Alumni engagement tools are crucial to help you build a thriving workplace community. These platforms provide a safe online space where alumni can engage with one another.
Alumni engagement tools also allow your alumni to grow and flourish, creating a happier and more productive workplace culture. Yet, with so many different alumni engagement tools and platforms available, it’s often a daunting task to find the right one for your particular community.
Read on to discover the essential user guide to selecting the best alumni engagement tool for your business.
What Are Alumni Engagement Tools?
Alumni engagement tools are online tools and software that help you manage and engage your corporate alumni community.
When used correctly, these tools will support your efforts to build a community and support a network of former employees who are ready to be called upon to achieve your business goals.
Aluminati has a range of useful modules and features that will assist you in onboarding and engaging your alumni.
The Importance Of Alumni Engagement
Successful alumni programs deepen brand ambassadorship and add tremendous company value. Creating an alumni platform is only the first step. You also need to keep your alumni engaged and happy if you want to reap long-lasting benefits.
When you frequently engage with your alumni, you’ll unlock a robust, supportive alumni community that can assist your company in various ways.
Most importantly, this thriving, engaged community will drive your brand forward, making future recruitment and talent acquisition easier.
The Undercover Recruiter reports that at least 84% of alumni would leave their current occupation for an organization with a stronger brand and better reputation.
Not only will a strong brand benefit your corporation from a successful alumni engagement strategy, but it’ll also help you save on expensive recruitment, marketing, and training costs.
You will discover that it’s easier to retain your top talent and acquire new talent when you effectively manage alumni engagement. With the top talent on your side, and a sterling, robust brand, your company can grow faster and thrive for years to come.
How To Choose The Best Alumni Engagement Tools
Aluminati offers an alumni engagement platform that can help in the following ways:
- Speed up daily tasks, such as onboarding.
- Enable effective networking in and outside of the community.
- Strengthen your brand and turn alumni into brand ambassadors.
They fall under three different categories; namely, Content, Interaction, and Administrative.
Here’s a list of key items to consider when selecting an alumni engagement tool:
1. Accelerate Daily Tasks
Managing a busy alumni community comes with its own set of challenges. One of these challenges is the plethora of daily administrative tasks you’ll have to oversee.
Some essential daily tasks include onboarding new alumni, dealing with user access, and more.
An effective alumni engagement tool will help automate onboarding, manage logins and automate other daily tasks.
Alumni platforms, such as Aluminate For Enterprise, offer an excellent, secure induction experience.
This tool offers a Newcomers Hub to help alumni get settled into their new roles.
Not only do alumni get access to a variety of valuable resources, but it guides them through the onboarding process.
This experience helps to reduce the time needed for alumni to settle in and feel welcome. Your community manager will also save time on onboarding new alumni as most of the process is automated.
Another essential feature is the Digital Library. This feature makes it easy to share information such as videos, articles, platform FAQs, and other corporate media.
It should also help your alumni familiarize themselves with the community and culture as quickly and effortlessly as possible.
Once they know how to navigate your platform, alumni can start to successfully network with their peers and build lasting, impactful relationships.
2. Enable Networking
Building and improving your network is one of the critical aspects of managing a thriving alumni community.
Your network should help alumni establish meaningful relationships that actually add value.
Aluminate Community Builder is an effective tool that helps you to build an online Work Community. This platform promotes alumni engagement by encouraging people to grow and build their careers, while creating a positive culture.
The first step is to include an up-to-date People Directory. Here, alumni can use the custom-created and dynamic profile pages to search and connect with others in the same workgroups.
Staff groups are another excellent feature that can be found in Aluminate For Enterprise. These groups are fantastic for alumni to form meaningful relationships based on shared interests, hobbies, goals, and experiences.
Forming relationships can also help them increase knowledge transfer and participate in collaborative working experiences, which will provide essential skills training.
Opportunities Board is an excellent tool for alumni to share internal experiences and opportunities. This alumni engagement tool should help your company improve brand perception, wellbeing and encourage innovation.
Your alumni will be motivated to stay in contact with your business and their former coworkers to keep a pulse on exciting opportunities that arise.
They’ll stay proud brand ambassadors and engaged alumni for years to come. These internal or external relationships will also help your company attract top industry talent.
Another advantage is that connections will help your company discover and maintain lucrative business opportunities while encouraging brand ambassadorship across the board.
3. Strengthen Your Brand
The final essential part of a good alumni engagement tool is that it helps to strengthen your brand. Like Aluminate For Enterprise, most of the best platforms let you build unlimited groups and channels, each targeted at specific regions or interests.
You can build fully customized experiences for your members. These experiences include on-brand design and language familiar to your company culture. When you speak their language and proudly show off your brand, you create an inclusive company culture that’ll stay with alumni long after they’ve left.
By doing this, you’ll encourage alumni to become proud brand ambassadors, which in turn will lead to your company attracting more talent and enjoying increased brand awareness. Another essential feature for an effective alumni engagement tool is that of a real-time, live dashboard that’s easily accessible to community members.
Here your community members can view the latest news, highlights, and other information on an ever-changing page that’s always corporate and on-brand. This page will help to improve engagement and keep alumni up to date with all the important company culture events and policy changes throughout the year.
It’s also a great place to highlight star alumni or recognize hard work. This encouragement will increase productivity and instill a dedicated corporate culture in your alumni.
Conclusion
There are significant ROI benefits of having a corporate alumni platform.
The best engagement tool to help you unlock these benefits is one that lets you:
- Manage daily administrative tasks effortlessly,
- Enable and encourage networking among your community members,
- Strengthen your brand to develop lasting brand ambassadors,
