His days start with a walk from his Center City home over the South Street Bridge, which directly leads to Penn’s University City campus. A short—mere minutes—stroll on Locust Walk leads to his office at E. Craig Sweeten Alumni House.

Hoopes Wampler feels an instant energy upon stepping on campus.

“It’s a nurturing environment where there’s research and learning and people enjoying themselves and expanding their minds and creating relationships that will be the most important ones to them for a lifetime,” says Wampler, assistant vice president for Alumni Relations. “To be part of that kind of environment every day should be something that I would think almost anyone would want.”

Wampler came to Penn eight years ago. His task? To engage all of Penn’s 290,000 alumni around the world. He’s since led efforts that have increased alumni participation almost 90 percent since 2007.

“We were able to set goals, which in and of itself is kind of hard, and just about all of them we were able to dramatically exceed,” he says. “Events were already successful and we’ve been able to roughly double attendance a lot of the time.”

Wampler attended the University of Richmond in Virginia for his undergraduate degree, and worked in advertising, marketing, and as a high technology consultant for about seven years after school. He always had a desire to work at a university, though.

He went back to school and earned his master’s degree in higher education administration at Harvard University. He then snagged a position with the Harvard Alumni Association, where he ran the alumni relations program for the undergraduate part of the institution for about a decade.

It was a no-brainer when Wampler found out about the open position at Penn, a university in his hometown.

“The opportunity to come home and work at an institution that I’ve always had a great deal of respect for, in terms of what Penn has done for the City of Philadelphia, but also to take a position that was focused more on university-wide alumni relations, was just so great,” Wampler says.

The Current sat down with Wampler at the end of the summer break to talk about what makes the Penn Alumni network unique, what got him interested in this line of work, and his office’s goals for the years ahead.

Q: Let’s start with the basics. Tell me about what you do, and do you call it the Alumni Office?
A: We’re the Central Office for Alumni Relations at Penn. We fall under the umbrella of the larger University-wide Development and Alumni Relations, which reports up through John Zeller, who is the vice president of that initiative. We call ourselves Penn Alumni, and that’s the term that we use to describe and cover all of the work that we do to engage, hopefully, all of Penn’s 290,000 alumni around the world. We work with a much larger development and support services team in Development and Alumni Relations, which makes our entire organization over 550 people, but our office here in the Central Office for Alumni Relations is much smaller than that. I lead this office here, and work closely with Penn Alumni President and University Trustee Julie Platt.

Q: You walk to work from your house in Center City. What is the best part about living so close to work?
A: My life is very convenient, if that is appropriate to say. Because Penn is such an integral part of Philadelphia, I think it’s great to live in the city where the University resides. While I can always quickly get home, I’m never that far from a place where I love coming to work every day. I’m very proud of the work we do here, and now I have a Penn degree so I can consider myself an alumnus of the institution. The kind of work we do in Alumni Relations is very immersive. We really do live and breathe the job because there are lots of events on nights and weekends and our programming is very socially based. To be near that is, as much as it is convenient, really a pleasure. 

Q: So, you’ve got a degree from Penn now?
A: Often when I meet new people, it’s their first question: ‘When did you graduate from Penn?’ And I’ve been able to do my doctorate at the Graduate School of Education since I’ve worked here. I completed that in 2013. But I don’t necessarily think that’s the most important part of me being a credible resource to our alumni, because it’s really about building relationships, listening to people, understanding what is important to them about their relationship with Penn, and then finding the appropriate ways to engage them and then have them become more involved. Just ask good questions; that’s what matters more than the fact that I have letters and a number after my name now.

Q: What got you interested in this type of work?
A: It was a little bit of serendipity I suppose. I’ve had an incredibly positive collegiate experience and always thought that it would be an amazing thing to work on a college campus every day. I think people who want to work in education in general, especially higher education, have a unique kind of passion and thrive in this kind of environment. 

Q: Your background is in high-tech consulting. Does that experience help you today?
A: It helps a lot with basic things like understanding the business elements of any job, and especially mine. Things that are very important, like strategic planning, budgeting, management, finance, and organizational dynamics. I’ve learned about it in school, but also that’s the experience I got working in the business world. While that’s a bit of a nontraditional path, I think it’s served me very well.

Q: What’s the best part of your job?
A: I want to say the people, but wouldn’t everybody say the people? My title has the word ‘relations’ in it so it is about the relationships. The people that are on my staff are so dedicated, passionate, and committed to their jobs that they make the work that we do together better. I love working with them and I’m very fortunate that we have a very strong team. I love the alumni and I love that they want to be connected to this place. Our alumni are not often easy, sometimes they are difficult, but they are passionate. I would so much prefer that to apathy. They are into it. They want to be part of this place, they want to see it get better.

