Here's our attempt at trying to solve the challenge of continuously keeping alumni engaged yet remain personal, at scale, with a small team and limited resources.
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When you dig down to the fundamentals - the most significant challenge with alumni relations is the same for most of us.
“How do I continuously engage all my alumni, yet remain personal, at scale, with a small team and limited resources?”
Not easy. Certainly.
Over the last five years, we’ve been doing much research to try and address this.
What we’ve come to believe is that there isn’t a silver bullet that will solve this problem. What we’ve also come to realize is that alumni will not regularly engage amongst themselves without something external that drives them to do so.
This is precisely why social network groups (Facebook/LinkedIn) fall flat. Over time, the group and the content within it become stale. The content that does get added becomes irrelevant and fails to provide enough value to its members. Since there isn’t anything of value to bring people back to the group, the group eventually dies out.
This is an age of specialized solutions for specific problems. It’s no different with alumni. They are most likely to listen when they’re receiving communication relevant to and targeted at them. If not, they tune it out.
So, what is the solution?
Like I’d said - there is no silver bullet to this problem. However, we are attempting to solve it - step by step.
Our first step to address this was taken last year -- with v1.0 of the Groups module on Almabase. With this, we wanted to understand how effectively a group would engage when someone drove the engagement.
Of course, we understand how stretched alumni offices are. We needed to do this without adding additional load to you and your team.
So, we built groups 1.0 focused around ‘Group Admins’.This would help you break down your alumni into smaller chunks, and help you delegate this responsibility of engaging smaller communities to those who are possibly more attached to the community.
Like a class leader for a class, a football coach to former football players, or a chapter president for a regional group.
1. For the most part, Group admins, on their own are not always incentivized to drive engagement
2. Fresh, valuable content drives engagement - and the group admin(s) alone cannot generate enough content to keep a group from going stale.
3. Unlike social networks - the purpose of an alumni network is more specific. Members arrive with particular objectives in mind (attend an event, reconnect with classmates, career networking, seek advice, find a job, etc.) The frequency of interaction is much lesser - so it’s all the more critical that the content they interact with be very relevant to them.
4. Different kinds of groups have different requirements from their administrators - some might want to be deeply involved, and some just superficially.
5. The frequency of engagement is vital - too frequent, and your community tunes out. Too infrequent, and your loses relevance and becomes stale.
We summarized this into three key challenges that we need to address, to be able to engage alumni:
Creation: Creating valuable content, frequently, without the burden for this falling on one or a few people.
Curation: Collating content such that each member of the community receives relevant content that is of value to them
Distribution: Distributing this curated content to appropriate people at a frequency with which they are comfortable.
Earlier, each of these three challenges fell on the shoulders of you and your office.
We want to build a solution that shifts most of this responsibility to the technology that powers almabase. It will automatically take care of Curation and Distribution while driving people to Create more content.
We are building a ‘Feed.’ All users can now post, like, comment and react. Content creation is no longer a job for just admins. Everyone can contribute to communities that they care.
The system will look across the groups that are relevant to each alum, and curate content that they are most likely to find value. For instance, if someone is part of the groups for ‘Class of 86’, ‘Law Alumni,’ ‘Alumni in San Francisco’ and ‘Baseball,’ the system will take care of curating the most relevant content from those groups and then send it to this person.
The feedback loop. We’ll be building an automated digest that is curated and personalized for each member based on what they choose to stay connected with. It will then be delivered at a frequency of their choice. All without you having to get involved. This will drive alumni back to the platform and hopefully urge them to create more content and close the loop.
1. Groups are going to become very central to all engagement on your alumni platform.
2. As it ties together all these different components for engagement, the product going forward would focus a lot on ‘groups.’
3. Increased peer to peer alumni engagement
4. A ‘feed’ within each group or module will allow users to post, like, comment, and interact with others in the community.
5. Distributed Fine grain control for group administrators
6. You’ll have much more control over the permissions of each group administrator. You can set different levels/combinations of permissions for each. E.g., if you want a group admin to be able to approve users, or update profile data of members - but just within that group.
7. Personalization gets more powerful
8. Customized email digests, notifications, segmentation based on engagement on the ‘Feed.’
9. ‘Chapters,’‘MyClass,’’ Sub-Colleges’ will get deprecated by November 2019
10. These discrete modules all going to be absorbed into groups. For those of you that use it, we’ll help you migrate to Groups.
We wanted to be upfront about this.
All of these are hard problems to solve and will take time to get them right?
However, we’ll get there.
Such an integrated system is something that has not been attempted before in the industry, but we’re finally at a time where we have the technology to pull it off.
We’re going to build this step by step, and we’d love to hear feedback along the way. Bear with us till we reach the final state, and I’m sure you’ll come to love the product. :)
1. The first noticeable change on the product is going to be with events
2. You’ll now see a Feed within each of your events where alumni can post, like, comment, and interact with each other.
3. Events are always a gathering point for people to interact with. It’s currently the single most significant driver for online alumni engagement across our partners. Adding a feed within events first will give us a lot of great insights that we can take back to the drawing board before rolling it out to groups.
