Ask a Viking: How Western Washington University Uses AI to Connect Students and Alumni

Webinar Transcript — May 12, 2026

Featuring Max Leisten, Founder & CEO of Protopia, and Victoria Martinsen, Senior Director of Alumni and Constituent Engagement at Western Washington University.
Introductions

Max Leisten: Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining today’s webinar. I’m Max Leisten, founder and CEO of Protopia. I’m based in North Carolina, and I’m incredibly happy to be joined today by Victoria Martinsen from Western Washington University. Together, we’ll talk about “You Ask, You Answer” and how AI technology can help boost engagement, activate volunteers, support fundraising, and bring communities together.

This webinar is being recorded, so if you have to leave early, we will share the recording with everyone who registered. There’s also a Q&A open, so if you have questions as we walk through the content, don’t be shy — we may be able to answer in real time, and if not, we’ll follow up after the webinar.

Victoria, I’d love for you to briefly introduce yourself.

Victoria Martinsen: Hi, I’m happy to be here. I’m Victoria Martinsen, Senior Director of Alumni and Constituent Engagement at Western Washington University in beautiful Bellingham, Washington.

Max Leisten: Wonderful. Victoria, give everybody a quick profile of WWU.

Victoria Martinsen: Sure. We were founded in 1893 as a normal school — which is an old term for a teaching college — and we’ve grown significantly since then. We now have seven colleges and approximately 14,000 students, primarily undergraduate, though we do have some master’s and doctoral graduates as well. We have about 147,000 contactable alumni, 86% of whom reside in the state of Washington. We are a public regional university.

Max Leisten: For those of you who are not familiar with Protopia, I founded the company in 2016. We initially developed Protopia together with Duke University, and we now serve universities exclusively — across the US, the European Union, the UK, Australia, and most recently Canada. We work with institutions that want to innovate and challenge the status quo.

One of the things that makes us different, and that we feel strongly about, is that there is no app. Your alumni are busy after they graduate — busy with family, careers — and they have very little time to engage. So how do you facilitate that engagement, and the human desire to help another person, without friction? That’s how we built this platform.

We started incorporating machine learning back in 2019, but we don’t put that front and center. AI, just like cloud computing, is simply a tool. What we feel strongly about is human connection.

We also focus heavily on CASE engagement. CASE — the global industry association that advances higher education — has an alumni engagement metrics framework that we’re big fans of, because it helps institutions benchmark and measure their performance against other institutions.

Why Protopia? My background is in software, and I was deeply curious about why students and alumni have such a tough time connecting with one another. Not the small mentoring programs that a dedicated team can get running with enough labor — I’m talking about scale. Victoria shared that WWU has over 140,000 contactable alumni, and most of them are absolutely willing to help someone walk in their footsteps.

On the student side — and not the students with high social capital, but first-generation, low-income students who may be working on the side — how do you make it easy for those students to find a needle in a haystack and connect with someone who genuinely wants to help them?

We dug into this with our early customers and asked: how do we make it easy for someone to ask for help? When you’re enrolled, you’re entitled to tap into the expertise and network of that community, if only it were easy. And from the alumni side, you want to help, you want to open doors, you want to support the next generation — because it feels meaningful. That is what we’ve built.

What we’ve created — and deploy across multiple continents — makes networking simple, builds connections using smart AI technology, and does all of this without another app. That is often the biggest point of friction. Alumni don’t want to sign up for something new. So how do you reach them, let them mentor and help someone, and drive engagement without adding another platform?

Victoria Martinsen: I thought it would be fitting, since this is a micro-mentoring tool, to use the STAR method to walk through our experience. Many of you are familiar with the STAR method — it’s a technique for answering behavioral interview questions. You focus on the Situation, the Task, the Actions you took, and the Results.

Situation: The Problem with Platforms

We had a previous platform that was very labor-intensive, time-consuming, and frankly delivered a low cost-benefit ratio. There was no real engagement. Success was being measured by outputs rather than outcomes — how many new people signed up, how many people logged in this month — but that didn’t tell us whether alumni were actually connecting and engaging with students.

It was a classic “if you build it, will they come?” situation. The answer was yes — they came. But would they come again? That’s where it broke down. We shifted to producing more and more content just to bring people back, and eventually interest plateaued. We decided we weren’t going to do that anymore. We weren’t entirely sure what we would do, but what we were doing wasn’t working.

