A strong, accessible alumni network is one of the greatest advocates for your institution. Prospective students often turn to an institution’s alumni to gain a realistic understanding of how their experience in the institution will be and where they can expect to see themselves once they get their degree. Our Alumni present us with a unique opportunity to build a foundation of support to be a strong Institution. But, to harness the benefits of your Alumni program, it is very important to keep an up-to-date database so that they can nurture their relationships with their alumni network in the right way.
Having an updated alumni database is a massive asset to any alumni program. While we all understand the herculean task that is keeping track of thousands of our graduates across the decades, we cannot ignore how crucial a role it plays in the process of our alumni engagement. In our experience of helping 1200+ institutions build their database, we at Vaave, have noted some of the powerful and facile techniques of building a database and one of them is the Branding Alumni Method, mainly to reach the critical mass and sustain.
What is the Branding Alumni Method?
As the name suggests, it’s Branding your Alumni. Every institution takes pride in acknowledging its Alumni across the globe, in various professions and domains. Brand identification and interpretation of the institution’s alumni, expressed in distinctiveness and attractiveness has positively influenced their supportive behaviors. Track down your Alumni who’re scaling up and brand them as well as the institution.
How?
We understood what exactly is the Branding Alumni Method but let’s see the steps on how to execute the same:
- Find Successful and Growing Alumni — It’s not practically possible to keep a tab on all the Alumni that graduate over the decades and at the same time, it’s not that impossible to find some of the powerful and prospering Alumni of your Institution. Spot some of your successful alumni from various industries and brand them.
- Write their success stories by tagging them on Social media — More than your prospectus, alumni success stories give weightage to your institution. They not only inspire the students but empower them with their real-life experiences. Publish stories of accomplishments of your Alumni on your Platform and tag them. Social media offers the right platform where news regarding achievements and accolades received by alumni can be shared and spread. This activity increases the attachment for Alma matter and in turn, strengthens the institutional brand.
- Allow them to share — Some alumni are more eager to share their experience and expertise. Ask them to share stories about their achievements, their success journey, and how the platform helped them. Your platform can serve more than just re-unions or reminiscing old memories like Lateral Hiring opportunities and mentoring initiatives and let the word be spread from their own encounters by the Alumni.
- Run a Campaign — Successful people have a knack to be listened to, in today’s world. Make popular Alumni sign up on your portal and start a campaign, “I signed up on Alumni Platform” using trending hashtags. Seeing them, others would also be interested in signing up.
Advantages
Builds Awareness — Humans, in general, would look for Acknowledgement and Appreciation. Featuring popular Alumni, showcasing their achievements, and sharing their success stories would help in marketing your platform. As the Alumni re-circulate your posts, they will be shared within their network which would include their Classmates, Seniors, and Juniors (minimum of 200) creating awareness about your platform and giving them an opportunity to sign up.
Publishing stories actively, per se 3 in a month (30 in a year) during the initial stages of your platform will definitely help to increase the number of sign-ups (30X200).
Successful Alumni to get featured will sign up — Getting featured by an institution in which you studied has its own perks. It enhances your Career Growth, Networking, and Investment Opportunities. The advantages associated with this will create a pull in other Alumni to get published resulting in them signing up for your platform.
Your alumni are the single greatest symbol of the success of your institution. Thriving institutions are often backed by a vibrant alumni network and for that, creating an engaged, supportive alumni network is crucial. A well-managed database adds up to a strong Alumni network and cannot be ignored.
To understand more about how Team Vaave is successfully helping institutions engage their alumni, drop us an email at hello@vaave.com