I have worked in my job in Alumni Relations for a bit over five years now, and I’ve never organised an alumni reunion or written a newsletter. Fascinating, right?
That’s because I’m not working in one of those well-known front-facing roles. I’m in the background, making sure that my colleagues have all the data and tools available to build and keep the relationships with our alumni. They organize events, manage mentorship programs or facilitate fundraising campaigns. They’re brilliant at it, and they wouldn’t need me to do it. But what I add to their efforts is speed and scale: one person can look after a few dozen alumni by hand and build relations with them.
My job is making Alumni Engagement work for large-scale communities of Alumni. I do this by making use of smart data and digital marketing techniques tailored to our situation. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Centralizing the alumni data
The best way to manage large groups of alumni, or any contact record for that matter, is in a central database. But the value isn’t in the fact that you have all records combined in one big pile. It’s about the engagement data and behavioural insights you capture along the way. Metrics like that that tell you much more about your Alumni base. Is this person opening e-mails, if so on what topic? Are clusters of alumni working in a specific industry and could that possibly create opportunities for internships, careers or workshops? Could an aging alumni become a donor one day?
Get that kind of metric-tracking right and you can unleash some seriously smart segmentation on your database. And such segmentation becomes even more powerful as you gradually fine-tune it based on various different criteria or goals you set yourself. Suddenly you realize you can reach the right 200 people for the right ask, instead of emailing 20,000 and hoping for the best like most marketeers do.
How to get to that level of data-granularity is not often spoken about. It’s not a matter of just putting records in a database alone, it doesn’t magically make it work. You need to have rich data-records, with various datapoints on it, before you can actually achieve meaningful segmentation. Over time, I found that the best way to get these data-points, is by organic enrichment of your data-base. Sure, you can scrape LinkedIn and dump all the data in a CRM, but that doesn’t say anything about whether or not the alumni you’re targeting is actually interested in your engagement offerings.
The real trick to getting proper, useful, engagement data into a CRM isn’t even technical or data-heavy, it’s human. It starts with devising processes that smoothen data-captures, creating user journeys that lets colleagues engage with even more alumni with less clicks. Building automations that capture passive data, so nothing depends on someone remembering to tick a box.
Practical examples
Some practical examples you can get started with right away are activities like executing simple surveys. Think of surveys to gauge interest in certain events for example. Or analysing what kind of e-mail topics are getting the most interaction from your mailing-system. Even knowing what kind of industry alumni from certain programs end up in can be valuable in the long run. A pattern will often start to emerge from the data, if you just have the patience to gather it for extended periods of time. More often that not, a lot of these data-points will already be available to you. You just need to bring them out in the open.
Lastly, it’s all about training your fellow alumni relations colleagues to do their data administration properly and structurally. And that is the part you will need to work the hardest for. The database is only as good as the habits feeding it. Which is exactly why this is so easy to get wrong. The amount of times I’ve busted colleagues who were keeping their own little excel sheets filled with rich data is staggering. It’s exactly that kind of data that needs to be centralized. I’ll never berate the colleague for keeping the file. Rather, I teach them that the CRM is a better place for them to store the data. It takes time (again), but once the habit is formed it helps build a much stronger data-foundation for you and your team.
I hope this write-up helps a bit with getting some inspiration and insights into CRM’s & community management. Feel free to reach out to me if you want to spar more about these topics, I’m always happy to help!