4. Within the next one-two months, you’ll see Feeds within Groups as well, as well as the first version of the notification system!
Big changes ahead!
We’re excited. Hope you are too :)
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Events have been around on Almabase for a while now and has grown to be one of among most utilized channels to engage constituents offline. As usage grew, the kind of events that needed to be created grew diverse and the more we realized that most event solutions out there, are not meant to handle the kind of complexities that come up during reunions - while considering engagement data to manage.
So, we went back to the drawing board to redesign events and we're excited to roll it out today to all platforms.
While a whole lot has changed (we will be covering more in our support documentation), here's everything you need to know :
We've completely redesigned the interface and experience for the user. Each event also now lives on its own page – free from unnecessary navigational options.
Additionally, the admin side for events is now entirely mobile responsive. Which means you can create an event, add photos, add guests, check-in guests, record payments, export, and everything else you needed to do from your computer, now on your mobile device.
Need to accommodate for change of plans? different tickets? additional guests? Not a problem. Each registration can now be edited both by the guest and event admins.
Guests can now also respond with a 'Maybe' or 'Not attending' during their registration.
You can now assign tickets to your event schedule (previously called 'Agenda') which will then appear to your guests in chronological order as they select the tickets they require. Great for grouping sub-event tickets and displaying tickets in the same order as that of the event schedule.
You can now select one of three types of tickets based on your use case.
1. Mandatory Tickets behave like base fares that need to be applied to every guest on the registration (including accompanying guests).
2. Seated Tickets behave like reservations made for a particular guest. Use seated tickets when the person needs to be physically present at the event, or when you need to know exactly which guest is attending and not just a number, like at an award ceremony or dinner. Seated tickets also work great with guest forms - more on that later.
3. Open Tickets behave like anonymous tickets that can be bought in any quantity by the buyer. Works great for t-shirts, tours etc.
Oh, and tickets now also support images for that homecoming merchandise :)
Previously, you could add a 'Registration Form' that was asked once per registration. With the new events, you can add 'Guest Forms' – a form that asked once for each guest mentioned on the registration. Works great if you need to know the dietary preference of every guest that will be attending.
Events now support in-page payments without ever having to leave your platform using Stripe. Additionally, guests can pay on their mobile devices using Apple & Google Pay for one-touch payments.
Support for Blackbaud Merchant Services (BBMS) coming soon.
The new events have a few tricks up it sleeves when it comes to discounts:
1. No more remembering or pasting discount codes with public discounts that anyone can use as they register.
2. Discounts applicable only to paid members of your organization with Member discounts.
3. Discounts applicable only to certain affiliations like student.
While paid events have a reasonably predictable turnout, free events have a large problem with no-shows. Which is why we built an automated event reminder that is sent a day before the event to your guests that remind them of the event and nudge them to modify their registration if they won't be able to make it.
Events : Here's what's changing.
The Events module has been around on Almabase for a while now and has grown to be amongst the most utilized channels to engage constituents offline. While a whole lot has changed (we will be covering more in our support documentation), here's everything you need to know.
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A few weeks ago, we laid the foundations to and rolled out the revamped communication center to all our customers globally. We thought it would be a good idea to write about where we are going with this and why we see the 'Communication Center' as a cornerstone to alumni engagement.
We envision the Communication Center to be hub for all your digital communications with your alumni.
For those of you who have tried the feature out already, the first release of the communication center encompasses a powerful email editor and campaign manager coupled with a better user interface. As we continue to develop the platform, you will be able to reach out to your alumni on multiple channels to cater to different segments of your alumni, including SMS, In-app messaging, push notifications and more.
Let's take a deeper dive into some of the biggest changes with the email tool in this release.
You can now create structured, graphic emails with the new email composer. Easy create new email structures and fill them up with images, to send out to your mailing lists.
If you need to create a simple email that you quickly need to send out, simply toggle the 'Simple Email' switch to switch to the plain text email editor.
Plan on sending out weekly updates or monthly updates? you can create a set template, that can be reused for subsequent email campaigns.
Want to send out an email on Saturday morning? you can easily schedule the email in advance so you have a peaceful weekend.
Close to 66% of all emails sent are opened on a mobile device. So it's imperative that your emails look great on mobile devices too. Switch to the preview mode on the email composer to view what your email looks like on mobile devices.
You can now see how well your email campaigns performed with your mailing list. You get a quick glance into how many emails were delivered, opened and what the click through rates were. These analytics let gauge how responsive and welcoming your alumni are of your emails.
Be sure to watch this space for more updates to the Communication Center and for sneak peeks into what we are working on.
Tell us what you think in the comments section below. What communication channels do you usually use with your alumni that you would like to see added to the communication center? What are some parameters that you would like to track on your campaigns?
Centralising Alumni Communications : an introduction to the Communication Center
We envision the Communication Center to be hub for all your digital communications with your alumni.
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