Here's a list of things you could do right away to gather some alumni data and insights into your alumni demographic without having to break the bank.
If you have ever been even remotely involved with advancement, you might share the frustrations of having incomplete and inconsistent data. While that is something we tackle at Almabase with social media logins and data enrichment, we wanted to compile a quick list of things you could do right away to gather some alumni data and insights into your alumni demographic without having to break the bank. If you are just starting to compile alumni data, this list can come in handy.
Before we proceed, it is worthwhile to note that this list talks merely of tools that you can use. Though they are great in its own accord, it can be ineffective when used in isolation without a larger strategy to connect, engage and involve your alumni.
Price : Free for 50 emails. $0.10/email after the free limit Utility : Find work emails
Voilanorbert is a prospecting tool that recently got a very nice upgrade. It was designed to help people scout for new businesses, but there is much that you can use to find the first group alumni who can help build your empire.
Voilanorbert is impressive in its accuracy and functionality to predict a person's work email ID from Linkedin.
You will need to create a new account to start searching for an email address.
You will also need a name and the domain that you want to search (eg:harvard.edu). If you put in 'John Doe' and 'Almabase.com', Norbert will go through all the combinations that are possible for John Doe on Almabase.com like jdoe@almabase.com, johnd@almabase.com, jd@almabase.com ,etc.., if a valid address is found, Norbert will let you know.
It gets a whole lot easier with the Voila Norbert Chrome extension. The extension adds a little magic orange button to the LinkedIn profiles you browse through. If you come across the need to find somebody's email, simply click on the Voila Norbert button to add them to your account.
Since you are reaching them on a professional channel, it becomes important that the email is more about them than your organisation. Make sure that the value you are offering to them is something that will interest them - like a request to become a class volunteer because of their influence or to mentor senior students that are interested in their industry.
Price: Free to analyze. Utility : Find and reconnect with alumni on Facebook
Voila Norbert is great when you need to find email addresses. But sometimes you need a get a glimpse at the bigger picture. One that tells you what your alumni are up to and where they live.
And if you don't have some pricey alumni relations software, this may seem like a daunting task and it surely is, but this seems to us like a good place to start.
The audience tool on Facebook especially comes in handy when you can tie it to your social media program or have an alumni portal to which you can direct to.
Having rich content on your facebook page will help convert those casual visitors to followers. Bundle that with a steady flow of traffic that you generate from facebook ads that are targetted to potential alumni and you will soon have a nice healthy following of alumni or students on your facebook page.
There is going to be a cost associated with the ads depending on the target audience you want to reach out to, but the good news is that you can control the spend and budget inorder to test out the waters before deciding to pump in more resources.
An overall schematic might look like this :
For more information on the Facebook audience tool, Visit Facebook for Business.
Price : Free to analyze. Utility : Find and reconnect with alumni on Facebook.
The Linkedin alumni tool will give you a quick snapshot on what the entire alumni network looks like using the vast oceans of data it has on your alumni.
Much like the analytics on almabase, you can look at the big picture of where people work and live, then you can narrow the results based on what matters to you. Like if you ever needed to find alumni who have a degree in engineering and live in Chicago, that should not take you more than a few clicks to get there. You can also drill down based on where they work in Chicago, if it were required.
However, the tool is catered primarily for higher educational institutions. So if you are in secondary education, the tool may not yet be able to sift through data for you.
The same ad strategy that we used on facebook may be used on LinkedIn as well, but the ads on LinkedIn can get a lot more expensive based on the type of people you are trying to reach out to.You can also refer to the Linkedin Guide on using the tool for Higher Ed professionals.
If you do not have an active presence on social media, make sure to look for any existing Facebook/Linkedin groups that may have been created by your alumni earlier.
The thought of finding and reconnecting with thousands of your lost alumni can seem very challenging. If you are able to try some of these channels to reach out to your alumni, let us know how it went for you. Do you agree with our list? If you have other ways that have worked well for your institution, let us know by leaving a comment below.
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Having an updated alumni database is a massive asset to any alumni program. Unfortunately, very few schools actually have a database that is seamless and functional enough. While we all understand the herculean task of tracking thousands of our graduates across the decades, we cannot ignore how pivotal a role it plays in our alumni engagement strategies.
