4 Ideas to Boost Alumni Engagement in Volunteering

It’s no secret that keeping alumni engaged in the post-pandemic landscape will present unique challenges, considering most events and fundraising efforts have moved online. Fortunately, many educational institutions have risen to meet those challenges and sharpened their abilities to maintain and even increase alumni engagement in the past year.

If you’re wondering what are some key strategies your organization can utilize to keep that momentum going and continue peaking alumni engagement in 2022 - we have got you covered. Let’s dive into some of the best approaches to keep your alumni virtually engaged with your institution going forward this year.

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Create Community with Virtual Events

Nothing encourages former students to stay plugged-in with their alma mater like the opportunity to create a community with other alumni. Many people have struggled with a lack of social interaction during the pandemic, and virtual community-building events are the perfect remedy for this situation.

In order to plan a successful virtual event be sure to nail down key logistics beforehand like an event agenda, promotional efforts, and setting up a plan to analyze post-event feedback. Let your alumni know in advance what the event has to offer and make sign-up as seamless as possible by offering quick registration supported on a variety of devices.

When it comes to promoting the event, use multiple channels to maximize your outreach. For example, you could create Facebook pages alongside email invitations to reach alumni no matter how they prefer to communicate. A good way to increase engagement would be to make your promotional efforts interactive. Ask your alumni to RSVP using a hashtag or commenting on a Facebook post - this will ensure better reach and engagement on your social media handles.

Finally, you can create opportunities for post-event feedback to tailor your approach for future events and increase alumni turnout. You want your former students to know that their opinions matter to you, so make sure you ask them to share it! This will also make planning your next event simple since you can build on the feedback and experience that your alumni share.

Check out how various institutions have leveraged the virtual space for innovative online events like virtual happy-hours, book clubs, and flagship events.

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Leverage Social Media for Targeted Alumni Outreach

A good social media presence can undoubtedly do wonders for your engagement goals. You likely already have a social media strategy in place, but how tailored is it to empower alumni to interact with one another and the institution? A simple way to get alumni engaged is to interact with their posts and to invite them to interact with yours!

One option is to create content that invites alumni to post photos of them at college events or even happy memories from their time at the school, college, or university. This is a great method to evoke nostalgia in your alumni and encourage them to remember the positive impact that your institution had on their academic experience.

You can even personalize these calls-to-action by tailoring them to specific programs or organizations involved within your school. For example, you could ask all journalism students to post a memory of why they chose to pursue journalism - or maybe ask all of the students involved in your athletics program to post a photo of their team. These specific calls-to-action are more likely to fetch responses from the targeted group of alumni.

Ensure social media calls-to-action remain engaging and personal by applauding donor efforts and the impact their gifts have on opportunities for future students. You can even share narratives of these impact stories by showcasing the effect their donations have made on a particular student or program. This is a great way to remind them that they are a part of the good change which will surely translate to donor engagement and retention.

Finally, you can encourage peer-to-peer giving campaigns through social media, so that alumni feel more directly involved with their community fundraising. By encouraging students to fundraise directly with their peers, you ensure an organic giving environment that fosters the sense of community that many alumni might associate with your school - making it a win for everyone involved!

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Engage Alumni with Matching Gift Fundraising Opportunities

When it comes to finding new ways to keep alumni engaged with your giving campaigns, matching gifts is a valuable giving option to consider. Matching gifts are a form of corporate philanthropy in which companies financially match the individual donations their employees make to charitable organizations - sometimes even at a 2:1, 3:1, and even 4:1 ratio.

Donors love to discover their eligibility for these programs as it allows them to instantly double the impact their donation can have on causes they care about, without having to reach back into their wallets. Informing donors of their eligibility can encourage higher donations; 84% of donors are more likely to give a donation in the first place if they know their gift will be matched and 1 in 3 donors indicate that they would donate a larger amount if their gift will be matched.

