Understanding the Alumni Personas to Strengthen Your Alumni Engagement
Alumni are the most important asset for any institution and meaningfully engaging alumni directly helps in the prime areas of student development, bringing placements/jobs to the institution, raising funds, and meeting the accreditation requirements. Building strong alumni communities is very important to help the students, alumni, and the institute as a whole.
While the concept of alumni engagement is not new, engaging them meaningfully is where we at Vaave have built our expertise over the last 10+ years serving 1000+ institutions.
The First step to building an alumni program is knowing the end user — The Alumni and cater to their specific needs. In this article, we explain the four major alumni personas that we classify alumni into, with respect to their connectedness and the year since they graduated.
Millennials
They are fresh graduates of the age group 21–25. They usually have a lot of time and are the most active & most connected members of the alumni community. Building a Database of millennials is the easiest. This is the group you should look for if you need volunteer support in events, helping with admissions, and Volunteering actively in the fundraising campaigns at college.
Vagabonds
Vagabonds are the classification of alumni of the age band 26–34 years. We call them vagabonds because their personal and professional lives are very dynamic in nature. As they are going through a phase change in life, their priorities are different and the connection towards the institution is found to be lowest. Building a database of vagabonds is moderately difficult. They are the potential set of alumni who can contribute to meaningful mentoring programs for students as they connect very well to current batch students.
Captains
They are the set of alumni of age band 35–54, who are in their mid-career. They are mostly stable and established their careers. While their willingness to connect with the institution increases, their need to connect is lower as they have established a decent professional network outside their alumni network. They would be looking forward to networking with peers of the same interest. They also actively take part in promotional activities and are very good brand ambassadors. They can be the most contributing group among the other categories if properly utilized.
Patriarchs
They are the oldies and the ones who have achieved what they wanted from life and a bank of knowledge. They are looking for avenues to give back to the community. Even though collecting databases is difficult, they are very nostalgic and are keen to attend reunions. They can help with donations, fundraising, building corporate connections, setting up Centers of Excellence, and contributing towards institutional development.
With these four alumni personas as pillars, we have designed the BEHA Framework that helps you build meaningful alumni programs. We have gone in-depth in exploring these personas in the Alumni Leadership Program (ALP) — one of its kind unique certification course with 6 Learning Tracks to unveil the secrets of Alumni Management.
Listen from the CEO himself about the 4 Alumni Personas!
To know more about ALP and the Upcoming Batches, visit: https://13x.app/c/alp