Task: Unlocking Alumni Expertise Without the Usual Hurdles

The question we set out to answer was: what if we could unlock the expertise of our alumni without the traditional barriers of a formal mentoring program? We weren’t interested in a model where alumni fill out an application, students fill out an application, we match them, build a curriculum, check in regularly, and run the program for an entire semester or year. That wasn’t something we were interested in, nor did we have the capacity to do.

Action: Launching Ask a Viking

That’s where Ask a Viking came in. What we found was that it delivered real engagement — actual connections between alumni and students. There was no login required, no new username or password to remember. Everything happens via email, a channel that both alumni and students are already using. It didn’t interrupt anyone’s normal workflow.

One thing that surprised me, which I hadn’t fully considered until we started using it, was the value of unbiased matching. The AI creates matches based on the question the student is asking. The student doesn’t have to search through profiles or filter by criteria. And it’s a blind email — the student has no idea who the message is going out to. They don’t know what the person looks like, what their pronouns are. All they know is that there is someone with reason to believe they can answer this question.

It also takes far less time to administer. I’m the sole administrator of this program, and this is not my full-time job. With our previous platform, we had roughly half an FTE dedicated to nothing but administration. With Ask a Viking, I spend about an hour a week.

In a nutshell: Ask a Viking is a micro-mentoring initiative that connects students and alumni in a secure, low-barrier way — fostering professional development and community engagement.
How It Works: The User Experience

Victoria Martinsen: Let me walk you through what the experience looks like for each type of user.

The site is mobile-friendly. When a student submits a question, we ask for some basic information — name, email address, area of study, and graduation year — all of which is used to help match them to the right alumni. The form breaks information into digestible chunks to make it easy to complete.

Students provide a brief headline describing their question, a short self-introduction, and then the question itself. They can also use an AI assistant to help clarify and sharpen how their question is phrased. At the end, they’re prompted to include a thank-you note.

Students also select from a set of affinities — we created custom affinities using the Candid Philanthropy classification system — which further informs the matching process.

Once submitted, the student receives an email confirmation. After some time, they receive another email letting them know a response has come in. They are then prompted to say thank you, which is critically important. When we receive a low feedback score from an alumni responder, it’s almost always because the student did not follow up with thanks.

While waiting for a response, students are also free to submit additional questions.

On the alumni side, an alumnus — let’s call him Cameron — receives a message in his regular email inbox. No login, no new platform. The email includes a brief reminder of what Ask a Viking is, followed by the student’s question.

Cameron has several response options: he can share written advice, offer to schedule a call, or suggest a meeting. Originally we only offered the “share advice” option, but we found alumni were offering to call and meet anyway, so we built that into the interface.

There is a character limit on responses — which some alumni find frustrating, because they have so much they want to share. We see a lot of responses ending with “feel free to reach out, I have more to say,” or “give me a call.” Alumni genuinely love helping.

Max Leisten: One thing I’d add — the goal isn’t for alumni to write a dissertation. The goal is to make a connection and take the relationship from there. But it’s true: alumni love to help.

Victoria Martinsen: After Cameron responds, the system asks him one of three profile-verification questions: Has your location changed? Are you still working at the same company? Have your interests or affinities shifted? This is how we keep our alumni data current, and this data is written back to our CRM. Every single one of our custom affinities corresponds to an area where we’re actually raising money — so this is helping our philanthropy as well, helping us understand what our alumni care about.

Alumni are also asked how frequently they’re willing to help: daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly.

Max Leisten: One thing worth noting: a common concern with mentoring platforms is that the same alumni get asked over and over again. Our algorithm specifically optimizes for alumni who haven’t been engaged recently, or who have never been engaged at all. Even if an alum says “weekly,” they may go weeks without receiving a request, because we’re always prioritizing alumni who haven’t participated yet. The goal is to democratize that helping — to distribute it broadly, not concentrate it on a few.

If Cameron doesn’t respond to the initial message, the system follows up — a gentle reminder that another alumnus like him might have the answer. If he still can’t help, he can pass, and the system asks why: Is he unavailable? Is this not a good fit? Or does he feel the question itself isn’t well-formed?

Importantly, Cameron can also refer the question to a colleague — someone else in his network who might be a better fit. That referral goes to the colleague, not the student. The student never knows who was contacted or who passed.