Many donors are actually unaware that they qualify for a matching gift program - in fact, 78% of match-eligible donors don’t know about their employer’s matching gift program. That’s why we recommend marketing matching gifts to your former students to help them discover eligibility and submit their matching request. This is a great way to add value to their donation experience while boosting revenue for your fundraising campaign. You can utilize a variety of avenues for this outreach, such as on a “Ways-to-Give” page, via social media, and through email outreach.

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Wrapping up

Moving forward into 2022 with these alumni engagement strategies in your toolbox, you can ensure your alumni remain not only plugged-in, but also well engaged, which is sure to reflect in your fundraising campaigns.

Alumni are the backbone of any institution and maintaining consistent alumni engagement is crucial to building a great institution and ensuring continuity.

While alumni engagement has come a long way from traditional direct mail campaigns and annual student reunions, we've witnessed a tremendous shift in the way alumni relations has evolved. While advancement teams will still continue to engage alumni via traditional channels in 2024, the previous year has shown us enough evidence to suggest that institutions can no longer be restricted to them.

2024 is undoubtedly going to be a challenging year, given the evolutionary phase that alumni relations is currently in. However, where there are new challenges, there are also new opportunities. Alumni engagement this year will offer tremendous possibilities for universities to engage with their alumni on a deeper and more meaningful basis – even in these times of uncertainty and chaos.

Here are five alumni engagement trends for 2024 that you should watch out for to achieve your alumni engagement goals. 

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1. Event strategies will evolve

As the pandemic made it impossible to host in-person events in 2020, we witnessed a host of creative virtual alumni events by institutions, big and small. While the COVID-19 crisis doesn't seem likely to die down any time soon, recent reports indicate that social distancing guidelines are going to be further relaxed in 2025. 

Alumni event strategies this year are set to evolve depending on COVID-19 state regulations. Some schools may continue to host all alumni events virtually, while some may open up their campuses to in-person events. Either way, advancement teams in 2025 will need to take a hybrid approach to keep their alumni engaged.

2. Alumni will be at the heart of all alumni engagement

For a majority of institutions, alumni engagement has been restricted to monthly newsletters, traditional events, and yearly fundraising appeals. But, the pandemic has prompted advancement teams to look for creative solutions to penetrate a wider segment of their alumni population and maintain consistent engagement year-on-year.

The past few years and its unprecedented challenges have allowed institutions an opportunity to review and rebuild their alumni programming with alumni at the core of it. This year, advancement teams will find a way to provide more value and on-demand programming to build meaningful relationships with their alumni. Schools, colleges, and universities will work towards creating easily accessible programs to maximize outreach, facilitate greater flexibility, and enhance alumni relations. 

From focused workshops to career networking and mentoring programs, institutions will ensure the easy availability of all these programs to all alumni.

During the pandemic, William Peace University launched a Virtual Book Club focused on professional development and career advancement for the university students and alumni. The group helped set and realize career goals for all participants. Via this initiative, the institution made valuable resources and knowledge easily accessible to alumni and students from the comfort of their homes during a crisis. Read more → 

Thus, focusing on alumni needs is the key to forging strong, meaningful relationships in 2025.

3. Measurement of engagement data will be more streamlined

Traditionally, alumni engagement data has mostly been limited to measuring event attendance and fundraising revenue. However, these metrics failed to provide any insights during the COVID-19 pandemic, when institutions had to cancel all in-person events and dial down on fundraising asks. 

The past few years have provided advancement teams with an opportunity to identify massive gaps in alumni engagement data and work towards creating a better structure for alumni engagement reporting. 

As a result, engagement data today can do so much more – from social media interactions, email engagement, mentor-mentee engagement, to volunteer participation and a lot more. Digitization of all this data will offer advancement teams the essential knowledge they need to make the right decisions and develop stronger relationships with alumni.

