The end of the year is a wonderful time to reconnect with your alumni. Step up your alumni engagement strategies this holiday season with these 4 tips.
Published:
December 28, 2021
Updated:
December 28, 2021
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With the holiday season in full swing, your institution is likely already focusing on how it will connect with alumni as they return home for the holidays.
While you should engage your alumni every day of the year, the holiday season presents a great opportunity to supercharge alumni relationships and foster lasting connections during a time when people are feeling generous. It’s a great time to reach out to graduates and let them know just how valuable they are to the continued success of your college or university.
Whether you reach out with a simple “thank you” or throw a full-blown appreciation event, there are plenty of ways to connect with alumni and bridge the physical distance between them and your school. As you freshen up your alumni engagement strategies for the holiday season, work these ideas into your efforts:
Your alumni are a valuable part of your institution. Implementing extra appreciation and engagement efforts will inspire them to stick around and establish lifelong connections to your school.
Any alum appreciates knowing their alma mater is thinking of them during this special time of the year. Why not send them a festive eCard or a letter in the mail, thanking them for their continued support for your school?
This is a great way to say thanks for their continued involvement and to wish them happy holidays. Here are a few ways you can create a holiday card that your alumni will love:
Feature student or alumni talent: Have someone who’s skilled in graphic design create the card itself. If you go digital with your holiday card, consider having a campus acapella group or musicians sing or play a carol.
Keep it short: Your holiday card doesn’t have to be lengthy to get the point across that you’re thinking about your former students. Keep the card fairly simple, or if you’re sending a video as your holiday greeting, make sure it’s no longer than a couple of minutes.
Add a soft ask to the card: The end of the year is the most charitable time of the year. Include a non-intrusive donation request at the end of your video or card. Add a donation button that links them to the donation page, or provide instructions on how to find your online donation page on your school’s website.
The great thing about holiday cards is that they’re low-cost (especially when you go digital) and they’re sure to make your alumni light up when they hear from you. Make this an annual marketing tactic, and alumni will start to look forward to hearing from you every year.
Alumni giving is used as an indicator of a university’s success. It communicates how invested alumni are in the continued development of the organization.
Colleges and universities among other fundraising organizations recognize the holiday season as one of the best times to push out fundraising appeals to alumni.
In fact, Double the Donation’s nonprofit fundraising statistics page indicates that 30% of annual giving happens in December, with about 10% of all annual donations coming in the last three days of the year.
As part of your year-end alumni fundraising strategies, try a peer-to-peer campaign. In this type of campaign, your supporters (in this case, your alumni) set up individual campaign pages, personalizing them with their own images and personal stories that emphasize their experiences at your school. Then, they share the page with their friends and family, encouraging them to donate.
Peer-to-peer fundraising is a fantastic way to connect with alumni and inspire them to donate during a time when they’re feeling extra generous — especially younger alumni who spend a good bit of time online. It helps you reconnect with other alumni who might’ve lost touch with your school. They’ll see their friends actively supporting your school, sparking memories of their alma mater. Not only this, but you’ll reinforce loyalty among those who volunteer to fundraise.
You engage with students on social media upon admission all the way through their enrollment at your institution. Those digital connections shouldn’t be severed the moment they graduate. The holiday season is a good time to re-up your social media activities to re-spark those connections.
Social media efforts play a crucial role in your overall reachability, enabling you to reach thousands or even millions of followers instantly when you post. If you’re not careful, your social media efforts might lapse during the holiday season, a crucial time where consistency pays off.
Here are a few ways to connect with your alumni during the holiday season:
Have a consistent posting schedule: Ideally, post a few times a week. If your marketing team will be out of the office, use your marketing tools to automate your posts.
Interact with them: Make the most of social media by leveraging it as a two-way communication system. Like or respond to comments on your posts, or go on a following spree where you follow active alumni members back.
Hold an ugly sweater contest: Bring the festivities into your social media strategies. Create a hashtag, such as #YourSchool’sNameUglySweaterContest2021, and ask alumni to share pictures of them in their ugliest sweaters. Declare your winner and send them a gift (like a branded t-shirt or a stuffed animal of your school’s mascot) as a prize.
People will have some extra free time to relax during the holiday season, so they’re sure to be scrolling through their social media feeds. Capitalize on this time and avoid putting your social media efforts on hold during the holiday season.
The end of the year is the perfect time to show your appreciation by sending alumni members gifts. After all, who wouldn’t be excited to get a package in the mail, especially if it’s a free gift from their alma mater?