Max Leisten: This privacy is intentional, and it matters. The student never knows if someone said no, so there’s no sense of rejection. The alumni never feel guilty about being too busy — we respect that their time is valuable. Protopia is the broker here. If Cameron passes, the algorithm simply moves to the next alumnus. It’s a win for everyone.

Both the student and the alumni are asked for feedback after each interaction. The prompt is simple — five emoji options. They can also add a written testimonial and opt in to having that testimonial shared publicly. This gives institutions powerful social proof to share in alumni magazines, on social media, and in other outreach.
Q&A Highlights

Q: How did you market Ask a Viking to students, and what has been most challenging about getting them to engage?

Victoria Martinsen: We used a combination of physical and digital outreach — digital billboards, posters, stickers handed out during welcome week that students could put on their water bottles. Our partnership with career services was critical, because their team was already meeting with faculty and students in classrooms. We also used the campus newsletter and our broader marketing and communications team. It was a multi-channel effort.

Q: Can young alumni also use Ask a Viking?

Victoria Martinsen: Yes — it’s open to students and alumni alike. We’ve even had prospective students use it. For inquiries from prospective students, we route those to our admissions office rather than sending them out to alumni.

Q: What happens if a student doesn’t get matched, or if the matched alumnus doesn’t reply?

Victoria Martinsen: The system sends a follow-up to the alumnus if there’s no initial response. If we still can’t get a match, or if a matched alumnus ultimately declines, the algorithm moves on and engages additional alumni until the question receives a response. We have an 86% answer rate, meaning 86% of submitted questions receive at least one response. For unanswered questions, there are management tools that flag them for review so we can investigate whether we have gaps in alumni supply or timing.

Q: Do you send a thank-you to alumni if the student doesn’t?

Victoria Martinsen: The system does generate an automated thank-you when an alumnus responds. But the thank-you that matters — the one we really want — is from the student directly. We prompt students multiple times to send their thanks, because that’s what builds the relationship.

Max Leisten: Agreed. The system sends a confirmation, but the human-to-human thank-you from the student is what creates a real connection.

Q: Can questions be customized, and can multiple alumni respond to one question?

Victoria Martinsen: The question is an open text box — students draft it themselves. A single question can go out to approximately 30–40 alumni based on the AI’s matching. The record for most responses to a single question was six.

Q: Did you integrate Ask a Viking into classes?

Victoria Martinsen: Yes. Career services promoted Ask a Viking while visiting classrooms, and several professors have made it an assignment — particularly in communications and business courses — requiring students to connect with a professional or alumni in their field of interest. That integration has been tremendously successful.

Q: Are alumni opted in by default, or do they have to sign up?

Victoria Martinsen: We went with an opt-out model. All contactable alumni are included — meaning anyone who hasn’t asked to be removed and whom we have a valid email for. We made that choice because we don’t treat this as a broadcast email. Out of 147,000 contactable alumni, the vast majority will never receive a question. An alumnus only gets a message if the AI has identified a relevant match. Alumni can set their preferred frequency and opt out entirely at any time, but very few have chosen to do so.

Max Leisten: This is a core Protopia principle. Alumni won’t sign up for a new platform in mass — we’ve seen this consistently. So we opt them in based on the data the institution provides, make the experience as frictionless as possible, and make it easy to opt out. We’ve found that when outreach is relevant, timely, and considerate, alumni engage at remarkable rates. Human beings want to help — we’ve just made it easy for them to do so.

Q: Is matching based solely on institutional CRM data, or does Protopia use third-party data?

Max Leisten: It’s institutional data only. We work with the institution to pull data from your CRM. We know that data isn’t always perfect — at a minimum, we need educational history, but job title, industry, and location enrich the matching significantly. We believe it’s important to work with your data and help you improve it, rather than augmenting it with third-party sources without your knowledge. You have full control over your data.

Q: Are questions reviewed before going out to alumni?

Victoria Martinsen: Every question that comes in and every response that goes out currently requires my approval. Protopia has offered to configure automatic approval for routine submissions and only flag edge cases for review — and that day may come — but right now, reviewing these is honestly the highlight of my day. The sincerity of the students’ questions and the thoughtfulness of the alumni responses is remarkable. I call it my dopamine hit.

Q: How is Ask a Viking different from a traditional mentoring platform?

