4 Ways to Help Alumni Feel Connected to Your School
It’s not uncommon for alumni to lose touch with their alma mater. For smaller schools without a major football or basketball team or a national reputation, it can be challenging to build alumni pride and engagement after graduation. And if alumni sense they are only sporadically engaged for the sole purpose of donating money, they can begin feeling somewhat slighted and may further remove themselves from their school.
It’s important to make sure your school is actively engaging your alumni in ways that genuinely make them feel connected as indispensable members of your larger community. With that in mind, here are four tips.
Maintain Regular Communication with Them
Have strategies in place to communicate regularly with alumni via email, social media, and print (mailers, alumni magazines, etc.). For some alumni, the only contact they receive from their alma mater is a request to become a donor. While developing campaigns to help turn alumni into donors is a necessary and important strategy, it’s also essential to let alumni know that you don’t only care about their money. It can be a major turnoff for a recent alum—especially one still carrying a lot of college debt—to feel that their school just wants more money from them.
Create content about things other than donations: what fellow alumni are up to, future plans for the school, recent accolades and awards, and so on. Stories or pullouts in your alumni magazine may be especially effective. These approaches will help them feel connected to your school in a more meaningful way. Further, through regular communication efforts, you can send alumni surveys and find out how you can better serve them.
While you don’t want to bombard alumni with too much communication and become an annoyance, consistent, engaging communication is key. And when it finally comes time to ask them for financial help, they will feel more connected to your school and be more likely to respond favorably.
Offer Alumni Events
It’s valuable to encourage alumni to attend major events like homecoming, but it’s also important to offer smaller and exclusive events for alumni. How about planning an event featuring a fellow successful alum in the business world? What about organizing an alumni-hosted sporting event or show? The more facetime alumni can get with other alumni—especially those who are already engaged with your school—the more connected they’ll feel.
Many schools also team up with other alumni representatives across their state or country to host regional events. Obviously, the locations for these types of events depend on the size of your alumni base and their general distribution.
Tell More of Their Stories
There will always be successful alumni your school will want to feature in articles, publications, and media. However, it’s important that you don’t limit your stories or features to alumni CEOs, head surgeons, and tech entrepreneurs. Show your alumni that you’re proud of them by featuring a diverse and large group of regular stories and highlights. The more alumni see that you’re sharing stories from fellow, relatable alumni, the more they will feel that your school cares about them and what they’re up to (even if they haven’t started a business or helped enact legislative changes in Washington).
Of course, the challenge can be accruing these stories, which is why it’s important to have a strong email and social media strategy in place (as mentioned above). Through these channels you can regularly ask alumni to share their stories with you or even write them. Not every alumni story has to be a full-length feature or blog article. Even a short paragraph highlighting an alum who is earning a PhD or working as a nurse practitioner can be a great way to showcase stories.
Recruit Their Services
A great way to build long-term relationships with alumni is to get them involved in various service-oriented initiatives. Do you need a speaker to give a talk to your MBA students? Are you looking for experienced mentors for your undergraduate professional coaching program? Can you find alumni who are willing to talk about their college experience with a prospective student? These are great ways to build alumni engagement while also meeting current students’ career planning needs.
Need a concrete idea to get your wheels turning? Check out Hendrix College’s Friday Mentor initiative.
By reaching out and giving alumni opportunities to serve your school beyond financial support you keep them more connected to their alma mater. Most alumni would probably love to help in some way, but may not know where to start. When it comes to your regular alumni communication efforts, invite them to get involved in service-related ways.
By reminding alumni that they are an integral part of your community (not just financial “assets”), you’ll turn them into proud advocates of their alma mater. Need help jump-starting your alumni communication strategy? Let’s talk!
