Turning Graduates Into Lifelong Supporters: The Role of Data in Engaging Young Alumni

Engaging with new graduates as they leave the university and enter a new stage of life is one of the toughest challenges that colleges face, but proper timing, outreach, and messaging make all the difference for cultivating relationships with new alumni. By educating recent graduates about the benefits of joining your alumni community before, during, and shortly after commencement, colleges can begin to build the bonds of a fruitful relationship and lock in future support. In this article, we cover how your institution’s data should play a role in engaging new graduates.

See how Augusta University transformed their ability to engage and steward alumni more effectively with a modern integration strategy: Elevating Alumni Stewardship with Omatic Cloud.

Challenges with Engaging New Graduates

Engaging with a new cohort of university alumni is no simple task. When trying to build relationships with recent graduates, alumni engagement professionals frequently encounter these common challenges:

Divided attention: Graduating seniors have so many things on their minds as they prepare to leave the halls of your institution and embark on the world: final examinations, commencement ceremonies, moving to new cities or returning to hometowns, finding careers, starting graduate programs, and other significant changes. Your invitation to join the alumni association might not resonate with new grads amidst these other priorities.

Contact information changes: After commencement, many graduates opt for using a personal email address over their former .edu address. Physical addresses change as well, with many graduates moving to new cities for job opportunities or graduate studies. Without an active and up-to-date email or physical address, it’s difficult to know which events to invite a graduate to—if you can even invite them at all.

Privacy regulations/Opt-in restrictions: Having alumni email addresses is not enough to add them to your alumni email distribution lists. They need to opt in to be truly engaged, otherwise, you risk sending your communications directly into the dreaded spam folder. The best emails go to recipients who expect (and want!) your communications.

Siloed data: Moving data between a student information system (SIS) and the development office’s CRM requires deliberate action and careful field mapping. These systems don’t always talk to each other, and data imports can lead to data issues like duplicates, incomplete giving records, and hours of manual cleanup, which all cause delays in identifying and engaging with a new cohort of alumni.

Knowing what to say to graduates: There’s the challenge of being able to get in touch with your recent graduates, then there’s the challenge of knowing what to say to them. To engage with new graduates as alumni for the first time, you’ll need to communicate differently from engaged alumni, like you would with a new acquaintance.

Why Engaging Recent Alumni Matters

Forming relationships with recent graduates is key to building your donor pipeline. Donors rarely make a major gift their first go-around. More often, alumni start with smaller gifts that build over time as their giving capacity grows. By establishing a rapport with graduates early, your organization can build momentum while fond experiences from college are still recent history.

Beyond building a donor pipeline, including young alumni in university programs is beneficial. They can help plan events, participate in early-stage career mentoring, and bring a fresh perspective to your programming to ensure cross-generational relevance.

How to Engage with Alumni at Any Stage

As Students

Build awareness about the alumni association and alumni programming by educating current students and including them in your programming. Involve students as interns or staff during alumni-focused events. Introduce students to alumni to build cross-generational bonds. Show how involvement with one’s college or university can look after graduation.

As Seniors

Help seniors begin the transition from students to alumni by fostering school pride and a culture of giving back. Creating a class giving challenge or campaign is one popular way to nurture future philanthropy. Learn about your graduates by launching exit surveys to get updated contact information, career plans, and interests. Finally, host events on how to network, write a resume, procure professional headshots and more.

As New Alumni

To engage with recent alumni, you’ll need to cut through the noise and capture attention by providing value. Host commencement parties, grad celebration events, and recent alumni mixers in locations where your grads reside. Launch post-grad communications immediately with early-career resources. Make the vast alumni network a resource for new alumni: facilitate mentoring opportunities and host events for networking.

Make Data an Asset When Engaging Recent Alumni

Data should be at the center of your engagement strategy, not an afterthought. The following data points will help you reach the right audiences, tailor your approach, and increase a sense of community among your most recent alumni.

Up-to-date contact information: It’s imperative to have the correct emails, phone numbers, and mailing addresses of recent alumni if you hope to stay in touch. The difficulty is that these often change right at the point you collect them at graduation.

Student information: Learn the basics about your constituents, including their degree, major, minor, residence hall, extracurricular participation and more. These biographical insights will help you tailor communications, event invitations, and giving solicitations in the future.

Engagement history: By logging attendance at events, participation in alumni organizations, email open and click rates, and engagement metrics, you can assign a unique engagement score to each of your constituents. As you attempt to build relationships over time, seeing how those scores change will help you know if your strategy is working.

Communication preferences and channel affinity: Knowing how (and where) to contact alumni is key to getting your message heard. Find out and document what means of communication your constituents prefer: text, email, phone calls, direct mail, social media are among the most popular.

Philanthropic interests or giving history: Not all alumni will give to your organization—but those who do usually start small. Having an accurate picture of all alumni gifts, including ones under $20, is important for identifying prospects later. Consistent giving (at any amount) is the greatest predictor of a prospect’s likelihood of making a major gift.

If you don’t have data as a central aspect of your alumni outreach strategy, it could be because data isn’t accessible enough at your organization. Or, you might not have the confidence in your reporting to make data-driven decisions. In either case, it is worth considering whether you are using best-in-class solutions to capture essential data related to fundraising, events, volunteer management and more. Then, think about whether you have an adequate process for moving your data from third-party sources into your CRM quickly and accurately. If you’re relying on manual data imports, data entry, or are missing data altogether, it’s time to build a comprehensive data strategy to address these issues.

Conclusion: Engaging Young Alumni Requires a Targeted Approach

Building strong relationships with your alumni is the foundation for long-term fundraising viability. By cultivating awareness of your alumni community with current students, you set the stage for an active and engaged young alumni base starting at graduation. Growing support and engagement with your university as the years go by requires attention, creativity, and most importantly, accurate data about your constituents.

Instead of a one-sizes-fits-all approach to engaging with alumni, successful organizations tailor their communications (event invitations, philanthropy impact reports, solicitations, and more) to match the interests of their audiences. But tuning your outreach to constituents requires accurate data that is easy to access. Investing in a data integration solution will unite all your third-party data, like valuable data from fundraising platforms and marketing and events solutions, to give you a full picture of constituents.

Ready to get the data you need for effective alumni engagement? Explore Omatic Cloud today!