Top business leaders know that a successful company is built on a vibrant corporate community with strong connections. These include mutually beneficial business partnerships, customer/client relationships, and, of course, the employer/employee relationship.
But how strong are your corporate alumni connections? Are you doing all you can to maintain healthy communication and cooperation with your former employees? If you are hesitant to answer these questions, this guide to building stronger alumni connections is for you.
As leaders in software for alumni engagement, here at Aluminate, we are experts on how to build and strengthen ties with both academic and corporate alumni. Read on for eight practical suggestions that will help you create a stronger connection with your corporate alumni.
8 ways to create strong alumni connections at your corporation
A corporate alumni program offers many benefits. But it will only serve you well when it is consistently maintained and nurtured. It is not too late to start improving your alumni connections. Build stronger connections from today with these eight strategic tips.
1. Understand your alumni network audience
Alumni associations consist of many different personality types. Your former colleagues and employees will have as many differences among them as your current colleagues and employees. To improve your alumni engagement levels, you must understand your audience.
By catering to their specific interests, you will build stronger connections between the alumni themselves as well as with your organization. Aluminate understands this, so we make it easier for you to appeal to varied interests.
The Groups feature allows like minds to communicate and collaborate. This allows members to create subgroups and connect based on projects or extracurricular interests. Community members see the content most relevant to their interests and navigate to them easily from the digital dashboard.
2. Use regular communication channels for a strong alumni network
Any alumni strategy relies on a foundation of regular communication. Do your company’s communication channels facilitate networking and support professional relationships with your alumni? If not, it is time to rethink your communications platform.
You can use one designed for alumni alone, or switch to one that supports communication throughout your entire corporate community. If you are looking for the right platform for stronger and better alumni corporate communications, look no further than Aluminate for Enterprise.
With customizable features that support engagement, collaboration, learning, and communication, it’s no wonder that so many organizations choose us for stronger alumni connections.
3. Host virtual events for networking with fellow alumni
Networking with alumni has traditionally taken place at specially organized alumni events. This relied on interested alumni attending your upcoming events. Unfortunately, this is not always possible, as their new careers may require them to move to another location.
This does not have to be a problem, though. You can invite alumni to virtual events that are not affected by geographical distance. A mix of virtual and in-person events is a good recipe for alumni event participation.
4. Share career development opportunities and job openings
There are many reasons why good employees leave. Former employees often want to return at a later date. The rise in boomerang employees is evidence of this. One of the benefits of building a strong alumni network is the opportunity to rehire your former employees that you were sad to see go.
Use the Aluminate platform and you will make it much easier for them to return. Stay in contact with them and they will realize they miss the company culture. Share available job openings on the digital dashboard and encourage them to apply, and they won’t hesitate to do so.
This continued interest in their career development and sharing of available opportunities will show your alumni that the business is prepared to welcome them back.
5. Recognize your alumni’s recent achievements
Although they no longer work for your company, you should still take note of your former employee’s achievements since they left. Recognizing your alumni’s achievements will boost your alumni engagement levels like never before.
You may discover the reason some of them left your employ in the first place was a lack of recognition or a perceived lack thereof. It is never too late to show recognition to your employees, even when they are former employees. You will build lifelong relationships that boost engagement, confidence, and self-worth.
Aluminate is the ideal platform to share your alumni’s updates and achievements. Simply post their news on the digital dashboard to allow your entire corporate community to recognize and congratulate them.
6. Offer volunteer and philanthropic opportunities
Alumni networks offer a continuous source of volunteer and philanthropic opportunities that will help you meet your corporate social responsibility targets. And help with outreach efforts is not all your alumni can do for the company.
They are the best choice when looking for career advice and mentorship for your new hires and junior employees. Playing their part in your professional development workshops and mentorship programs benefits your alumni community too.
The alumni feel wanted, needed, and appreciated, and hone their skills in the process. And current employees feel supported. It is a win-win scenario. That is why our mentor-matching feature is so popular with alumni and current employees, alike.
7. Offer alumni what they want, when they want it
People tend to be more engaged when they find what they’re looking for in a community. If you only throw a big quantity of information at them, they’ll soon be overwhelmed and lose interest because it will be complicated to dig out what’s interesting to them.
Aluminate allows members to set preferences and only show content that aligns with their interests. This makes it easy to search for content, people, jobs, and other opportunities with a multitude of search parameters.
8. Use feedback mechanisms and adapt accordingly
The best way to engage alumni and keep them engaged is to use the feedback they give you. This is one of the key benefits of an alumni network. By networking with your corporate alumni, you gain insights into what they were looking for that they did not get from you. This will help you plan future strategies so you don’t make the same mistakes with current employees.
Constructive criticism and feedback allow you to adapt your engagement strategies in general. Establish channels where your alumni can contribute their ideas and opinions with targeted surveys and polls. Keep them short and entertaining and your alumni will be more inclined to do them.
Foster lasting alumni connections with Aluminate for Enterprise
There are many ways to build stronger alumni connections. Alumni events and networking sessions have traditionally served as the best way to do so. However, your alumni connections need not be limited to networking with alumni at official events.
Technology now plays a greater role. When you have the right corporate community network in place, you can engage and communicate with alumni regularly using content relative to your industry and theirs. interests. A platform like Aluminate for Enterprise allows all of this and more.
Request a demo today and start building a stronger bond with your alumni association.