While sending gifts to every graduate might not fall within your school’s budget, you can send them to those who are active in your alumni program. Your team should be sure to pick the appropriate gift that represents the alumni’s level of involvement, whether that means taking a look at their volunteer hours or donation history. Some branded gifts that will serve as great memorabilia for active members of your alumni network include:
These can easily be branded to your school, and recipients will be reminded of you each time they use their gift. If you want to express appreciation for major donors, you might instead send larger gifts, like food baskets or gift certificates. Either way, get into the spirit of giving this holiday season by sending a token of appreciation to your active supporters.
Whether you’re asking them to get involved in a campaign or extending a thank you to those who stay involved, the end of the year is the perfect time to step up your alumni engagement efforts. Between a boost in your fundraising appeals and gifts, make the most of this upcoming holiday season by investing in alumni engagement. Good luck and happy holidays!
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Social media is a pivotal tool for alumni engagement, especially for young alumni who spend a lot more time on social media platforms than older generations. Engaging young alumni after graduation is crucial to building lifelong relationships. In order to stay connected with these young alumni after graduation, the two must-haves are: an effective alumni social media strategy and high-quality content.
Let’s take a look at some of the best practices for engaging alumni using social media from world-famous educational institutions, and how they use social media posts and content for engagement:
Alumni respect the professors who helped them master new skills and gain valuable knowledge during their formative years. A social media post featuring one of your beloved professors can tap into your alumni’s sense of gratitude and nostalgia, strengthening the sense of belongingness to the institution.
Keeping alumni regularly informed about deceased professors also offers a good opportunity for the former to pay their respects.
One of the ways to engage and motivate your followers is to share inspiring alumni stories. It can be stories related to internships, scientific research, entrepreneurship projects, or other topics that resonate with your audience on social media.
Celebrating the small and big wins of your alumni paves the way for stronger bonds.
If one of your alumni gets recognized for an academic or business front, don’t forget to give a shout-out to this achievement. Show your followers that you are truly proud of people who glorify their alma mater. Genuine appreciation for your alumni's success will make them feel valued and more connected to your institution.
One way to truly create an alumni community is to help them display their skills. Encourage them to create and share the artworks that represent your educational institution. Creative works of your alumni would perfectly complement your social media content strategy and help your alumni feel welcomed.
Remember that you can’t share your alumni’s work without getting their permission and you should always tag the original content creators in your posts.
Hashtags play an essential role in content promotion. If you want to improve the visibility of your social media content and increase reach and alumni engagement, you should add relevant hashtags to each post.
Here are a few basic rules to follow:
- Add three to seven hashtags to each caption or tweet
- Create your own branded hashtags (e.g., #berkeleyforlife, #berkeleyPOV)
- Make sure that all hashtags you are using are relevant to the image and message of your post
If you have already mastered the art of using hashtags, you can start a hashtag to collect a specific type of alumni content.
“Throwback-to-the-good-old-days” posts resonate with graduate students on a deep emotional level. Sharing black-and-white photographs of campus buildings and other old pictures that evoke nostalgia is bound to grab attention and further boost alumni engagement on social media.
Whenever you post a new article in your blog or add a thought-provoking research paper to your publication database, you should share updates on social media with the alumni. Try writing a short caption to intrigue your readers and use a call-to-action to invite them to your website. Here are a few examples of call-to-actions you can use: check the link in the bio, browse this site, or hit the link below.
If you want to engage your alumni, you should provide them with useful information. For instance, you can give tips on how to apply for an internship or how to stay productive while working from home. Also, you can share checklists, guides, templates, or any other helpful alumni-centric content.
Stanford University published a holiday gift guide for book lovers and invited its alumni to check it out. It’s a great example of helpful and relevant content to use on Instagram.
Do you use social media to sell college merchandise? Offer your alumni a special discount, and you will hit two birds with one stone – boost your alumni engagement on social media and increase sales. Numerous institutions have used this approach and seen great results.
People like to share inspirational quotes with their friends, family, and coworkers. Inspirational quotes are a big hit amongst alumni of all ages. Posting daily or weekly inspirational quotes to motivate your audience is a great way to drive alumni engagement on social media. Remember to choose quotes that resonate the most with your alumni.
Today, social media has become the prime platform for alumni engagement and if you’re not leveraging it already, you’re missing out on engagement opportunities. A vast majority of your alumni community is more active on social media than anywhere else, so a strong social media presence should be a part of your alumni engagement strategy. Incorporate these 10 tried and tested strategies to drive higher alumni engagement than ever via social media.
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10 Best Practices for Engaging Your Alumni on Social Media
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As another year approaches its end and the holiday spirit hangs high in the air, how prepared are you to leverage this holiday season to double the impact of your donations?
