Want to spend more time developing your alumni engagement strategy and less juggling spreadsheets and data?
Alumni management platforms eliminate a lot of the laborious administration involved with managing alumni. They can streamline the management of donations, events, mentoring programs, and more, meaning you can focus on what is truly important—your alumni!
Let's take a closer look at the benefits of investing in an alumni management platform.
1. Create the Best Experience for Your Alumni
Technology has revolutionized consumer expectations and demands.
According to Salesforce, 64% of consumer and business buyers say companies need cutting-edge digital experiences to keep their businesses.
It's not just major brands and corporations that have to cater to evolving consumer expectations – the landscape has changed for everyone. Alumni relations included.
Personalization is a critical component for creating a compelling alumni experience. Personalized experiences are more memorable, help build a deeper relationship with alumni, and increase their likelihood of meaningful engagement.
With an alumni management platform, you can leverage data analytics, advanced segmentation, and marketing automation to create personalized and impactful alumni experiences at scale. For example, you can:
- Share tailored content with each member based on their profile
- Create a different content experience for members logging in for the first time
- Offer content recommendations
- Create sub-communities within the platform for chapters, interest groups, and more.
2. Keep Precious Data up to Date
Alumni engagement campaigns are only as good as the data they are built on.
Maintaining an up-to-date database can be challenging, especially if you do not have a system for regularly updating records.
Alumni management platforms centralize all your data in one place. CRM and Social-media integrations and one-click options for updating information mean minimum effort is required to keep data clean and up to date!
Your alumni control what information they choose to keep private to admins and what information they share with others! Powerful search filters also make it easy for you and your alumni to quickly find members based on criteria such as alma mater, location, and job title! For example, if one of your alumni is planning a trip to Brussels, they can easily search for members located in this city, reach out to them on the platform and connect.
3. Boost Pride and Sense of Belonging
Your university's branding is essential for (among other things) building trust, loyalty, and standing out from the crowd.
Your brand is built to be a true representation of who you are as an institution and how you wish to be perceived. It’s extremely important to create a consistent brand experience. The most valuable brands in the world know that brand consistency is key to creating lasting customer relationships and increasing brand recognition.
Offering your alumni a branded and exclusive online platform will reinforce and strengthen your institution's brand identity. It will help facilitate deeping connections, inspire audiences, and ultimately deliver stronger results in terms of alumni engagement.
4. Centralize your Tools
Alumni engagement platforms centralize all your alumni management tools in one place.
From the platform, you can:
- Keep important alumni data up to date
- Create sub-groups to save time and effort while increasing engagement
- Encourage and facilitate donations
- Boost your alumni placement statistics through careers and mentoring features
- Manage events—on and offline—from A-Z
- Simplify and centralize how you communicate with alumni
- Make data-driven decisions with actionable analytics
Having all these features centralized in one platform dramatically simplifies the management of your network. Plus, with all your vital data in one place, you can make data-driven decisions to manage members better and refine engagement strategies.
5. Opportunities for Your Alumni
Your platform shouldn't be seen as yet another social network by your alumni! Your platform should be a hub for structure and relevant information and opportunities.
Let's look at some examples of what you can offer with an alumni management platform:
- Opportunities to connect and network with peers
- Career, mentoring, and investment opportunities
- Access to research from the institution
- Opportunities to give back financially or by offering some of their time
6. Save Money and Stay Up to Date With the Best Alumni Engagement Practices
When it comes to creating your dedicated platform, you generally have three options:
- Build it yourself in-house
- Request a web agency to build it for you
- Use an alumni platform specialist
There are several alumni management software specialists on the market that offer various degrees of customization and flexibility.
The use of a specialist generally ensures you cover over 90% of your needs for a fraction of the cost of building and maintaining a platform from scratch. It also ensures you benefit from and stay updated with alumni relations best practices.
Leveraging the experience of an alumni management software specialist usually ensures a more stable platform and better maintenance of the solution while benefiting from the improvements of the platform. At Hivebrite, we offer a SaaS solution that allows our customers to benefit from all future upgrades at no additional cost.
Hivebrite is a comprehensive and flexible community engagement platform. It empowers organizations of all sizes and sectors to launch, manage, and grow fully branded private communities. Schedule a demo today!
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