Alumni usually are the greatest brand ambassadors of an institute. They are the ones who make their institute proud and the current students look up to them as mentors for a successful career.
In various institutions, Alumni have been praised time and again for their active role in successful placements. Not only have they created a positive image of the institute in the market but also they prove to be a great help in terms of convincing their companies to run a recruitment spree in the campus.
However, in many institutions, out of the total alumni community, only a small fraction will be seen participating supporting their institute in their placement drives. Facing the same challenge? Ever wondered what could have been the reason for getting a lower alumni participation?
While achieving a good placement drive, these are the 3 things an institution is neglecting while seeking alumni support from its Alumni Community:
Updated Alumni Database:
Each year a bunch of students pass out from the institution and add up to the alumni community. However, updating the database of recent graduates isn’t enough. An institution needs to maintain and manage the database of the entire alumni community to have a strong alumni database.
Strong Alumni Database consists of all the information of alumni right from their current location to their correct email address, the organizations they are working in, designations, their social media presence, etc.
Alumni Database is the base of any alumni community. An incorrect email id is wrong or a wrong designation can hamper the whole placement flow and would leave institutions connecting with only a handful of alumni.
Engagement Strategy
As we all agreed above, the alumni database is the base of an alumni community. But, it doesn’t end there. Strong relationships with alumni fetch strong alumni support from them. However, to build a strong relationship, it is important for any institution to build a holistic engagement strategy for its alumni community.
Poor engagement practices can leave the alumni community non-active and indifferent to the mission and values of the institute.
Hence, sharing regular information, keeping alumni posted on the latest updates, planning various engagement campaigns and more helps in building a lasting relationship with them. This makes seeking any support, right from placements, mentorship to career guidance a smooth experience for institutions,
Alumni Reachout
To build a meaningful relationship with the alumni, they ought to be regularly engaged. And to regularly engage alumni, an institution will require a strong communication channel.
There can be various mediums in which institutions can reach out to the alumni community, some of them being Mails, Social Media Accounts, Alumni Forums and Alumni Platforms.
Building a smooth communication channel reduces tons of the efforts of TPOs in reaching out to the alumni community seeking placements and also helps achieve huge alumni participation.
Alumni Tracking
Building a strong database and engagement strategy, an institution also requires the right tracking base. Not being able to track how well an updated alumni database is or how well the alumni has participated in multiple initiatives planned, will keep the institutions clueless about the results of the efforts taken up by them.
So it is really important for the alumni community to set up a tracking channel that can ease up the operations of an alumni cell and TPOs when it comes to tracking for placement support received.
Conclusion
Networking, interacting and staying in touch — the alumni network offers students, institutions and alumni a host of benefits. The more engaged an institution is with its alumni, the easier it gets to place its students.
With Alumni Database, Engagement Strategy, Reachout Channels and Tracking System sorted no one can stop an institute from successfully hosting its campus placements with the full support of its alumni community.
February 16, 2023
