An alumni engagement strategy is the one which is built keeping ‘alumni’ at the centre!
The educational institutes are centre of affectionate recollections and encounters as who can ever forget the fond memories and experiences of our University Campuses.
While students set themselves up for career success by learning things about industry topics and also built a relationship with their college that grew to ingrained loyalty.
The love and commitment of your alumni for their Institutions can be a powerful tool for fundraising opportunities, marketing and brand awareness for universities. However, if you want to tap into those benefits, you need to find a way to maintain the relationship with your students even after they receive their degree.
In the earlier time, most of the best practices for alumni engagement revolved around direct mail campaigns, phone calls and student reunions. Now the digital age means universities can engage with their alumni on a more consistent and modern basis.
If you’re ready to take your school’s marketing strategy into the digital world, here are the steps you can follow for better alumni engagement.
1. Gather Your Alumni Information
Making meaningful connections with your alumni requires higher education institutions to act with diligence. What makes your alumni tick and what sort of content do they respond best to? Knowing the answers to these and other questions will allow you to tailor your alumni engagement strategy for each segment and persona.
2. Creating Persona Maps for Each Alumni Group
Once important data about your students is collected, you can segment them to better speak their language. For instance, if you’re designing a campaign for the class of 1992 or alumni of your college of business, you can ask these:
- Do you prefer podcasts or blog posts?
- Do you like to interact through live video?
- Are you more likely to connect through Twitter or LinkedIn?
- When do you spend most of their time online?
- Are you engaged by visual content?
- What kind of jobs do you have now?
- What subjects were you interested in while at school?
By looking at alumni preferences, the Universities can discover how they would connect with their audience’s preferences. Here is a Blog about the best ways to keep your Alumni Community Engaged.
3. Tools to Monitor Your Alumni Engagement Strategies
Managing alumni engagement through various techniques can be a complex experience for any organization. After all the only way you determine whether your campaigns are successful or not is to monitor their performance, you’ll need a tool that helps you to continuously learn from your efforts. As, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for delighting your students and alumni.
Once you know where your audience is spending their time, and what content they enjoy the most, you can begin to adjust your alumni engagement strategy. In this way with the help of alumni engagement tools you can monitor alumni engagement strategies and best practices for your success.
4. Social Media to Promote Networking & Alumni Engagement
Engage your attendees to promote the event on Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to their network, getting huge alumni participation. Harness the power of social media channels and mails together to maximize the reach.
5. Twitter for Brief Updates & Shoutouts
A powerful way to encourage more engagement with the college brand is to encourage and appreciate your Alumni over Twitter.
Platforms like Twitter can also be useful for universities that want to keep their alumni informed about what’s going on with the college. A quick update means you won’t risk boring them with long-winded articles and blog posts.
There are several opportunities to engage with alumni through social media. Knowing which platform your target audiences prefer, as well as creating content and imagery that will capture their attention, will be crucial. With AlmaShines grow your outreach even to the alumni who weren’t reachable till now through mailers with integrated Social Media channels on modules; be it alumni fundraisers or alumni events. Harness the power of social media to grab attention and engage a broader mass and boost alumni engagement effortlessly.
Thus with AlmaShines Alumni Portal get a hassle-free experience in connecting and managing alumni relations as AlmaShines allows you to trace alumni behaviour and plan your engagement campaigns accordingly. Keep a measure of a number of alumni engaged, alumni responded to which emails, who contributed to your cause, who attended your events, and more.
Invest in an alumni management platform as it can facilitate the continuity and sense of common identity between your past and current students. An alumni management system helps you ensure that you never lose access to them and continue to engage with them long after they have graduated. Speak to us today to know more about how our solutions can fit your needs.
March 21, 2022
