Keeping alumni data up to date is the biggest challenge for almost any relations team. Every so often I have colleagues come up and ask why we don’t have the latest job data available on our alumni records?. Fair question, because we “should” have it available right? Well, no, not always at least. 

See, if you would somehow manage to always have the latest job data on all our alumni available, you’d practically be operating your own version of LinkedIn. Now that would require a tremendous amount of resources to achieve and maintain. You would be directly competing with a social media platform, vying for the attention of your Alumni. You would probably need to build an app (or more infamously, a “portal”) as well. I doubt that’s what you signed up for as Alumni Relations Manager.

Your Alumni are probably also not thinking about you the moment they switch jobs. Face it, their graduating university is not the first one to hear about a job change. And it makes sense. But knowing in what industry or company your alumni work is such a vital piece of the puzzle if you want to tailor your alumni activities towards your audience. So, how do you fix this?

From what I’ve seen over the last years, there’s three key things you can do:

• Ask your alumni to provide or check their job details at certain intervals in the year

Employment survey 6 months after graduation? Super valuable! Do it! You’ll know where they ended up, or could even offer help to those struggling to find a job!  Even better, send out a small little “is your data still correct e-mail” 2 years after the survey, or to records of which you know data is incomplete/out of date..

• Show alumni the importance of keeping their details up to date, with concrete examples

Highlight opportunities and events in specific industries in your communication. Or share short stories or interviews with alumni who recently changed their jobs. You want to spark that tiny voice in the alumni’s mind thinking “Hey, I also would have liked that event” or “That’s cool, I also want to share my achievement!”.

• Only ask the data that is really necessary

As mentioned, you are not linkedIn, you don’t need to know exactly when a new job started, what the contract-term is or access to their latest AI playbook (written by the AI itself). You just want to know where the alumni work and possibly in what function and/or industry. That’s all. 

Keep it simple, use clean forms or methods of data-capturing (surveys) with no more than the basic questions. Even the most basic of company data unlocks opportunities for engagement.

Start with a recent cohort or graduating year and work your way up through your records. The puzzle will look more complete over time.

The coming period I will be writing more about these topics and how to tackle challenges in the alumni relations field. You can read more about it inmy first post, detailling my role in Alumni relations.