Finding the details of alumni, especially those who are not in touch with your institution for longer periods can be a big headache for your alumni offices. Inherently, the alumni information is dynamic, critical details such as place of work, company, skills, residence, and contact numbers keep on changing whenever the alumni move to new places and companies. Along with collecting their details, maintaining its privacy and exclusivity is very important. It feels like your alumni officer or team is searching for a needle in a haystack. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have lost these alumni to the wild.
To make your work easier, we have come up with 5 out-of-the-box tactics that can be used to track and find alumni who have lost their contact with the institution. These strategies are suitable for institutions of any size. Let’s dive in!
1. Utilize Social Media
If your institution wants to collect the details of missing alumni, leveraging social media platforms can be very useful. There is a high chance that your alumni must be using social media and you can get details from their accounts. Your institution can be creative about this. Post old alumni group photos, and yearbook pictures on the institution’s social media accounts and encourage alumni to identify the people who are not tagged.
This way, you can get the missing alumni’s updated profile links. The details obtained will be authentic as their peers verify them before tagging the missing alumni. This reduces the burden of verifying the details by the institution!
Your school or college can gather lost alumni details through yearbook building by encouraging alumni to collect the required information. Involve alumni from each batch and inspire them to collect alumni details. To make it interesting, your institution or alumni office can gamify their data collection efforts by rewarding the alumni who met the targets. This will encourage the alumni to do it again.
2. Engage Enthusiastic Alumni
Every batch has those alumni brimming with energy who are in touch with almost everyone in their batch. These alumni can be leveraged to find the lost alumni of your institution. Your alumni office can handpick at least one alumnus from each batch who is active in their social circles and encourage them to track alumni and obtain their details.
For example, if the institution needs to find 500 missing alumni information across 5 batches, leveraging 2 alumni from each batch with a target of collecting 50 alumni details in 2 months, your institution will have all the 500 missing alumni details within 60 days. The active alumni pull the missing information from their first-degree connections from LinkedIn. Pulling data from Facebook connections along with data from LinkedIn/Facebook groups makes these details reliable and accurate.
Recognizing the efforts of alumni and rewarding them can encourage them to do a lot more for their alma mater. This will motivate them to own up to their targets which helps your institution to collect data quickly and effectively.
Bonus Tip For Collecting Older Alumni Info
To collect older alumni details, the alumni office can reach out to the younger alumni who share the same alma mater as their parents and grandparents. You can obtain fresh and accurate information as the younger ones are always in touch with their families. This is more suitable for older institutions which are at least 50 years old.
3. Leverage Online Tools
Your school or college might have some or other information about the lost or missing alumni. You will at least have the names of the alumni you want to find the details of. By using online directory websites like White Pages & People Finder you can find critical alumni information such as phone numbers and addresses. Some of the websites like White Pages offer reverse lookups through phone numbers and addresses. Also you can leverage identity solutions such as Pipl, Fullcontact if you are ready to invest.
Sites like Email Hunter can help you find the email addresses of the alumni you are looking for. Do bear in mind that free versions of these websites are restrictive and you have to pay big bucks to these websites for complete usage. Though these tools are helpful in general, they can’t help your institution in securing information that is useful for alumni engagement.
Vaave Magic is the perfect remedy for building complete alumni profiles. It is an AI based tool that can be integrated into your alumni platform to build an alumni database and provide actionable insights about your alumni.
4. Create & Share a Lost & Missing Alumni List
One of the first things your school or college can do is to create an elaborate list of all the lost and missing alumni by mentioning their batch, department, and class information. But first, you have to analyze the resources at hand before creating a list. Perform a thorough refining and cleansing of the existing data of alumni to identify inconsistencies and gaps.
You can share this list on the institution’s website and launch Lost Alumni Campaigns on the official social media handles such as Facebook & WhatsApp groups and encourage the alumni to share the details of the lost alumni. You can also ask your alumni to share and repost the list for maximum visibility.
Nostalgic alumni once connected to the institution will help you find the others too. Your alumni office can set up some targets for them. Establishing goals for alumni in finding information can be very helpful for the involved parties. It becomes easier for the institution to track the progress and alumni can get a sense of fulfillment.
5. Alumni Achievements News Alerts
Your institution might have missed out on collecting alumni details. But, did you know that you can build alumni profiles via their achievements? Your missing alumni might be creating ripples in their respective sectors and you can leverage their successes to collect their details using alert tools such as Google Alerts. You can go to Google Alerts and set periodical notifications to your email. You can define keywords like “Institution’s notable alumni”, “ Institution alumni achievements” “Institution successful entrepreneurs” and many more for setting alerts.
Recently, Nishant Gupta and Palash Pandey, VIT alumni secured Series A funding for their startup Iluvia, a haircare company. It becomes easier for the VIT alumni office to search for their alumni on all social media and networking platforms. If your alumni achieve something similar, you will be notified via alerts. Then, you can search for their LinkedIn profiles and get their updated details from it.
In a Nutshell
Finding lost and missing alumni details can be very overwhelming for the institutions of any size. Most of the time, the efforts put in by the institutions go in vain even after significantly investing in resources. By following these techniques, you can find your missing alumni and engage them efficiently.
Vaave helps institutions and corporate entities across the globe in realizing the power of alumni and offers strategies for engaging them. We offer a full-fledged alumni management ecosystem that helps you to leverage alumni to its fullest.
Drop in your details at hello@vaave.com & +91 91006 88850, we will get in touch with you at the drop of a hat!