A fundamental function of formal education in today’s technology age is to build a knowledge-based workforce for any nation’s 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 is vital. As a result, education and educational resources have become the fastest-growing segment in the world.
When it comes to educational institutions, “alumni” play a vital role, being central to the well-being of students and the institution’s own brand equity.
What will be a better resource than our alumni to assist in overcoming some of the institution’s barriers? How can an institution harness the power of its alumni community? Institutions ought to build a robust network of alumni and an ongoing rapport with alumni through well-executed alumni engagement initiatives. The phrase “alumni engagement” refers to how educational institutions retain and foster relationships with those who graduated in previous years 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 through an alumni CRM. It will also help maintain a positive reputation as an institution for future generations of students. A number of students decide to join a university or college based on the featured of alumni success storeys.
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 community. Alumni data may be centralised and coupled with various useful front-end member modules and time-saving back-end administration tools.
The benefits of alumni management:
- Contribute to the availability of opportunities for teaching or mentoring graduated students who have maintained close relationships with their universities and may be willing to return to teach. Current students can benefit from this since they can gain expert and experiential advice from alumni with 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 bring in more new students. Globally located alumni can even do interviews for international students.
- Enhance admission – every educational institution receives a great deal of data and information from former students.
- Obtain significant financial support – strong alumni engagement enhances fundraising campaigns. Maintaining an engaged alumni community helps in fundraising.
- The alumni community can stay in touch with their peers through events, virtual communities, and sharing recollections through online channels, job boards, and other means.
- Alumni may return to the institution to pursue part-time courses for upskilling and career changes.
How to Boost Alumni Engagement?
- Begin alumni engagement as soon as students graduate. Students spend a brief time at your institution compared to the number of years they would spend as alumni. Community networking, email, and text messaging are important in establishing an effective framework for alumni connect.
- Identify your audience, learn about their needs, and tailor your communication to them. A current 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 multiple channels. This can be done based on areas of alumni specialisation, interests, and location.
- Increase the value for any 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.
- The alumni community should have opportunities to create their own network and communicate easily on the move through an alumni mobile app.
- Keep alumni data up to date – it is important to keep your alumni current to sustain alumni interactions properly. Before students graduate, duly collect their contact information, personal information, and preferences. Then, to keep profile data up to date, employ an innovative community engagement platform and use online and social media sites such as LinkedIn.
Why e2s Connect?
Maintaining alumni participation has become more difficult in recent years as there is a lag in communication and networking landscapes. To develop an engaging alumni network, you need the right platform with flexibility and configurability.
e2s Connect, from Engage2Serve, delivers a reliable and modern technology platform with an assortment of functionalities to engage your alumni with mobile apps and portals for your alumni to establish not only a powerful two-way communication with the university but also easily network 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 practises from reputable global institutions.
What does an Alumni Engagement platform need, and how does e2s Connect score there?
- Multiple layout templates and a customised domain for your alumni software
- Great automated campaign facilities to target groups of alumni, including personas. Some sample alumni personas are alumni in research, alumni in entrepreneurship, alumni in corporate jobs, etc.
- An excellent database management system that includes an alumni directory and profile management, allowing the alumni to create their own network, call for events, etc.
- An engaging system with activities, automatic notifications, and an interactive discussion board
- A comprehensive event lifecycle management from invitations to registration and feedback
- Job boards where they can advertise open positions with their own employers for peers and newly graduating students.
- Polls and surveys to read the pulse of your alumni, their needs and aspirations.
- Mentoring current students of your institution in areas of need
- Great communities feature for alumni networking through the establishment of communities, posts, likes, etc.
- Fundraising for various causes with a secured payment gateway
- Tracker, which provides engagement analytics and detailed reports with a 360 view of each alumni.
- Involve your alumni in volunteering initiatives.
- University-branded mobile app on both IOS and Android platforms.
e2s Connect from Engage2Serve is designed as a mobile-first, modern alumni engagement software meant to address today’s institutional challenges of connecting with and successfully engaging their alumni.
Engage2Serve Inc. is the creator of transformational cloud-based, mobile-first Student Lifecycle CRM products for student recruitment, retention, and alumni engagement.
COMMENTS