Is your alumni affairs office eager to improve the number or quality of your alumni relations?
Or maybe you’re keen to create more industry connections and take on new clients? Whatever your company or institution aims might be, join us to discover how expert alumni relationship management can help.
Not only do we take a look at the best way for organisations maintain mutually beneficial relationships with their alumni, but we can even help you to significantly improve these alumni relations via an alumni association.
To find out more about the purpose of alumni relations and how you can improve them, carry on reading!
What is the purpose of alumni relations?
Put simply, there is no single purpose of alumni relations. While strong alumni relationships have clear benefits for the alumni (including discounts and networking opportunities), they are also incredibly advantageous for the enterprise or institution as well as for the current employees or students.
For enterprises and employers in particular, alumni relations can help them to generate invaluable word-of-mouth marketing by acting as brand ambassadors, leading to new clients or even a better industry reputation. Positive alumni relations can also encourage alumni to return to the company at a later stage in their career, aiding recruitment drives.
How do you manage alumni relations?
Often, properly managing alumni relations not only takes a dedicated alumni affairs office, but also requires the implementation of the appropriate tools, research, and strategies. Simply sending out a newsletter via post every other month is unlikely to generate the results you’re looking for. Instead, alumni relationship management involves regularly updating your database of alumni contacts, taking the time to uncover their interests, and ensuring you create content that they want to engage with.
How to improve alumni relations
Want to enhance your approach to alumni relationship management? Below, we explore how organisations and institutions alike can improve these vital alumni relations by making just a few important changes. From offering more valuable incentives to ensuring their database of alumni contacts is up to date, it’s well worth going the extra mile to help maintain these mutually beneficial relationships.
Get to know your audience
While you may believe that understanding your audience is more applicable to SEO and other marketing tactics, it’s just as relevant when it comes to alumni relations. Once an employee or student has left, it can be much more difficult to identify their interests and therefore harder to engage them with your content.
To create content that your alumni will actively engage with, it’s important to monitor your audience using any available metrics. Social media, for example, provides organisations and institutions with plenty of key metrics (such as views, likes, and comments) which can be monitored and analysed to help them to determine the type of content and the various topics that resonate with their alumni.
Update your database
Unfortunately, you could spend days creating fantastic content, but it means nothing if you can’t effectively communicate with your alumni! The fact of the matter is reaching out to your alumni and building those relationships is only possible if you have a database of their up-to-date contact information. To achieve this goal, you’ll need to consider two key areas.
First, it’s vital that you can use a database or system that can be easily and regularly updated with new contact information. Without this important tool, updating records can become time-consuming and chaotic.
Second, before the employee or student leaves, we recommend asking for as much contact information as possible (especially a primary and alternate email address) and routinely asking them to update their contact information if necessary.
Attract with added value
When it comes to engaging your alumni, you must also consider the value you are providing them with. Regardless of whether this value comes in the form of travel discounts, network connections or useful content, your alumni must feel that you are offering them enough incentive for them to continue to engage with your organisation or institution.
You can also use information collected through your alumni research to increase the value of these incentives. For example, your research might indicate that your alumni are far more interested in attending (or more likely to attend) virtual alumni events than physical events. In this case, acting on this information and choosing to host more virtual events will likely strengthen these alumni relations.
Provide them with all the information
If you want your alumni to effectively communicate with others about your organisation, then you’ll need to provide them with all the resources and information they require. Creating regular content, giving them access to insider information, and keeping them updated with all the latest company news will help them to explain the organisation’s goals more accurately and in greater detail to interested parties.
Get in touch with Aluminati today!
To help you maintain a strong and mutually beneficial relationship with your alumni, communication is key.
This is why we’ve created a dynamic alumni management platform specifically for the enterprise sector that encourages meaningful relationships to develop between alumni and organisation staff.
Featuring interaction modules, content tools, and administrative functions, our innovative platform has many uses across an institution. Suitable for events promotion, listing jobs and opportunities, opening connection networks, and even generating custom reports, strengthening your alumni relationship has never been easier.
To discover more about the world’s most customisable engagement platform specially designed for the education and enterprise sectors, don’t hesitate to book an online demo with a member of our team today.
Simply get in touch and we’ll arrange a suitable date and time to conduct your personalised online demonstration.
Alternatively, if you’d like to find out more about our products and the way we work before arranging a demonstration, why not give us a call on 01638 676 232?
You can also get in touch with us by sending an email to info@aluminati.net, or hopping onto social media – we have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
