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Four-year colleges have been making it their top priority to maintain relationships with their alumni. They do this because they understand that their alumni are a reliable source of support for their university. However, two-year colleges aren't taking advantage of this huge potential as often as they could or should.
One reason for this is because they can't establish what makes an alumnus -- whether it’s a graduate with an associate degree or simply a person who took a single class only. Each institution varies on what they constitute as an alumnus.
According to the director of the Center for Community College Advancement's Paul Heaton at CASE, managing alumni information properly and seeking better relationships with former graduates may seem to community colleges with tight budgets an unjustifiable expense.
However, when colleges find ways to contact their alumni and engage with them, even if it's through donors, they find it’s well worth the time spent and money invested in reaching out and you can easily do this through survey software.
Community colleges have a huge opportunity to improve their relationships with alumni. There's a clear connection between how often a school reaches out to its alumni (i.e. conducting alumni college surveys through online survey software) and engages with them and how much their alumni takes part, particularly philanthropically.
Benefits of Implementing an Alumni College Survey
There are many benefits of using a survey tool to engage with alumni, including:
- Gathering alumni data on graduate school attendance and employment status within a year after they graduate.
-Generating insights on how to improve institutional quality.
-Collecting contact information, preferences and current status.
-Measuring the experiences and satisfaction of alumni within all scopes of their education from student experiences (technology resources, campus life, extracurricular activities) to academic experiences (quality of departments and professors).
-Gauging alumni interest in possibly donating to the educational institution.
-Gathering information on alumni interest in taking part in alumni events.
-Analyzing and reporting on information to provide statistical data for accreditation purposes.
As with any type of survey, the success of a college survey depends on a number of factors that influence response rates in addition to feelings of attachment and personal preferences. How you layout and design your survey tool, your mode of survey research, your survey administration, your timeframe in the field and your invitation and personalization all affect your response rates.
You'll want to establish your objectives for your survey and optimize its layout and design including question libraries that have pre-developed survey questions and engaging and interactive styles of questioning. Develop questions that will get you back the most valuable feedback in an engaging survey design. Basically, you’ll want to plan out your survey process meticulously to optimize response rates.
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