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Colleges and universities can find enormous value in strong alumni relations. Alumni can be extremely valuable to higher education institutions because of the money and time they could spend on their last institution. Alumni might help the university or college they graduated from in the form of monetary or non-monetary support. Their involvement could contribute to a higher education experience to present students, such as by future job opportunities and reflection on present curricula.
Are you trying to figure out ways for more college and university alumni engagement and excitement for your educational institution? Below are some ways universities can do more for engaging their alumni community.
1. Holding Virtual Events
One primary benefit of virtual events is having the ability to engage those alumni who might not have the resources or time to travel to the university for an in-person meeting. Because webinars are recorded, alumni who aren't able to attend in real-time, could watch the recorded webinars at their leisure.
2. Conducting Alumni Surveys
One powerful thing colleges or universities can do when seeking ways of supercharging alumni engagement is to conduct an alumni survey tool. Essentially, alumni online survey software is a complementary method of evaluating the effectiveness of your engagement techniques and works together with the information you gather from survey software online systems, which includes your alumni platform.
3. Focusing on Alumni Success
Higher education institutions might want to think about creating content surrounding alumni success during the COVID-19 pandemic. The content should focus on how students are building community safely during these hard times. It can also include the way groups of students organize over Zoom webinars or how residential students are getting to know one another safely.
Share tips for campus students or capture happy moments on campus. Content like this highlights the adaptability of an organization and shows students can continue thriving, despite a pandemic.
4. Creating Alumni Online Communities
Instead of creating a simple alumni database, why not build an active alumni online community. Active alumni communities are much more useful than a simple database filled with the names and email addresses of alumni that most universities provide. Be sure to have a social media presence for alumni too.
5. Offering Graduates Graduate School Support
Graduates often take several years off before going to graduate school. Alumni (and current students) should have access to graduate school advisors. One way of increasing alumni graduate school success is for universities to give graduates (and current students) access to graduate school advising which would improve a mutually-beneficial bridge between the university and alumni.
You can rely on your alumni networks to provide prospective and current student career counseling, internship opportunities experiences, and, even, potential career opportunities to students.
Alumni usually have significant pride in the school they received their hard-earned degrees. You can take advantage of this pride (and loyalty) by exciting and engaging your alumni on a regular basis and fostering a vibrant life-long relationship with them.
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