Digital alumni engagement goes beyond just maintaining an online presence. To enhance alumni connections, institutions must use digital tools that address their alumni specific needs. Starting in their student years, today’s approach to engaging alumni considers what makes each group special and leverages various online tools, like social media and virtual events, to offer meaningful experiences.

Why is Digital Alumni Engagement so Important to Alumni Departments? 

1. Global Outreach
   Alumni networks were once characterized solely by casual meet-ups like reunions, but now that alumni are scattered across globe, the internet allows for never before opportunities for connectivity. Social media, websites, and online events are such tools that allow for real-time interactions and collaborations, irrespective of distance.
2. Economical Advantages
   Digital channels have steeply altered the cost benefit calculus. Unlike traditional methods such as print newsletters or in-person events, these online sites are cheap. If organizations take to online forums, webinars, and email campaigns, they can address a larger audience at a lesser expense.
3. Engaging on the Individual Level
   Technology has now enabled outreach activities to be truly person-specific depending on the individual’s different interests, career tracks, or location. Almabase-type tools use data analytics to ensure messages and recommendations are as much relevant as they are fun.
4. Impact tracking
   Through analytical methods, organizations can collect invaluable information regarding online engagement. They can observe participant levels in engagement, analyze the consequences of their fundraising, and refine their strategies in view of real-time feedback.
5. A Social Network Helping Build Community
   Websites enable graduates to work together professionally as well as interact with peers and share knowledge and experiences. This further increases their loyalty and connection to their alma mater.
6. Supports Institutional Objectives
   The networks of alumni are active agents with major impacts on ranking, fundraising, industry connection, and graduate success; for example, IIT Bombay’s digital engagement raised 57 crore rupees from its alumni for their campus.

Is Social Media Enough to Drive Alumni Engagement?

Alumni engagement is not time-specific, it is a continuous process of inviting your alumni participate and interact. it differs from platform to platform.

Alumni engagement can be done with multiple platforms where you engage your alumni such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc. But with these multiple social media platforms, one can not build a strong alumni community.

Alumni Offices have been adopting smart technologies to cater to the complex alumni relations engagement cycle. There’s nothing like the power of an alumni platform built with cutting-edge technology that boosts alumni engagement to another level.

5 Hacks to Boosts Alumni Engagement with a Powerful Alumni Platform:

1.Platform Driven Engagement Campaigns:

When you’re out of alumni engagement ideas, let the technology come up with new ones. Yes, that’s right! Based on the alumni interests, likes and comments, advanced algorithms provide better alumni engagement ideas, completely platform-driven. Whatttttttttt!

2.Powerful Outreach with Integrations:

The Alumni engagement model usually consists of various tools.  Sometimes managing multiple tools for alumni engagement becomes cliche. To avoid this, the alumni platform eliminates the process of managing multiple outreach tools (emails, social media, SMS, etc.). with powerful integrations of all of them on the alumni platform with which you can easily reach out and control your outreach channels from a single place. Alumni Platforms facilitate personalized/targeted communication by generating automated HTML mailers, auto event creations, and increase alumni engagement by building personal relationships with your alumni.

3.Notifications:

Capture the attention of your alumni instantaneously as you circulate important information and make announcements. A notification system prompts quickly reduces the response time of alumni towards your campaigns and will make sure that your information is consumed by the alumni right when you want them to know. You can play with cool notification headlines to infuse and sustain the excitement of your alumni. Don’t forget, your alumni will remember some of your best notifications and will talk it over with their friends too!

4.Alumni Events/ Webinars:

There is so much to look forward to in the coming years after a challenging last year.

A lot of institutions conducted their first virtual giving day, virtual seminar, etc.’ Amidst this, one concept that evolved better so far is Virtual Alumni Events.

You can create any virtual events or webinars on alumni platforms. Don’t lose your alumni over managing multiple tools. Make it a hassle-free experience for alumni to register and attend your virtual events. Manage registration, ticketing, etc. from the platform itself thereby not losing alumni participation during these processes.

For webinars and other online events, alumni platforms serve as a single point of contact for alumni to register and attend.

5.News & Stories:

News and stories are the essential points to keep your alumni engaged. 

For alumni engagement, you can arrange Technology facilitates polls, interest groups, and professional networking groups easily on the platform. This will help to build a strong alumni network as well as boost alumni engagement because alumni can now interact on various groups from a single place thereby not oscillating between various networking tools.

You can make important announcements on the platform and get it viewed easily by all alumni just like notice boards. 

Conclusion:

The Alumni platform is an important tool for alumni engagement. You can manage alumni virtual events, webinars, news everything under one roof.

Invest in a more interactive alumni platform rather than on multiple tools which will not only enhance your alumni engagement but also save you a lot of time & money.

See what are some of the features of AlmaShines Alumni Platform and how you can increase your alumni engagement. 

For small alumni offices, the most important factor which is taken into consideration is ROI. Investing in technology only makes sense as it delivers ROI and removes the limitation of manpower.