Victoria Martinsen: The biggest difference is that there is no platform. There’s no website to log into, no username or password to remember. We’re not asking alumni for a six-month or yearlong commitment. We’re asking: do you have 20 minutes to draft a considered response to this question? That’s it.

Q: How is this different from just pointing students to LinkedIn?

Victoria Martinsen: When students search LinkedIn on their own, they have to filter, scroll, and decide who to message. Here, the AI does that work for them. And because it’s a blind email on both sides, there’s no sense of rejection if a match doesn’t pan out — the student never knew who was contacted. What we hear most in feedback is that this is easy. Frictionless. And the results tend to be better.

Q: How did you build stakeholder buy-in across campus, particularly with finance, IT, and senior leadership?

Victoria Martinsen: Finance wasn’t a major obstacle because our foundation covered the cost, and this platform actually came in under what we were spending before. So the argument was simple: better results, lower cost, less staff time.

IT had protocols we needed to meet, but Protopia was able to address all of their compliance and privacy questions to their satisfaction.

For leadership, what we were previously doing clearly wasn’t working, so there was openness to trying something genuinely different. My vice president is pro-AI and pro-automation, so she could see the value immediately. And assembling a cross-functional team — alumni engagement, career services, marketing, data operations — helped build consensus and momentum from the beginning.
Results

Max Leisten: Let me share some of the numbers from WWU’s first full calendar year of using Ask a Viking.

– 336 questions submitted
– 681 alumni engaged (engagement defined as any response — including a decline, because that signal matters too)
– 53% of engaged alumni updated their profile data in the process
– 1.7 responses per question on average — more than one response, which students consistently tell us feels like a real network
– 50% email open rate
– 86% of questions received at least one answer

We prompt students frequently to say thank you, because that’s how you build social capital. And we’re careful about throttling — while some questions have received 15+ responses, we want to keep the experience manageable so alumni don’t feel overwhelmed.

Victoria Martinsen: On the CASE alumni engagement metrics side:

– Volunteers: We went from 69 in FY24 to 509 in FY25. The vast majority of that growth is directly attributable to Ask a Viking — every alumni who responds to a request is coded as a volunteer.
– Communications engagement: From 44 in FY24 to over 3,000 in FY25, with profile updates through Ask a Viking contributing meaningfully to that figure.

The student and alumni feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. One of my favorite responses: “I appreciate the opportunity to help someone in a way I wish someone had helped me.” That sentiment comes up again and again.

Victoria Martinsen: I want to share a specific example of the impact this program can have. Jack — his real name — is a recent graduate from the math department. Before Ask a Viking, he had never been engaged: no gift, no volunteering, never attended an event.

Then he received a question from a student who was discouraged about internships and wasn’t sure what else she could do. Jack responded. His reply started with genuine empathy — “your experience is typical, and I know it can be very frustrating and confusing” — followed by encouragement and practical guidance about research opportunities, personal projects, advisers, and more. He hit the character limit and ended with an invitation to reach out directly.

After responding to that student, Jack made his first gift to the university. He went from completely unengaged to a volunteer and a donor.

Jack was not alone. Using our dashboard data and a Copilot-assisted analysis, I found that:

– 94 alumni had never been engaged before Ask a Viking and are now engaged
– 12 of those alumni made their first-ever gifts
– The largest group of alumni responding to questions are mid-career alumni — a key demographic for long-term engagement and giving
– The College of Humanities and Social Sciences has the highest adoption — which tells us this isn’t just accounting and business majors benefiting. Our liberal arts students are some of the biggest beneficiaries of the program.

Victoria Martinsen: Looking ahead, there are several features we plan to activate:

– Donor alerts — notifying gift officers when an assigned prospect engages through Ask a Viking
– Circles — subcommunities organized by college, region, or interest area
– Super volunteers — a digest-based program that routes unanswered questions to a curated group of willing alumni, even without a direct match
– Graduate school data enrichment — adding information about where our alumni pursued further education, so we can match students who are weighing grad school options with alumni who have walked that path

Max Leisten: Victoria, thank you — this was amazing. I can’t tell you how much we love working with you. You always ask the slightly uncomfortable question — “Can we do this? Can we do that?” — and that’s exactly what we want. It pushes us to do better. Every customer matters, and you are a rock star.

Victoria Martinsen: Thank you. It’s been my pleasure.