an important part of the global AIESEC world. We used to have very famous Study Tours with hundreds of students taking part. We had an international meeting in Jerusalem, exchange students from all over the world.
Now it is time to add the re establishment of AIESEC Israel to our goals.
Thank you
I like the initiative here, but am I the only one who struggles to understand how that applies to me? I would like to see a more tangible mission, rather than a vision support for AIESEC. Words like “leadership” and “solidarity” are nice, but not very actionable. It’s the same when you talk about Branding. A full on branding exercise should take in consideration what are we doing, who are we addressing, in what territory, in what we believe, what do we promise and how do we deliver that promise. Another important point is how do we bring value to ourselves in being part of it? I’m happy to expand on this if of interest and again, congrats for the initiative.
Best,
Ramon
Ramon, thank you for posting this comment which gives us a chance to try to make our proposals clearer and, hopefully, responsive to your concern.
We see our proposal as being highly actionable, and here’s why. Our proposed mission statement has three parts, each of which can be linked directly to a “platform” and to associated actionable services that are supported by a large proportion of alumni according to our global survey (see http://aiesecalumniunite.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/platforms-goals-and-services-blog.pdf).
Specifically…
“We are a global network of AIESEC alumni…” speaks to the Alumni-to-Alumni platform. Our survey suggests that 76% of alumni view this as a major alumni platform, and more than 2/3 of alumni support a specific set of Alumni-to-Alumni services.
“…with a lifelong commitment to AIESEC’s mission…” speaks to the Alumni -AIESEC platform. Our survey suggests that 65% of alumni view this as a major platform, and, once again, more than 2/3 of alumni support a specific set of Alumni-AIESEC services.
“…of advancing international leadership for a more solidary world” speaks to the Alumni-to-World platform, and in this case 50% view this as a major platform even though we didn’t explain it very well in the survey. We weren’t suggesting that our alumni body could become another UN but, rather, that we pursue initiatives that leverage capabilities that are unique to AIESEC and our alumni body to advance international leadership for a more solidary world. Once again, the survey indicates that a large percentage of alumni would support a specific set of AIESEC-to-World projects.
Clearly, these services (and others) would need to be implemented over a period of time, and we published a very preliminary timeline recently on this blog (see http://aiesecalumniunite.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/timeline.pdf).
We feel our mission statement is actionable, even when it is reduced to the tagline “Leadership under AIESEC values delivered for life.” Having said that, it is the actions themselves that will make it resonate with members. I urge you to take a look at the survey results (if you have not seen them yet) and then report back to the group on whether you still have concerns about this.
I also agree with Ramon.
So my proposal is to have a Vision witch is more projected to Society in general, given the actual circumstances of great crisis and lack of equilibrium in the social, political and economic spheres, where change is top priority.
“AIESEC Alumni: A global leader’s community who believes in the potential of every person to participate responsibly in creating a world where human dignity is respected and where Society, Economy and Nature co-exist in harmony”
It is AIESEC who has launched the idea of an AIESEC Alumni Association to improve the support to AIESEC’s mission indeed, but I see a conflict there: We can definitely help them to improve to get better results, but we cannot guarantee them good results. AIESEC is about forming leaders with integrity, and it is the challenges that gives us opportunity to develop our leadership. We shouldn’t make things easier for them, we should give them more tools given our experience.
On the other side, an AIESEC Alumni is already a formed leader ready to give something back to Society and what it needs from us now. And the best thing we can give is indeed our leadership in the AIESEC way and it’s values exercised by example, and that is a great challenge already.
Our Mision should reflect that. Our organization should show how do we make sure that that really happens in our policies, in our Ethic codes, in our organization and our control and monitoring activities.
Every part of who we are and how we show it to the world should support the manifestation of our AIESEC VISION in the real world. While being a student, many times I have heard that AIESEC is a real life lab. Well now it is real life for us alumni-es: How has AIESEC impacted us? How do we show it or can we show it? That is the real deal.
AIESEC Alumni should be a privilege given to people who can truly show all what we have learned and benefited from, as a created reality in their environment and professional history. We can be impressed by numbers, like commercial rankings, but that doesn’t mean necessarily good quality. The Branding of AIESEC should be focused on the quality of actual results.
In the surveys on social media it is shown that we have personal leadership, entrepreneurial leadership, executive leadership, companies leadership. And we could use their testimonies as AIESEC publicity, to create credibility and a more solid branding. But then we must monitor this to be fulfilled in every level. With AIESEC as well as with AIESEC Alumni Associations in their local, national, regional and international chapters.
In that sense I very much agree with hiring a full-time team who can create the channels and legislation to bring this dream into fruition.
Very proud to be an alumni,
My best regards to all,
Marcela Astete
AA PERU
Marcela,
Thank you very much for taking the time to outline your thoughts on this which fall into what we in the working group think of as the “AIESEC-to-World” platform.
Our view is that the part of our proposed mission statement that states “…advancing international leadership for a more solidary world” encompasses the points you are addressing. Our tagline “Leadership under AIESEC values delivered for life” seems to be a direct hit as well.
Having said that, we clearly have not articulated your points in as much detail as you. One reason for this is that, according to our global alumni survey, most alumni also have Alumni-to-Alumni goals such as “to facilitate networking on a global scale to enable alumni to connect, collaborate and learn from each other” and “to serve as a professional resource for alumni on a global scale”. Moreover, most alumni have Alumni-AIESEC goals such as “to provide opportunities for alumni mentorship and training of AIESEC members,” “to make it easy for alumni to support AIESEC’s development” and “to keep alumni informed about AIESEC activities.”
Given the results of our survey, do you think that our alumni body will support a mission statement that addresses the Alumni-to-World platform but does not readily encompass the others? Having said that, I think it’s fair to say that there are many opportunities for our alumni organization to further the goals you are supporting here as shown on the slide entitled “What Goals Should an Alumni-to-World Platform Address” in our survey results document which can be found here: http://aiesecalumniunite.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/platforms-goals-and-services-blog.pdf.
Hi David,
I understand what you say, but all the points you are mentioning are about inside AIESEC and its members, and what I understand as a Mission is that it has to transcend into others outside of our organization. All what you mention are indeed necessities to make our organization stronger a be appealing for the membership to grow bigger and stronger. That is the HOW we are going to harness our potential. But then what? All that has to be done for a WHY and our only reason is the World, to keep on making it a better place to be for every one.
Best regards,
Marcela
Pingback: Save the Date for Annual Stakeholders Meeting & Reception