Alumni management: A fundamental function of formal education in today’s technological age is to build a knowledge-based workforce for national growth. Similarly, if the goal of globalisation is to be met, the availability of high-quality human and material resources to boost production, consumption and trade become vital. As a result, education has become the fastest-growing industry in the world.
When it comes to the educational institution “Alumni” play a vital role, being central to the well-being of students of their alma mater.
What will be a better resource than our own alumni to assist in overcoming some of the institution’s barriers? The institutions should build and encourage a robust network of alumni and build a continuous rapport with alumni.
The phrase “alumni engagement” refers to how educational institutions retain and foster relationships with prior graduates to develop a strong professional network.
When considering the big picture of alumni engagement, we should keep in mind that the student experience does not end with graduation. Long-term student achievement will be boosted by implementing an engagement strategy to keep alumni connected. It will also help maintain a positive reputation as an institution for future generations.
By promoting participation, community-building, networking, communications, and giving back, a well-thought out alumni management software assists institutions in strategically establishing and managing their alumni network. Alumni data may be centralized and coupled with a variety of useful front-end member modules as well as time-saving back-end administration tools.
The benefits of alumni management:
- Obtain significant financial support-strong alumni engagement supports fundraising campaigns. Maintaining an engaged alumni community helps in fundraising.
- Contribute to the availability of opportunities for teaching or mentoring – graduated students who have maintained close relationships with their universities may be willing to return to teach. Current students can benefit from this since they can gain expert advice from prior students who have real world corporate experience.
- Alumni can provide crucial career advice and other mentoring to current students. This increases the overall value of the institution.
- Recruit brand advocates: the university’s proud alumni can act as excellent brand ambassadors. Positive feedback and recommendations will be shared with their peers, the general public, and on social media. Hence, it helps to enrol more new students. Globally located alumni can even do the first-cut interviews for international students.
- Enhance admission –Every educational institution receives a great deal of data and information from former students.
- Alumni can stay in touch with their peers through events, virtual communities, and sharing recollections through online channels, job boards, and other means.
How to Boost Alumni Engagement?
- Begin the engagement phase as soon as the enrolment process begins. Students spend a very brief time at your institution, in comparison to the number of years they will spend as alumni. To establish an effective framework for alumni involvement, community networking, email, and text messaging play an important role.
- Identify your audience, learn about their needs, and tailor your communication to them. A present student’s interests will differ from those who graduated decades ago. These findings can be applied to the materials and communication that can be used to engage your audience by creating meaningful personas to send targeted communications via text messaging, email, mobile app or other channels, which will make a major difference. This can be done based on areas of specialization, interests, faculties, and location.
- Increasing the value of the alumni community. Organising events and get-togethers where former students can reminisce, discuss current projects, and debate future opportunities is another powerful way to accomplish this.
- Keeping data up-to-date; it is important to keep your alumni database up-to-date to properly sustain alumni interaction. Before students graduate, duly collect their contact information, personal information, and preferences. Then, to synchronise all profile data, they employ an innovative community engagement platform that collects information online and from social media sites like LinkedIn.
Why e2s?
Maintaining alumni participation has become more difficult in recent years as there is a lag in communication and networking landscapes. To develop an engaging aluminate network, you need the right platform with flexibility and configurability.
e2s delivers a reliable and modern technology platform, with an assortment of functionalities to engage your alumni with mobile apps for your alumni not only to establish a powerful two-way communication with the university but also easy networking with peers and students. The platform is a one-stop-shop with all the tools you’ll need to create and manage your alumni community, built from the ground up for universities incorporating best practices from reputable global institutions.
What does e2s provide?
- Multiple layout templates and a customised domain for your alumni software
- Great automated campaign facilities to target groups of alumni
- An excellent database management system that includes an alumni directory and profile management
- An engaging system with activities, automatic notifications, and an interactive discussion board
- An comprehensive event lifecycle management from invitations to registration and feedback
- Job board portal and mentoring
- Polls and surveys to maintain the pulse of your alumni
- Great communities feature for alumni networking
- Fundraising portal with secured payment gateway
- Tracker which provides engagement analytics and detailed reports
- University-branded mobile app on both IOS and Android platforms
e2s Connect from Engage2Serve is designed as a mobile-first, modern alumni engagement product meant to address today’s institutional challenges of connecting with their alumni.
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