Gift matching programs are a great way to drive revenue for your institution - they allow your donors to increase their donation amounts through employer benefits instead of their own wallets. Despite this, there is an estimated $4 to $7 billion in matching gifts that go unclaimed each year. Academic institutions could really benefit from that cash - so why aren’t they taking advantage of it?
Well, many organizations and donors alike are not very familiar with matching gift programs. In fact, 78% of match eligible donors don’t know anything about their gift matching programs. That means they are certainly not taking the extra step of submitting matching gift requests. So the most important thing to know about gift matching is that not enough donors know about gift matching programs.
Once you know that it is an awareness gap and not a motivation gap that stands in the way of matching gift revenue, it becomes easier to educate your donors and encourage them to drive their matching gift requests to completion.
This holiday season, leverage these 3 matching gift strategies to fuel your institution's fundraising efforts and upgrade your alumni programming.
As mentioned above, the main reason that your organization does not reach its potential in matching gifts is because donors are not aware that they are eligible for gift matching programs. As a nonprofit organization, it is your job to educate these donors because it can result in a lot of extra cash for your mission.
One of the best places to educate your donors is on your donation confirmation screen. Many matching gift requests are time sensitive, so it is important to educate your donors quickly, and the easiest way to do that is, of course, directly after their donation has been made.
Educating your donors on the confirmation screen also allows you to target them while they are still in the giving mindset. The donor obviously feels connected and committed to your organization, so they will welcome additional ways to increase their initial contribution.
To do this, simply add a couple of sentences about gift matching on your confirmation page. You can even use tools like 360MatchPro by Double the Donation to allow donors to search for the name of their employer and then read more about their own specific gift matching program.
By placing matching gift information directly onto your confirmation pages, you can target donors quickly and efficiently while they are still feeling connected to your organization. This increases the chances that they will learn more about employer gift matching and then pursue a matching gift request.
After your donor learns more about gift matching, you still want to ensure that they take action and submit their matching gift request. That is why our next must-know strategy also involves direct donor communication. This time, however, it entails using automated emails to follow up with donors after the donation process.
Email messages are a great way to provide additional gift matching information that might not fit on your confirmation page. It also provides a second chance for your donor to submit their gift matching request. There are many automated email stream options that allow you to send matching gift emails to donors after the donation process.
If you use gift matching software like 360MatchPro, you can even automate these messages to contain gift matching information that is specific to your donor’s employer.
These messages contain specific guidelines based on the information that your donor entered on the confirmation page.This can include employer match amounts, eligibility and a link to submit a gift matching request. This makes it easy for the donor to learn more about gift matching and take the final step of driving their gift to completion.
Automated emails that contain general matching gift information are especially important because even if your donor did not enter their employer into the gift matching tool you’re using, they might still be eligible for a matching gift. They might have simply neglected to read the confirmation page or they did not think that matching gift programs applied to them, which could be based on the awareness gap that we discussed before.
Most nonprofits choose to customize this email so that it matches their brand’s unique voice. Automated email outreach is a lucrative strategy that encourages donors to complete gift matching requests. It is a great way to further educate donors and help them secure extra funding for your organization.
The gift matching process produces valuable insights about your donors. This can include where they work, their matching gift eligibility and their response to automated outreach. It is important to keep track of this data so that you can better develop your ongoing fundraising strategies.
That is why the final need-to-know strategy involves tracking donor insights. By tracking the information that is produced from matching gift strategies, you can tailor future outreach and ensure that you are creating an effective matching gift approach.
360MatchPro can actually track all of these insights for you using its automated technology. While you could manually record all of this data, the 360MatchPro dashboard stores it for you in one, easy-to-navigate space.
Using this information, you could thank your donors for their matching gift request, or you could automate follow up emails to donors who did not open your first message. For example, if you have a donor named Jenny from the Home Depot who submits a matching gift request, you could wait to receive the gift, then send Jenny a personalized message that thanks her for her request and explains how it helped your organization. You could then track Jenny’s future contribution habits to see how this positively affected her donor behavior. Keeping track of this information is vital to maintaining a lucrative gift matching strategy.
The fundraising strategies don’t stop there! While you just learned about the most important matching gift strategies for the year-end holiday season, there are certainly more tools to explore. For example, if you are interested in learning more about which companies have the best matching gift programs, check out this page. This list details the most impressive matching gift programs, and it can help you target the most profitable matching gift employees.
You can also check out Double the Donation’s educational blog to discover more matching gift resources. Happy fundraising!
