Across the higher education realm, alumni engagement is a core activity. Long after your students graduate, they can and need to provide benefits for your institution and future students in the form of donations, volunteering, networking opportunities, and more.
But these activities don’t happen automatically. Instead, colleges and universities have to actively work to engage their alumni, ensuring that graduating students remain connected with their alma mater and building mutually beneficial relationships.
That’s not an easy undertaking. Fortunately, a few central strategies can help to build your alumni engagement, including:
- Beginning engagement with or before graduation
- Providing easy networking opportunities for young alumni
- Frequently asking for feedback
- Creating targeted alumni newsletters
- Building open lines of communication
- Going beyond fundraising asks
- Getting alumni involved with current students
- Hosting relevant events for alumni
- Promoting alumni news to their classmates
- Creating an alumni ambassador program
This guide will dive deep into each of these alumni engagement strategies, including why they work and how you can get started. Let’s dive in.
1. Begin Engagement With (or Before) Graduation
Once students leave campus with their degrees in hand, engaging them again can be difficult. That’s why it’s crucial for your alumni office to begin their engagement efforts much earlier, at graduation ceremonies or even while students are still in their senior year.
How To Begin Alumni Engagement Before Students Graduate
Host a reception congratulating the new alumni and their families at graduation, connected with the ceremony
Provide a gift of swag items for the university at graduation, like a car decal identifying them as alumni
Partner with the career center on campus to help graduating seniors prepare for life after college through workshops, etiquette dinners, networking events, and more
2. Provide Easy Networking Opportunities for Young Alumni
Speaking of networking: research consistently shows that one of the biggest fears graduating students have is that they’ll be unemployed despite their degree. Your alumni office can help to alleviate that fear by hosting networking opportunities for young alumni to get together with their more experienced counterparts, building a career support network that everyone can benefit from.
How To Provide Easy Networking Opportunities for Young Alumni
Invite current alumni to your graduation reception with graduating seniors for networking opportunities and to build community
Ask already engaged alumni to reach out to younger counterparts in their industry with tips on how to get a foothold
Host local and regional alumni networking events that are free for recently graduated alumni to attend
3. Frequently Ask for Feedback
Alumni tend to be opinionated, eager to share their college experience with those around them. Savvy alumni offices are able to take that general eagerness and turn it into a benefit for the institution while leveraging it as an engagement strategy. By actively and frequently asking for feedback about your institution, alumni efforts, and anything else, you can easily start and maintain conversations with all groups of graduated students.
How To Effectively Ask for Alumni Feedback
- Send an annual alumni engagement survey to ask how alumni want to be engaged by the institution, focusing on anything from channels to the messages that resonate most
- Include feedback opportunities at every event you host to ask how the event can improve in the future
- Provide easy, on-demand forms on your website that enable alumni to share their thoughts with your institution at their discretion
4. Create Targeted Alumni Newsletters
Alumni engagement, like so many communications strategies, relies in part on a steady flow of communication that provides the baseline and keeps your graduated students in the know about the institution. The more targeted these communications can be, the more likely your alumni will become to pay attention and feel like they are an active part of a larger community
How To Create Targeted Alumni Newsletters
- Segment your alumni into relevant interest groups, like creating unique segments based on age groups, programs or schools they’ve graduated from, athletes vs. non-athletes, and more
- Create monthly or quarterly newsletters for each of these interest groups based on the amount of content available, and automatically subscribe to the segments you’ve created
- Enable alumni to subscribe or unsubscribe
5. Build Open Lines of Communication
Communication, of course, can never be a one-way street. Instead, your alumni expect and will appreciate opportunities to ask questions, provide more informal feedback, or just have someone in the alumni office to talk to. The more effectively you can create open lines of communication that your alumni can leverage anytime they want, the more likely they’ll become to remain engaged with your institution.