Having observed hundreds of institutions around the globe take up various approaches with respect to updating their alumni databases, we’ve compiled for you the best techniques that are typically employed by schools and their relative benefits.
Address Finder Services look up publicly available information on individuals and matches them against your database. Typically these services are charged on a success fee model - so if they help you find new data then you pay for it, otherwise, you don’t. Some of these services are integrated into your database, and some are independent. A few popular service providers are — LexisNexis, AlumniFinder, and Raiser’s Edge Address Finder.
1. Affordable for low-volume data appends: For organizations that work with low volumes of data, Address Finder Services can be affordable but the costs are high if you have a large alumni base.
Quick results: Address Finder Services eliminate the need to manually collect data, thereby saving time and resources.
1. No user consent: Since you are not asking your alumni for this information, they are not giving you explicit consent to use their information to communicate with them. The recommended practice here is to get consent from your alumni once you get new contact information, but this is a separate effort you’ll have to take up.
2. Incomplete Data: Since these services compile data based on publicly available information, more often than not, you may find yourself dealing with incomplete information as it is likely for people to limit their personal data online.
3. Inaccurate Data: As these services extract data from various public sources, you might often come across outdated alumni data. While some of the data may be accurate, it is highly likely that all of it isn’t.
4. No ongoing updates: In order to keep your alumni database updated, you will have to run this service regularly.
This is an easy option and almost every school includes a form on their website requesting alumni to update their information using that form. Within the alumni page of your website, this is a key section. However, the challenge that every school reports is that very few alumni actually fill it. Think about it — what is the motivation for alumni to go to your website regularly and fill out a long form to update their information?
1. Data accuracy: Since your alumni are providing this information voluntarily, it would be accurate at least for then.
2. Easy to setup: Setting up a form on your website that captures information from your website visitors or in this case - alumni, doesn’t take much time or effort.
3. User consent: Unlike address finder services, forms collect information from only those who are willing to provide their information, thereby establishing user consent.
1. Low volume: Without an incentive in place, very few alumni actually fill out the form.
2. Manual efforts: While setting up a form may be easy, the challenge lies in entering the data collected by these forms into your database.
3. No ongoing updates: Most updates are not captured on time. For example: if an alum finds a new job and moves from Boston to San Francisco, how likely are they to immediately update you via the form?
LinkedIn is a great source of information, some schools turn to the social media platform to capture relevant alumni information. LinkedIn has an alumni tool that you can use to find your alumni who have indicated an education at your school on their profile. You can either have a staff member use their personal LinkedIn account and browse through alumni or create a separate account using your school’s name only for this purpose. The major problem here is that beyond a point LinkedIn will detect that you are browsing through too many profiles and will block you.
1. Data Accuracy: LinkedIn being a professional networking platform, alumni are much more likely to keep their profiles updated here.
2. Beneficial for smaller institutions: For smaller organizations, with a smaller alumni base, capturing alumni data via LinkedIn is feasible.
1. Limitations by LinkedIn: Since LinkedIn only allows a fixed number of searches, upon exceeding that limit, you will be either blocked or asked to shift to a paid account.
2. No user consent: Similar to address finder services, the data collection process is discrete and user consent is not involved.
3. Expensive & time-consuming: You would need to appoint designated people to solely do this job which can make this process rather time-consuming and expensive.
4. High risk of error: Where there’s manual extraction of data involved, there is always a high risk of error.
Events are wonderful opportunities to re-engage alumni and offer a chance to gather relevant information from event attendees. The data collected from these event registrations is highly accurate since it’s provided by your own alumni who are actively engaging with you.
1. Data accuracy : Since the source of this information is your alumni, there’s no doubting its credibility.
2. User consent : Since the information collected via events is provided by your own alumni, user consent is established.
1. Low volume : If your institution doesn’t see a lot of alumni participation at events, you might not be able to capture enough information to update your alumni database.
2. Manual effort : While alumni information collected from events can be highly useful, this information needs to be manually entered into your database, thereby increasing the risk of errors and time taken.
4 ways to update your alumni database
Looking to update your school's, college's or university's alumni database? Find the top 5 ways to update your alumni database and engage with more alumni.
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August 26, 2019
12 minutes
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