Q: Penn has a great alumni network. How do you handle its growth?
A: Thinking about our alumni increasingly spreading out all across the world, we have to find different ways to keep them engaged and connected in a mutually beneficial way. It comes with both more opportunities to be engaged, just in pure numbers, and then more strategic opportunities that really allow alumni to be involved in things that are meaningful or things that we really need help with, such as planning class reunions, running regional clubs, and interviewing high school students. These are three examples where we can’t be successful without them.

Q: Alumni are tasked with interviewing potential students?
A: It’s a program we partnered with Penn Admissions on three years ago, because we wanted to work to create the program more as a way to engage alumni and reposition it as an alumni ambassador program. Alumni go out and talk about Penn with prospective applicants and educate them on what it’s like to be a Penn student and a Penn alum. Then they give the admissions office a valuable piece of information they would need to make the best decision possible when determining if a candidate should be admitted or not.

Q: Is part of your role also trying to attract alumni as donors?
A: My staff doesn’t directly solicit gifts from alumni, but we are very much supportive of the development agenda, the fundraising agenda, and we all know that engaged alumni are more likely to be supportive of the institution. Alumni engagement does not exist just for fundraising, but if it creates more of an inclination for an alumnus to be supportive of the institution, then we want to be helpful in that regard. Our primary mission is to keep alumni engaged and connected, and if it leads to other things, which I think we have a good feeling that it will if we do it well, then we also would like all of our alumni to be donors. I think we’re unapologetic about that with our alumni. We do want them to support the institution financially, especially at the participatory level. If you can give $25 a year, then you are a donor, and those participatory dollars can add up to lots of money. But we have a really, really talented fundraising staff here and we’re going to leave all the solicitation work to the skilled experts.

Q: When is the busiest time of the year for your office?
A: Our biggest time is leading up to graduation and Alumni Weekend. This past year, we had over 11,000 attendees back for Alumni Weekend, which is by far Penn’s largest ever. In fact, I was hoping we’d break 10,000, and we broke 11,000. That is obviously a big time for us, although the rest of the year is also very busy. The summer is a busy time, albeit quieter because the students aren’t here, but to plan for our big fall activities, which include things like Homecoming, lots of regional programming, and we have a new major online academic program that starts in October this year. All that stuff has been planned over this past summer. Then, as soon as we’re in the fall and actually doing those events, all the planning is in the late winter and the spring with our regional events and then, of course, Alumni Weekend.

Q: Major academic online class? What’s that about?
A: Penn is a founding partner of Coursera. We’ve been experimenting or thinking about how alumni could use MOOCs [massive open online courses], specifically through Coursera, to connect to academic intellectual content at Penn. But alumni don’t really want a course that has lots of tests and a heavy amount of reading, or they don’t really want to submit papers. Last fall, for the first time, we took a course that was on Coursera and partnered with a professor that did it and shortened the course down to four weeks, removed a lot of the assignments and a lot of the reading, and offered that exclusively to alumni. We had a huge response: Over 700 alumni registered and actually paid a nominal fee to take the course. More than 95 percent of them had logged into the course at some point during the four weeks. They either watched the lecture or participated in the discussion group, which, if you compare to the traditional usage rates of the average course, is huge. We are having our second offering of a different course that starts in October, once again for four weeks, with a different faculty member and different subject.

Q: Do you get to travel a lot?
A: Yes, I travel all the time. Something I learned early on coming into this job is if I can go out and see people where they live, then that’s really one of the best ways to advance relationships and get to know people. I’m traveling all over the world. I spend a lot of time in Asia. That’s a growing, important area for Penn in lots of different ways. But of course I’m in all of our big, domestic markets on a regular basis as well. I spend a lot of time in New York, Boston, D.C., Chicago, and on the West Coast. But we have alumni everywhere so trying to get to see them all is a challenge. In due time, I get around to lots of different places. In the coming year I have plans to be in Tulsa, Okla., and Jacksonville and Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., places where you wouldn’t necessarily think there’s a lot of Penn activity, but there is. I travel about three to four times a month.

Q: How do you make sure that you understand the needs of Penn alumni?
A: Our alumni are not shy and they will tell me what they want all the time. One of our challenges is often they tell me what they want, what they need, or what they would respond to, and we actually already do it. Then they just don’t understand how to use it and we have to tell them. Communication is a big challenge for alumni to understand what’s available to them. That’s why our use of volunteers in everything we do is so critical because if you take, for example, a class reunion, there’s no possible way I could plan that reunion for them. They have to do it with us. And they have to tell us what they need because they’re the ones that had that Penn experience at that unique moment in time. They have to tell us what’s important to them about their relationship with Penn and then we can help integrate that into different types of programming or engagement points. It comes from asking good questions, doing lots of listening, and engaging volunteers in a productive way.