4. We will see an increased focus on mid-level donors

2020 set a landmark record for one of the highest unemployment rates in the United States. This alarming trend directly affects institutions as a lot of their major gift donors have taken a huge hit on their fortune. Studies indicate that 88% of all funds donated to schools come from 12% of donors, and these donors constitute major gift donors. 

Fundraising in 2025 is going to be largely different from what we have saw back in 2020 and 2021. Institutions will shift their focus towards mid-level donors, working towards converting them into long-time donors. Additionally, advancement teams will also be on the lookout for creative ideas to expand their current donor base and drive up engagement with more diverse alumni segments.  

5. Career networks will continue to be integral to alumni programs

The importance of alumni networks for professional networking and career growth has only increased in recent years. With unemployment steadily increasing in the US, institutions have stepped up to provide an additional resource for finding and pursuing career opportunities.

Additionally, these career services also foster alumni engagement by allowing them to provide opportunities while simultaneously tapping into their alma mater's fresh talent to nurture an ever-growing community.

Why alumni engagement is essential

Alumni engagement is a crucial part of advancement and alumni relations efforts for a reason. An effective alumni engagement strategy:

• Inspires loyalty by providing a sense of belonging from your alumni to your institution. An alumni that doesn't feel engaged will obviously be less interested in events, fundraising opportunities, or helping current students or programs. It also means that your efforts need to convey a genuine attempt to kindle and maintain a human connection.
• Attracts giving as engaged alumni not only feel more compelled to give but feel confident that their generosity is going to a worthwhile cause. A heartfelt and personalized email sent to the right segment might just be the final nudge that a dormant alumni needs to provide their first gift.
• Promotes lifelong learning by making your alumni feel more likely to get involved in providing mentorships and career opportunities.
• Increases your reach exponentially as alumni who feel appreciated and want to give back eventually become prominent voices to champion your cause and amplify your outreach efforts.

Winding up...

2025 is likely to witness advancement teams rebuilding their alumni engagement programs to cater to the evolving needs of their alumni. This evolving alumni relations landscape calls for the adoption of more modern, technology-driven strategies for effective alumni engagement.

With the amount of changes that alumni relations has gone through in the past few months, we've already witnessed some amazing new trends emerge in the last few months.

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Update : ‍

We have some great news from Jessica and her team as they increased the sign-up rate by 55% from last year. They helped 467 students sign-up on one single day at their Spring Grad Expo, 2018.

Grad Day or Grad Expo, as known at Nicholls State University, has evolved into this festive, one-stop-shop for everything the graduation candidates need to be prepared for their walk across the stage at commencement.

The event is held every semester and usually welcomes 300 to 400 graduating seniors. Their friends and family members join in too sometimes. These numbers usually represent roughly two-thirds of the graduating class for any given semester.

Nicholls grad candidates come to our red-and-gray draped and decorated campus ballroom, where they can purchase their caps, gowns and alumni gear. They even take their senior portrait for the yearbook, order their announcements and grad rings, and visit our graduate school faculty, Career Services staff, and Liberty Mutual insurance representative.

They are also given the opportunity to take selfies in front of our Colonel Pride backdrop with a snapshot frame and props, visit and take pics with our mascot, Colonel Tillou, and eat jambalaya and snacks provided by the Nicholls Alumni Federation.

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‍Grad Expo at Nicholls has been revamped to be a great experience that both caters to a campus community need, graduation preparation, and provides a fun encounter, often for the first time, between our seniors and their alumni staff and Federation board members.

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‍From an event planning and validation perspective, though, how do we justify continuing to host our biannual Grad Expo?

For as long as we have held a version of this Grad Expo event, we have either counted participants, or as we have been doing more recently, have had them fill out a form so that we would have an accurate participation count and collect their most current contact information to be used by the alumni office upon their graduation.

‍This semester we said “Goodbye” to paper forms and “Hello” to online registration with Almabase!

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Last February, we were able to move our Alumni Federation website over to the interactive Almabase platform. Since then, the Office of Alumni Affairs has been working diligently to encourage our alumni to create their profiles on the new website, allowing them full access to Federation benefits. It even helps us keep better track of them.

