Today, only alumni management is not enough. Institutions have to find practical ideas to interact with alumni in a way that ensures alumni engagement. The alumni relations market is becoming more alumni-centric with each passing day.
With it, multiple software options are available with alumni-centricity at its base. These softwares are nothing but an alumni engagement tool. In the simplest terms, alumni engagement tools are comprehensive solutions for institutes to manage, engage, and connect with their alumni.
Using these engagement tools, alumni associations can build long-lasting alumni relationships. In this piece, we have accumulated five alumni engagement tools that every educational institution needs right now. Take a quick look!
1. Data Management Tool
Big data is a big problem for the majority of educational institutions. Imagine how draining it would be to maintain a journal of thousands of alumni to record their most recent data! Perhaps we can thank excel sheets for saving our lives.
No doubt it is a free tool, but institutions have to invest in terms of their time. Irrespective of what kind of excel sheets, spreadsheets, or Google sheets universities use nowadays, they need a data management tool for trouble-free alumni relations management.
With little manual effort, alumni associations can thoughtfully use sheets to record, maintain, and manage alumni data.
2. Email Marketing Tool
Email marketing software is one of the inevitable alumni engagement tools. In order to engage alumni bigger, better, and faster, all universities have to leverage email marketing tactics. And what could be better than investing in an email marketing tool for this?
An email marketing tool gives you hundreds of ready-to-use, responsive templates to choose from for your next campaign. These templates drive attention, convey the message, and fulfil the core purpose of marketing.
Institutions need tools like HubSpot email marketing, Sendinblue, or Mailchimp to win in their email marketing game and engage alumni in college events and activities.
3. Campaign Management Tool
Undoubtedly, to engage alumni, running multiple alumni engagement campaigns from time to time is a must. Institutions with a greater campaign management capacity have mightier chances of having long-lasting alumni relations.
Campaign management means planning the upcoming campaign, gathering all the planning resources, designing, launching, and recording the results all at one destination. Tools like Asana, Hive, and Basecamp are not only excellent campaign management tools, but also brilliant alumni engagement tools.
A cherry on the cupcake: a few campaign management tools offer ready-made project templates to launch on occasions like Teacher’s Day or Women’s Day, and institutions should not have any second thoughts before investing in them.
4. Community Networking Tool
Being an institution, it’s your responsibility to provide a platform for your alumni to network. A community networking tool enables alumni to build their professional connections, refer fellow alumni members, mentor others, and much more.
Moreover, such an interactive platform lets alumni communicate through posts, share opinions through polls, and expand connections by attending virtual events. Salesforce for Education is a top-notch community networking tool.
Besides fellow networking opportunities, this tool facilitates communications & family engagement as well. Institutions should invest in community networking tools to show their alumni:
- What are they capable of offering?
- How they value opportunities and
- How much will they stretch to keep their promise?
5. Performance Analysis Tool
“Last but not least.”
Every tool that institutions use to ensure alumni engagement should be tracked to know the outcomes. Therefore, a performance analysis tool becomes a dire alumni engagement tool requirement for universities. Using a performance analyzer, universities can track and record the responses received from campaigns.
Such a tool also helps in tracking the overall alumni engagement performance. Using the insights from it, institutions can get an idea of improvements or changes to be made for effective alumni engagement.
Tools like SEMrush, Moz Pro, Sprout Social, BuzzSumo, and Google Analytics are a few names of performance analyzing tools. These are the most investment-worthy tools for any institution looking to assess alumni relations best practices performance.
Surprise! What if you get all these tools as a combo?
Don’t worry. We aren’t kidding. With the current trends shifting towards building interactive alumni communities, Almashines has come up with an outstanding alumni portal. The Almashines Alumni Platform features streamlined and automated alumni database management, email and social media marketing, campaign sharing and management, networking and CouchSurfing, and alumni engagement metrics analysis. The all-in-one alumni portal is the best substitute for all five of these alumni engagement tools at an affordable price.
Are you excited to know more about such a varied platform?
Conclusion
Alumni engagement tools cut short the time institutes need to invest in alumni engagement activities. Plus, these tools increase the efficiency and productivity of alumni associations working towards engaging alumni with the community.
With rapid digitalization across all the industry verticals, the alumni relations industry should adopt technology-driven portals for a smooth operational flow ASAP. Who knows, with a little investment in alumni engagement tools, institutes might get stellar results overnight!
March 21, 2022
