When a high school student sits down with her or his parents to consider where to attend college, many considerations are in play. Some students look at the academic features and ratings of an institution, some look at residential life, and others look at first-year student retention rates. While these considerations are important, I suspect that the institution’s alumni participation rate as donors is considered more by prospective students than many institutions believe.
Many school managers who have known the importance school alumni network are spending huge amount of money to host an online alumni database for their alumnus, accessible through the College’s website.
Mr. Alaun, a school manager said “as our management team saw the great need for alumni network, so we have we some huge money to setup our alumni network system to manage our old students. So far, it is good”.
“Additionally, the mode of contact provided are e-mail addresses that are only as updated as the users choose to make them. These accessibility issues have prompted many Camels to turn to LinkedIn for their networking needs – which, while helpful, can be overwhelming in its vastness and restrictive in terms of who one can reach out to via message”.
Read: Benefits of Alumnus Association with Alumni Management Software
Before we continue, whether your own school in Nigeria or elsewhere, have you considered how to reach your old students in the next 10 to twenty years to come as a school administrator? How to inform them in some issues concerning the school or gathering them for meetings.
School Software Pro is a software with Alumni Plugin and it is design to meet your school today’s technology needs (from admission to graduation and even alumni) and preparing to face tomorrow challenges also. Alumni plugin takes care of your old student networking and management.
Why Is Alumni Relations Important?
In the past, alumni relations, or engagement, tended to be treated as a stand-alone activity divorced from fundraising and other advancement activities. Indeed, some alumni associations were entirely independent of their parent institutions, and whilst their members interacted with each other, they had very little interaction with the institution.
Today, alumni relations is an important part of an institution’s advancement activities for many reasons and keeping good track of your old students records is very important.
- Alumni are an institution’s most loyal supporters.
- Alumni are fundraising prospects.
- Alumni generate invaluable word-of-mouth marketing among their social and professional networks.
- By engaging alumni, an institution can continue to benefit from their skills and experience.
- Alumni are great role models for current students and are often well placed to offer practical support to students as they start their careers.
- Alumni are often in the position to engage the expertise of the institution in their professional lives.
- Your alumni are your international ambassadors. They take their knowledge of your institution to their hometowns and countries and into their professional and social networks.
Maintaining a positive relationship with your alumni means that the messages they share about your institution will also be positive – and current.
If the relationship between your alumni and your institution stalls when they leave campus, their knowledge of your activities and achievements will no longer evolve. The messages they will share with people will be out-of-date and could reflect poorly on the progress your institution has since achieved.
Read: School Administration and Management Software in Nigeria
Maintaining communication channels with alumni means you can keep them informed of your achievements and make them part of your institution’s future, not just its past.
Good alumni relations benefits alumni as well as the institution. If you support your alumni in their professional and personal lives through activities such as the facilitation of social and professional networks, preferential access to on-campus expertise and facilities and negotiated benefits with third-party suppliers, they are likely to be your loyal life-long supporters. Your support may also help your alumni achieve positions of success and influence, which will in turn benefit your institution as they begin to give back.
By helping the institution become bigger, stronger and more successful, alumni are also enhancing the value of their own degree qualification.
Alumni as Prospects
All alumni are fundraising prospects. They are the most likely group to give (if the institution has done its job right), as alumni should have a sense of gratitude and want their institution to succeed.
A strong link between alumni relations and fundraising will enable you to spot alumni who have the capacity and inclination to make significant gifts. It will also enable you to effectively segment the majority of alumni who might only give smaller amounts so that you can match them to the ask that has the highest likelihood of success.
Don’t Be Overprotective
It is tempting to keep close control over your alumni and funnel all contact with them through the development or advancement office, but this can have negative consequences. The capacity of the office to deal with alumni contact might be overwhelmed, frustrating the alumni who want to get in touch. A bond between an alumnus and the institution that is focused on a single point will be weaker than a bond focused on multiple points.
Good alumni relations should be flexible enough to allow an alumnus to maintain a positive link, not only with the office, but also with his old tutor, former football coach, careers adviser and any number of his peer group. This broader network experience is far more enriching both for the individual alumnus and the institution.
The trick is to be aware of these links, capture the information and make sure these interactions are recognized as a part of the overall donor cultivation process (as multiple links are a strong indication of an individual’s favour toward the institution and probability to give).
Action Items
- Define alumnus for your institution – and document that definition.
- Outline a few key ways in which you are maintaining positive relationships with your alumni (in partnership with other departments).
- Keep good contacts of your old students.
- Always to inform them on some school activities even when you know they may not attend.
- Schools should send some pleasant messages to the alumnus from time to time.
- For older schools, outline in your fundraising strategy how you would like to focus the support of your alumni (in partnership with other departments).
School Management Software is only a Student Result Checking app when the school management team has not considered meeting their school today technology needs and faces the tomorrow challenges.
Thank you for reading.