When the Grad Expo discussion came up again as we started planning for the Fall 2017 event, we decided that an online registration option would be easier on everyone— students and staff. We also kept in mind that we are always looking for new ways to persuade our alumni to register on the website. That line of thinking finally led us to create their website profiles on the alumni site as their “signup” form for the Grad Expo.

‍Since Almabase provides us with the ability to mine our data so deeply, when the event ended, we were able to pull a list of everyone who registered as a student on the date of Grad Expo.

‍This online registration option gave us our headcount, gave our students basic access to the Federation website as an intro to the benefits of being a full member of the Federation, and made them active participants on the website. They could not just access the career boards now, but also actively network with alumni across different fields.

‍Best of all, Almabase would automatically change their status from 'student' to 'alumni' as soon as they graduate - 301 of our December 2017 grads would automatically become active alumni on the platform when they graduate!

‍That means that we will have more accurate contact info, career updates and location changes for them without having to first convince them to sign up. If we continue to use this approach at each Grad Expo, we will have roughly half of our alumni registered as active users on the platform by the time they graduate.

Another benefit to having them create their profiles on the alumni website at Grad Expo is being able to send them targeted group emails. The week after the Expo the Office of Alumni Affairs emailed our grad candidates who were in attendance through the platform.

We thanked them for coming to the event and signing up on the platform. We also took that opportunity to walk them through using the platform in more detail, from updating their profile to career board benefits and alumni news features. We will send this saved email group another email when they graduate, congratulating them and welcoming them to the Federation and the website as full alumni members.

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We are still working towards streamlining the sign-in process, but we are confident that it will continue to provide the best approach to registering our graduating seniors for the Expo and getting them familiar with the alumni website before they actually graduate. It will also get them to start using the platform more actively.

‍With online and phone support from Almabase on the morning of the event, we were able to sign up 301 seniors with ten laptops over a period of five hours (the Expo is of one day from 10:00 am to 3:00 pm).

‍Next semester, we will have more laptops, more staff assisting with registration, and instructions on creating profiles printed on stand-up banners next to the laptops.

We are also working with Almabase on a way to denote, on these grads’ profiles, that their profiles were created at that Grad Expo event. In doing this, we hope to be able to make performance comparisons between multiple events.

Overall, using Almabase to register our potential grads was hugely successful for us, especially for a first try. We are excited to be able to continue streamlining that process to more efficiently get participants through the process and on their way to being active members of our online alumni community.

Finally, it is important to note that our creative partnership with Almabase, which continues to benefit Nicholls alumni and students, keeps getting better the longer we work with them!

‍Edit: This note from Jessica made our day here at Almabase. Thank you, Jessica, keep them coming!

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As the COVID-19 outbreak continues to disrupt alumni relations and fundraising, institutions around the world have found themselves in a tight spot as a consequence of canceled events, giving days, and other planned alumni engagement activities.

With this new world order settling in, advancement teams are looking for unique ways to engage their alumni digitally. While a lot of institutions have been engaging alumni digitally for a while now, in this blog post, we’ll be looking at some of the most creative engagement ideas that we’ve seen being implemented during COVID-19.

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1. Organize virtual happy hours 

With alumni confined to their houses and being forced to work from home, everyone’s missing out on those Friday night Happy Hours. But wait, who said social isolation’s equivalent to the end of Happy Hours?

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Virtual happy hours are a great way to encourage social interactions among alumni during these difficult times. You can organize your next virtual happy hour as a 1-hour event open to limited registrations. Create a dedicated event page for collecting RSVPs and lay down all the details on this page. Ask alumni to grab a beverage of their choice and join the meeting link. To add structure to your virtual event, encourage your event attendees to share something about themselves during the event like a short introduction, some insight into how they’re dealing with the crisis, or what they’re doing to help those in need.