How To Build Open Lines of Communication With Alumni
- Provide a public phone number and email address for your alumni office that anyone can easily reach out to, without crowding the inboxes of individual staff members
- Consider hosting “office hours” for local alumni to be able to drop in and have a chat
- Build automated means of communication and responses, like chatbots and AI-enabled texting that provides instant responses to common questions like homecoming
6. Go Beyond Fundraising Asks
Ultimately, much of alumni engagement is done with a deeper purpose: to ask former students to support the institution financially. But focusing exclusively on this goal can be dangerous, not only excluding alumni who might not currently be in a position to give but alienating others who will begin to view all community from the institution more cynically. That’s why engaging alumni has to go far beyond the fundraising piece.
How To Engage Alumni Beyond Fundraising Asks
- Actively manage solicitations especially for younger alumni, ensuring that they won’t be overwhelmed or overloaded with giving asks
- Count non-financial engagement, like volunteering on the institution’s behalf, in your means to measure and report on alumni engagement
- Provide exclusive benefits to alumni who are engaging with your institution without giving, like hosting an annual event for your alumni volunteers
7. Get Alumni Involved With Current Students
The general desire for alumni to help tends to extend especially to current students. It’s easy for recent or long-time graduates to see themselves in students working hard to earn their degrees and establish their careers. That’s why getting your alumni involved with your current students can be such a successful idea for engagement.
How To Get Alumni Involved With Current Students
- Host successful alumni for career panels and guest lectures that enable them to show how far they’ve come
- Provide mentorship opportunities for alumni who want to help students in their field succeed with personal engagement
- Create internship pipelines between alumni and current students in partnership with your career center
8. Host Relevant Events for Alumni
Events have long been a staple of alumni engagement efforts for institutions across the spectrum. But the well-established strategy ground to a halt during COVID-19, leaving alumni offices to look for virtual alternatives. Of course, alumni engagement events are far from gone; the key, however, is making sure they continue to be relevant for your audience.
How To Host Relevant Events for Alumni
Move away from larger events to smaller, more intimate, and more relevant gatherings in a variety of local spots and regions
Invite alumni back on campus for a reception that allows them to see how the campus has changed since their time as a student
Consider hosting short, topical virtual events that allow alumni to engage from the comfort of their own home
9. Promote Alumni News to Their Classmates
Alumni don’t just want to engage with the institution from which they graduated. They also want to stay in touch with their classmates. Colleges and universities that can facilitate this ongoing connection can gain significant credibility in the eyes of their audience, acting not just as an organization with fundraising equity but as a third-party intermediary that just wants to help graduates stay in touch.
How To Promote Alumni News to Their Classmates
- Create an online resource for and database of class notes that alumni can easily submit their entries to
- Include relevant class notes as a section in your alumni newsletters to maximize the attention these self-submitted news items can receive
- Share alumni news and updates on your social media channels, even when they’re not directly connected to your institution
10. Create an Alumni Ambassador Program
Finally, and perhaps most comprehensively, institutions can benefit significantly from building an ambassador program. Alumni ambassadors can represent the institution externally, even hosting alumni events or attending college fairs on your school’s behalf. An ambassador program can take alumni engagement to the next level, building strong bonds that last for decades.
How To Create an Alumni Ambassador Program
Identify highly engaged alumni who might want to become more official representatives of your institution
Create an incentive structure through which ambassador can get tangible and intangible rewards for their participation
Host regular ambassador meetings to continue setting guidelines, connecting members, and providing updated college information for them to share
From Alumni Engagement Ideas to Actionable Strategies
Of course, the alumni engagement strategies mentioned throughout this guide are only the beginning. Institutions will need a comprehensive strategy designed to reach all of their alumni through multiple channels, leveraging at least some of these ideas in the process.
That process is comprehensive and will require full institutional buy-in along with the right staff and the right technology. Still, it’s an essential step to ensure that your alumni remain engaged with you throughout their lifecycle, ultimately enabling you to reap the long-term rewards for your institution.