Adam Weinger is the President of Double the Donation, the leading provider of matching gift tools to nonprofit organizations and educational institutions. Adam created Double the Donation in order to help nonprofits increase their annual revenue through corporate matching gift and volunteer grant programs.
Everything You Need to Know About Matching Gifts to Fuel Your Fundraising Efforts This Holiday Season
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The holiday season is just around the corner. As the festive season brings your alumni home to visit their loved ones, it also presents one of the best opportunities for your institution to connect with your alumni on a deeper level and lay the lego blocks for lifetime relationships.
The festive spirit is high in the air but the 2020 holiday season is one-of-a-kind in its truest essence. The pandemic might have affected several segments of your alumni differently - confining some to work tirelessly from their homes while balancing their social lives, exposing frontline healthcare workers to massive risks, robbing some of their jobs and even near and dear ones due to the virus. At a time like this, it's particularly important for your institution to support your alumni and deliver the highest value.
So, how do you best leverage this holiday season to drive more alumni engagement? After observing hundreds of schools driving success with their alumni network over the years, we've found these top 5 strategies that can help your school, college, or university boost alumni engagement rates this holiday season:
2020 has already set a landmark record for one of the highest unemployment rates in the United States. The alarming numbers projected by the US. Bureau of Labour Logistics is a clear indicator of why your alumni need your support now more than ever.
With the pandemic resulting in the worst job market since the Great Depression, your younger alumni are at an even larger risk as they lose their on-campus jobs, internships, and are already witnessing dwindling job opportunities.
Amidst all this chaos, professional networking events are one of the surest ways to provide value to your alumni and help them in these dire times of need. Corporate jobs respect recommendations, and applicants actively seek social connections and support. Leverage your existing network and motivate influential alumni to help their peers out in these dire times of need.
Your alumni network has a wealth of knowledge that your current students and graduates, both can benefit greatly from. Get your community together for webinars, discussion panels, podcasts, workshops, and much more to lead the way towards professional growth for your alumni.
Here's how Fordham University's Alumni: Help A Ram Today campaign supports Class of 2020 graduates by encouraging alumni to hire these young grads for a full-/part-time job or an internship.
What are holidays without holiday parties? The landscape this year might look somewhat different due to the pandemic but that shouldn't rob your alumni of the opportunity of connecting with long-lost peers, toast to each other's good health, and ring in the holidays from the comfort of their homes.
A great alternative to continuing with the tradition of hosting holiday parties this year is to do it virtually. Holidays are the perfect time to get your alumni together over a couple of drinks and celebrate over an e-party. A surefire way to grab more alumni attention and drive attendance is to create themes like 80′s retro or a Christmas Character Party. To make it easy for you to manage and even easier for your alumni to participate, host your virtual party over Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or another common video conferencing tool.
With the pandemic leading to forced furloughs, students having to drop out of schools, and many small businesses shutting down, your constituents need your support now more than ever. Make the most of the holiday spirit and find ways to fundraise for your community.
Riding high on the giving spirit this holiday season, also urge your community to come in support of your institution’s cause by helping with emergency needs and in bracing the impact of the pandemic.
Planning your annual holiday drive to raise funds for academic continuity or to support your community are perfect examples of fundraising asks for this year.
A simple gesture such as sending creative e-cards is a great way to express festive greetings, gratitude, and acknowledgment for your alumni network's contribution to your institution. Include this as part of your yearly holiday activity to drive engagement and foster lasting alumni relationships.
The example from the University of Westminister works as the perfect inspiration here. The school rolled out 30-second animated e-cards to wish happy holidays and thank their alumni for their ongoing support.
Social media is a dominant tool today and has a lot of potential for alumni engagement. Young alumni especially spend considerable time scrolling their feeds daily.
If your institution has an online presence on these platforms, use them to encourage higher participation. If you’re unsure about where to start, you can consider looping in student volunteers to ramp up your social media presence and start driving engagement with your alumni online.
Drive more engagement online by conducting live chats, contest giveaways, and posting yearbook pictures to evoke nostalgia and create a buzz amongst your alumni community. You can even encourage alumni to post their 'throwbacks' with the right hashtags and repost them on your channels.
Ugly sweater contests have also become a yearly trend, with universities and other schools creating innovative rules and giveaways to attract greater participation. Take cues from Boston University's Annual Ugly Holiday Sweater Contest to create one for your community this holiday season.
With the holidays arriving soon, there are many opportunities to express unconditional support and boost alumni relations and engagement.
Your alumni are your family and the holidays are the perfect time of the year to showcase solidarity.
Want To Drive Higher Alumni Engagement This Holiday Season? Tap Into These 5 Go-To Strategies
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