St. Thomas University School of Law created a dedicated event page for its first-ever Young Alumni Virtual Happy Hour and promoted the event via social media.

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2. Support small alumni businesses

According to a recent survey by Goldman Sachs, 51% of America’s small-business owners said they could not weather more than three months of the current economic environment. 

With small business owners struggling to stay afloat throughout this crisis, this is a good time to offer your support to your alumni who own small businesses by leveraging your alumni network.

Create a web page listing small businesses owned or operated by your alumni and promote it on all your official websites and various social media platforms. 

Here's how Centenary College of Louisiana offered its support to alumni small business owners.

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3. Encourage non-monetary donations from your alumni

Since the educational fundraising landscape has evolved as an outcome of the coronavirus situation, the approach that institutions have been adopting for fundraising asks has also transformed. Since schools and universities need funds now more than ever to be able to support their students, but feel apprehensive about asking their alumni for monetary donations, a lot of them are choosing to opt for fundraising in kind.

Similar to other institutions, Nicholls State University also had to move its classes online. However, the university realized that many students did not have webcams at home which served as a major obstacle to conducting online tests and smooth functioning of classes.

With the ongoing coronavirus situation, raising funds for webcams wouldn’t have been possible and so, the university appealed to its alumni to help students out by donating webcams.

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4. Organize virtual races to boost alumni well-being

With everyone confined to their homes, forced to work from home, limitations on social interactions, and physical fitness taking a back seat, health and well-being of alumni has become a major concern for institutions across the globe.

Aid your alumni through this phase of social isolation and encourage them to make exercise a part of their routine by organizing a virtual race. A virtual race can have participants from any location within a predetermined time. Photos shared by alumni during their walk/run can further be shared with the alumni community via Facebook or alumni website, helping drive engagement and registrations. 

The College of Idaho’s ongoing ‘2020 Coyote Dash [Virtual 5K] race’ is helping connect its alumni who are located miles away from one another during these testing times. ‍

Read the complete success story here 👇

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5. Conduct online yoga sessions

With COVID-19 leading to stress and anxiety as a result of social isolation and financial pressures, the mental health of alumni is a rising concern for all schools and universities. Many institutions are organizing virtual exercise or yoga sessions for their alumni to help them deal with stress, depression, anxiety, energy, fatigue, and motivate them to work towards their overall physical and mental well-being. 

William Peace University, a liberal arts college in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, roped in its former Alumni Board President, Alli Leggett '01 to organize a virtual yoga session for alumni to join from the comfort of their home. 

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6. Urge alumni to share their photos with the community

Alumni photos that capture happy moments is another great way to engage your alumni and get them to interact with one another. You can start a photo contest by encouraging your alumni to post their photos on your alumni website or alumni group on social media.

Bob Greene, Alumni Director at Serra High School started a ‘Picture Time’ contest via email, urging alumni to share pictures while they’re at home with their families or any picture that makes them feel happy.

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7. Host virtual gaming nights to bring your alumni together

Social isolation during COVID-19 means that you can’t invite your alumni to your school or university for a fun game of soccer but, how about hosting a virtual event for alumni to engage in some healthy competition over online games? 

Bring your alumni together for a fun night of online Charades, Monopoly, Pictionary or Cards against Humanity. Take it a notch higher with special appearances of some of their favorite staff members. 

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8. Host a virtual coloring contest for alumni and their families

Encourage your alumni to show off their creative side by hosting a virtual coloring contest open to them and their families. Coloring is known to be great for mental, emotional, and intellectual health in adults and serves as a wonderful hobby that keeps children calm and entertained. 

‍Chestnut Hill College organized a fun virtual coloring page contest for alumni and their families where campus photos and logos were converted into coloring pages using the Colorscape app. Take a look at the coloring pages here.‍

The college also took to social media to launch a contest by encouraging alumni to download coloring pages and participate by coloring and sharing it with the alumni community. The best submission will be chosen by the alumni community and receive a CHC prize pack.