raised from attendees of 38th Annual Scholarship Auction Event
click rates on alumni engagement emails and communication
With campuses in Concordia, Kansas and Junction City, Kansas, Cloud County is a two-year public community college, started in 1965. With the Foundation established in 1988 to raise funds for the benefits of students, Cloud County Community College has an active alumni program for over three years.
Despite active and consistent efforts, the alumni advancement team experienced low engagement rates as compared to other similar institutes.
With dependencies on the IT teams for the creation of pages, managing RSVPs and handling multiple channels of communication, event planning was a tedious task for the advancement team. Even making decisions like where to host the alumni event, took the team much longer, leading to the last minute rush.
The advancement team made use of multiple software that cost them almost $1400/ year to manage alumni communication. Also, the need to switch between various tools, often led to the team losing essential alumni data.
The institute used only a Facebook page to interact with their alumni. The limited interaction often led to their posts getting lost in the volume and not being noticed on time, leading to lower participation rates.
The team paid a recurring cost of $1200/ year additionally for powering their giving pages. But the money first goes into the network and then hits the foundation account 15 days after the donation via the page. The platform also charges them a transaction fee of 3% and limits them to creating only five pages at a time.
As an all-in-one alumni engagement and fundraising platform, Almabase helped the Cloud County Community College launch their digital alumni community and maintain multiple giving pages through the year. With an integrated communication tool and event management module, Almabase also helped manage their alumni engagement efforts better.
The institute could manage the scholarship event better with the ‘events module’ on Almabase.
The ability to manage everything on a single dashboard - event management, email communication, donations, and other website work, the advancement team could draw actionable insights from their database. Right from where they should use the event, to what message should be used to reach out to their alumni for better engagement.
(i) With an integrated communications tool, the advancement team could trigger their outreach campaign in minutes. Doing so from a single dashboard, enabled them to run campaigns on time, without losing data due to switching between tools.
(ii) The Almabase software also offered the team a ‘fundraising module.’ It made it easy for the team to manage the event, by providing the flexibility to integrate payment gateways for ticket collection. The integration made the ticket purchase cycle more seamless, increasing completions digitally.
With actionable insights on their fingertips and easy event management, the team could raise $67,000 from their Annual Scholarship Auction Event.
Having moved all their advancement activities to Almabase – including events, emails, donations and other website related work, the advancement team now focuses more on establishing better alumni relations with strategic communication.
Using the email communication feature on Almabase, the team could create dynamic groups from their alumni database. For instance, the institute could develop segments like “everyone living in Boston, MA” or “everyone who attended events but never gave a gift,” to personalize their outreach messages.
By sending emails to such targeted segments, the alumni advancement team noticed a 3X higher engagement rate on their campaigns.
Almabase helped the Cloud County Community College set up a digital alumni directory in less than a week. With an up-to-date alumni database, the institute now remains focused on building meaningful alumni relations.
