A regular alumni newsletter will keep alumni informed, connected, and involved with the alumni program. However, to offer these benefits, it must be engaging enough for alumni to want to keep reading. Are your alumni actively reading your emailed newsletters? Or are they mindlessly clicking through them?
Stop wasting time and resources on alumni newsletters that don’t bring results. It’s time to learn how to write a more engaging alumni newsletter. This guide will show you how, in eight simple steps.
The benefits of an engaging alumni newsletter
An alumni newsletter is not only the ideal tool for keeping alumni engaged, but it also offers several other benefits.
- Promotes your institution/organization, alumni program, and alumni events. Informs alumni about fundraising drives, thereby increasing fundraising opportunities and donations.
- Makes alumni feel recognized, valued, and essential to the alumni program. This boosts alumni engagement, facilitates re-engagement, and drives alumni participation.
- Creates mentorship, networking, and business opportunities with other program members. This strengthens members’ relationships with their alma mater/former employer and the greater alumni community.
- Advertises upcoming events such as networking sessions and seminars, ensuring more alumni attend. Alumni who feel connected to their alma mater attend more events.
How to write an engaging alumni newsletter in 8 steps
These eight simple steps incorporate the best practices for writing an engaging newsletter.
1. Collect and update contact information
If you don’t keep alumni profile data, especially contact info, up to date, you’ll lose valuable connections. There is another downside to letting this admin task slide. If alumni notice that their profile data is incomplete or outdated, they’ll lose interest. To keep them engaged, you need to update info regularly.
The Aluminate platform acts as a central database of alumni community information. It allows alumni to update their profiles, contact info, and more. And our social data sync feature makes this even easier, tracking LinkedIn and Facebook (with users’ permission, only) for the most up-to-date profile changes.
2. Segment your audience
An alumni community has one thread holding them all together. In the academic world, it’s the alma mater. In the corporate world, it’s their former employer. However, they all have unique interests, skills, talents, and affiliations. Segment your alumni audience according to the criteria that seem most relevant.
Whether you’re an academic institution dealing with former students, or a corporate organization dealing with former employees, the aim is the same. Segmentation allows you to reach out to them with more targeted, and therefore more engaging, content.
The Groups module on the Aluminate Community Builder allows you to create sub-communities within the wider alumni community.
3. Understand alumni interests
To ensure that your alumni readers find your newsletter content engaging, you need to gauge their interest and match their expectations. Aluminate’s Intelligent Matching Engine can help you do this, effortlessly.
This feature in the Aluminate Community Builder automates what used to be a major administrative burden. It matches alumni members to each other, and relevant valuable content, in the alumni program.
With just a few clicks, it can match alumni program members to :
- Available jobs, courses of study, training programs, etc.
- Upcoming alumni networking events
- Fundraising campaigns and volunteering opportunities
- Mentors to mentees (or vice versa)
- Affinity groups
- Updates to the alumni program, alma mater news, industry-specific news, etc
- Special offers
And so much more. If it’s on your community platform, our matching engine will find it, and match it to the right recipients. Matches can be downloaded and concluded manually, or automated for your convenience.
4. Create valuable content
Create valuable content that will keep your alumni coming back for more. Highlight their achievements in alumni feature stories. Offer further study and career resources. Promote upcoming alumni events.
The Aluminate platform’s digital dashboard is the perfect tool for posting and sharing a regular newsletter and other engaging content. You can use it to showcase inspiring alumni success stories, and alumni can contribute their personal stories to share with others in the program.
A Harvard University survey found that their alumni are deeply engaged and strongly committed to social responsibility through entrepreneurship and volunteerism. Indeed, 39% had founded a for-profit or nonprofit venture. These are the kinds of stories that engage alumni and inspire them to do the same.
5. Keep the design clean and engaging
It’s a fine balance between engaging, and overwhelming. Keep the design of your alumni newsletters clean and uncluttered. A page full of text and nothing else will do little to capture alumni’s attention. On the other hand, too many colorful elements and images may create sensory overload.
Introduce multimedia elements here and there to break up text and increase engagement. Indeed, interactive features are highly effective in keeping readers actively engaged. The key here is a healthy balance of information and entertainment.
6. Craft catchy subject lines
Your alumni readers already see countless emails and newsletters from various organizations every day. They may be reluctant to open yet another newsletter. It’s your job to entice them with an eye-catching subject line.
Craft some catchy subject lines for your alumni newsletters, and you’ll soon see an uptick in opening rates. You may also personalize them with their names. Avoid too many emoticons, emojis, exclamation points, and other common attention-grabbers here. Less is more, so limit these to one or two at most.
7. Include clear calls to action
Your newsletter should include a clear call to action near the end. For example, it could encourage alumni to RSVP to participate in an upcoming event, or sign up for a new free course, etc. Whatever you’re hoping your alumni will do more of, that’s what the topic of your call to action will be.
Consider the placement of your CTA. Near the end of the newsletter is good, but be sure to make it visible. Bold, contrasting colors against a white background are best. Don’t get carried away describing the benefits of the desired action – that’s what the main body of content was for. Keep it concise.
8. Measure and improve
Measure your engagement metrics such as your click through rates. This will allow you to adapt and improve your content strategy for higher engagement.
In today’s world, both academic institutions and corporations focus on data to make better business decisions. That is why the Aluminate Community Builder offers users Insights, for a deeper understanding of their alumni communities’ engagement score at a glance.
The Insights tool is dynamic and highly customizable. Use it to track relevant key performance indicators such as generated business/donations, content clicks, re-hires, and HR savings. Track the metrics that are relevant for your organization, to assess the return on investment (ROI) of your alumni program.
You can choose from a library of pre-set reports, or create your own. Insights help you determine the success of your alumni program, and discover what produces the most engagement. This in turn lets you optimize your program’s budget allocation.
Engage more alumni with Aluminate
An alumni newsletter does much more than make alumni aware of the program and its activities. It informs, educates, entertains and engages them, ultimately driving more participation. If you want your alumni association to be successful and profitable, your newsletters and other content must be engaging.
The Aluminate platform makes this so much easier.
Aluminate is the world’s most customizable online community platform. Aluminate for Education and Aluminate for Enterprise help academic institutions and companies stay connected to and engage their alumni community members.
Request a demo and start engaging more alumni today.
