Struggling to help your alumni connect with their former educational institution? Between their busy home and professional lives, and your focus on supporting current students and faculty, it can be difficult to devote enough time and attention to your alumni relation efforts.
To rectify this, we explore why connecting with your alumni is important and the various ways in which you can encourage alumni to engage and stay in contact.
Why do we connect with alumni?
From fundraising events to financial incentives, alumni offer a long list of benefits to their educational institution and vice versa. This mutually beneficial relationship offers a number of key advantages including the establishment of alumni mentoring programmes, more alumni placements, and an increase in alumni donations.
Not to mention, graduates, especially those with notable professional positions and achievements, are an inspiration for current and prospective students. Connecting with your alumni and building your reputation is therefore crucial to ensuring the continued success of your establishment.
How do you stay in touch with alumni?
Keeping in touch with your alumni can be tricky – especially when they move cities or change their name after getting married. To help your educational institution benefit from having a collaborative alumni network, we explain some of the best ways you can help your incredibly useful community of alumni connect with your institution.
Keep your database updated
First and foremost, one of the best ways to stay in touch with your alumni is to check that you have their up-to-date contact details. Ensuring you have their latest phone numbers, as well each person’s physical address and email address, will help all relevant communications to successfully reach your intended alumni audience – regardless of whether it’s a text, email, or newsletter.
To do this, it’s important that regular communications are sent directly to existing alumni asking them to update their contact information. These requests should also be shared on social media platforms to ensure alumni can reconnect with you even if they’ve lost touch for a number of months or years.
Utilise social media
The advent of the internet and social media platforms has made getting in touch with long lost relatives and old school friends alike easier than ever before. For educational institutions, having a strong online social media presence can encourage alumni to connect long after losing touch.
From Twitter and Facebook to Instagram and LinkedIn, there’s no shortage of effective social media platforms out there that you can utilise to shout about your institution’s latest news, events, faculty, and student achievements. Building your presence on these sites can boost the visibility of your institution, making it easier for alumni to find you.
Host regular events
Hosting varied and frequent events that are interesting or entertaining is one of the most effective ways to encourage alumni to interact with your institution. Regardless of whether the event is focused around an informative seminar followed by a meet and greet, or a three-course meal filled with music as part of a fundraising event, these alumni gatherings provide a vital incentive for many individuals to keep in touch.
Create captivating content
Give your alumni something worth sticking around for by crafting memorable, informative, and entertaining content. To encourage your alumni community to engage, you may even decide to create more nostalgic pieces of content, interview alumni individuals, or dabble in interactive content.
You can even send out interactive alumni surveys to find out more about their interests and collect useful data and preferences. Using this information, you can then adjust your approach (if necessary) to make your content more appealing to this particular community.
Offer some incentives
If you want your alumni to actively connect with you, then some sought-after incentives may be necessary. These incentives might include exclusive merchandise or discounts on activities/meals, but it’s important to listen to your alumni, so you know which incentives are likely to be well-received.
Once you’ve decided which incentives would be best to encourage your alumni to stay connected to your institution, you need to shout about it! To foster a positive relationship between your institution and alumni, make sure they have easy access to these incentives and don’t have to jump through too many hoops to receive them.
Become a valuable resource
Another way to help your institution and alumni connect is by turning your institution into a font of knowledge! You can do this by commenting on current affairs and creating a dedicated resources and news page. This library of handy information will attract alumni searching for a reliable source and encourage engagement, healthy debate, and conversations.
Help your alumni connect with Aluminati
At Aluminati, we know that the right tools can make getting (and staying!) connected much easier. This is why we developed the world’s most customisable engagement platform for the education sector. Featuring a convenient profile, directory, and grouping function, connecting with your invaluable alumni network has never been easier.
Plus, this innovative alumni engagement software platform also boasts interactive chat messaging, data insights, and supports mentoring programmes, helping to support the effortless creation of new and meaningful relationships. As a result, your institution could benefit from an increase in student engagement, better alumni placements, and even more alumni donations.
To find out more about helping alumni connect and how our platform can support alumni connections, please don’t hesitate to contact our friendly team today. Alternatively, why not learn more about how to make the most of this customisable platform with a personalised demonstration? With a bespoke demo, you can discover which tools will work best for your alumni.
You can also get in touch with our team by giving us a call on 01638 676 232 or emailing your enquiry to info@aluminati.net. Prefer social media messaging? Active on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, simply send us a message to learn more about our platform for the education sector