Q: What’s the hardest part of your job?
A: The hardest part is we have so many alumni out in the world and the best way still to engage alumni is to have a personal relationship with them and that’s going to be very difficult to do with our numbers. That’s not a frustration, we know I’m not going to be able to build a personal relationship with every member of our alumni community, so that’s just something I have to take into account, and try to operate more broadly. I think that’s our biggest challenge. And then secondly is just really trying to make sure alumni are aware of what’s available to them at the University, both in our office and other places.

Q: How is your office involved in the Penn Compact 2020?
A: Engaging the alumni community in different and productive ways is part of that strategy. We’ve been able to adopt our alumni relations and engagement strategies to the framework of the Penn Compact 2020 around the three ‘I’ values: inclusion, innovation, and impact. That continues to say something very strong about Penn and how important relationships and the alumni are to the institution. The fact that we’re asked to roll up our strategies into a presidential framework is really kind of extraordinary. No matter where Penn is along its planning cycle or leadership cycle or strategic cycle, alumni and their importance and role at the University are part of it. And it’s not just for development either, not just for fundraising. Their engagement makes the University a better place.

Q: What’s the biggest goal you and your team have accomplished?
A: Penn just finished not too long ago the Making History capital campaign. It was a huge capital campaign to raise $3.5 billion and ultimately it raised $4.3 billion, but during the course of that campaign, the University set out to use the campaign as a way to engage more alumni in the life of the University than ever before. When the campaign started and during the course of the campaign, it had three publicly stated goals. One was to raise the $3.5 billion, the second was to have that money allocated toward the priorities that the University identified as important, but then the third, alongside of those two, was engaging alumni in a more substantial way than we had before. We had to come up with a strategy across all of our programs and also introduce lots of new programs to increase alumni engagement over the public phase of the campaign. We were able to do that in lots of ways through dramatic enhancements of existing programs and offering lots of new programs. A couple new program highlights are things around engaging our youngest alumni, our most recent graduates, our diverse alumni populations, new programs in alumni education and lifelong learning, new programs around career networking, and more. I’m really proud to say that during the course of the campaign, with the help of a lot of people around the University and a lot of volunteers, we were able to significantly demonstrate an increase in alumni engagement and really set the new baseline for where we want our alumni to be engaged from and then continue to engage them further.

Q: Do you have any big goals for the next year, or years?
A: Our next big opportunity with our alumni is finding more ways to support them in their professional lives and careers using the power of the Penn network. I think there’s a really huge opportunity for us to add value to the University-alumni relationship. Over the coming year, we’re going to structure out and strategize about a program to really make sure that we can add value to our alumni using the Penn network for their career and professional interests. It’s not necessarily for alumni looking to find their first job, because Career Services and on-campus recruiting and that kind of thing does that very well, but really finding ways to connect people around their career and professional interests, so that the network can be used for the most advantageous purposes, such as whether you’re looking for a new job or you want to sell something or you want to buy something from a trusted source, or you just want to get to know more people that are working in your industry, or you want to get involved in an entirely new industry, and how you would do that. That’s kind of our next big thing. We’re in the process right now of running focus groups with our alumni to discuss the topic.

Q: Why is a strong alumni network so important for colleges, particularly Penn?
A: Having a strong alumni network helps attract the best students. Having a strong alumni network helps the institution find support for its priorities. Having a strong alumni network creates a culture for the institution that’s a lifetime connection rather than just a student’s two-year, four-year, or six-year connection. Broadly, all these things are important to not only the institution, but also to a person’s own self-identity as an alumnus of the institution. You know, when you think about an individual’s identity, a lot of alumni would say, ‘I’m a dad and I went to Penn.’ To have that presence in the world just increases the prominence of this place and can serve the place so well, but also increase the value of their degree and what that means to the world when they have the Penn connection.

Q: What makes the Penn alumni network unique?
A: We’re very fortunate because our alumni are very passionate and most of our alumni in one way, shape, or form still want to be connected to the institution. We have a very receptive audience, if you will. They’ve already bought the product, if you want to look at it that way. Our challenge is just really to find the things that they would want to participate in or what’s important to them. This is not a tough sell. I think at other places I suppose that’s true, as well, but I think our alumni are incredibly proud of what Penn was and what it is now, and they want to be part of that. Everybody wants to play for a winning team. You like to associate yourself with things that are successful and Penn is successful and continues to get better every year in lots of different ways.