That’s the message of WAA’s Local Alumni Touch Points (LATP) taskforce: every UW alumni organization, whether in Madison or Miami, Wausau or Washington, ought to be headed in the same direction.

There are more than a hundred alumni chapters around the county, and though UW graduates are known chiefly for their individualism, WAA is making a renewed effort to forge unity among these organizations. The reason for this is simple: Badgers want to know what to expect from their alumni association.

“In the minds of alumni, there’s no difference between their local chapter and the nationwide WAA,” says Deb Nelson ’85, WAA’s director of volunteer relations. “They expect to find the same kind of service whether they’re in Boston, Philadelphia, Sacramento, or Madison. And our chapters leaders are also looking for ways to forge a consistent structure for their organizations and events.”

In October 2005, WAA rolled out its plan to achieve greater consistency at the Chapter Leader Fall Forum. The LATP recommendations included methods for recruiting and using alumni volunteers, models for organizing chapter structure and leadership, and ideas for diversifying programs beyond student sendoffs and football-watching parties to include service and learning events.

For Jessica Donze Black ’96, president of the Washington, D.C., alumni chapter, the plan offered obvious benefits. “From a branding perspective, this is a great thing,” she says. “At the chapter level, we want to feel like we’re part of some bigger thing.”

When Jessica returned to Washington, she quickly called together a retreat for the D.C. chapter leaders. Inspired by what she’d heard at the fall forum, she led a discussion about how the chapter could take advantage of WAA resources to develop a broader set of activities.

“In the past, our main aim was raising funds for our scholarship program,” she says. “This helped a lot of students, but we’ve got a fairly young alumni population here. Not everyone can afford to make donations, but they want to be more active. We talked a lot about how to create more service work — things that would aid the community or that would aid alumni, in addition to things that would help raise money.”

Heading into the next year, WAA hopes to keep the bus rolling and inspire chapters to find ways to appeal to all the alumni in their area.

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