Your Alumni Coordinator Is Doing Three Jobs

This isn’t only a feeling. In a 2023 survey of 750 mental health and substance use treatment workers, the National Council for Mental Wellbeing found that 93% had experienced burnout and 62% described it as moderate or severe. A third said they spend most of their time on administrative tasks. Among those who see clients, 68% said that administrative time takes away from time they could spend directly supporting clients. Almost half (48%) said workforce shortages had led them to consider other jobs. National Council for Mental Wellbeing

Those numbers cover the whole behavioral health workforce, not alumni staff alone. But alumni and aftercare roles tend to sit right where those pressures meet. The work is never finished, it is hard to measure, and it is often the first thing to slip when the unit gets busy.

Turnover in addiction treatment has been a problem for a long time. A longitudinal study that tracked actual turnover found an annual rate of 33.2% among substance use disorder counselors and 23.4% among clinical supervisors. Eby, Burk and Maher, 2010

For alumni work, turnover costs more than a hiring search. When the person who has been calling alumni for a year leaves, the relationships go with them. So does the informal knowledge of who needs a check-in this week and who stopped picking up a month ago. If that knowledge lived in a personal phone or a spreadsheet only one person understood, the next hire starts from zero.

When follow-up slips, it is tempting to treat it as a performance issue. Usually it is a design issue. Calling everyone on a schedule, logging every attempt and turning it all into a report is repetitive, high-volume work. Asking a skilled person to do it by hand means their skill goes into dialing and leaving voicemails.

The part that actually needs a person is smaller and much more important. Someone has to talk with the alumnus who says they are struggling. Someone has to notice when a person goes quiet and figure out why. Someone has to plan the events and build the community that keeps people coming back.

Automating routine outreach doesn’t mean having fewer people doing alumni work. It means the people you have get to do the part of the job they were hired for.

When scheduled check-ins go out on their own, the coordinator no longer spends the morning working down a call list. Replies are recorded as they come in, so there is no separate logging step. Reports build themselves from the same data, so the end of the quarter stops being a scramble. What lands on the coordinator’s desk is a short list of people who said they need help or who stopped responding. Those are the calls worth making, and now there is time to make them well.

There is a continuity benefit too. When the history lives in a shared system instead of one person’s phone, a new team member can pick up where the last one left off. Alumni don’t fall through the cracks during a transition.

Moira sends post-discharge check-ins by text from your program’s dedicated number and records every reply. When someone says they are struggling, or stops replying, your team is alerted. Standard measures and check-in responses flow into outcomes reporting without anyone retyping them. Your alumni staff keep the conversations, the community and the judgment calls. Moira takes the call list.