Common Problems when Activating Alumni

In our previous post, we talked about The Importance of Activating your Alumni Community. In this post, we’ll cover the challenges that organizations often face when tapping into this key stakeholder community:

1. Finding the Value Proposition: Finding the alignment between your business and the people you want to engage. What are your common interests? Too often, people are asked to do things without any thought given to what they need. From continued education to networking events to discounts and even shout outs on on social media, everyone appreciates getting something in return.
2. Difficulty in Reaching Out to Alumni: Many organizations struggle to maintain contact with their alumni. Maybe you have Salesforce but the data is still a hot mess? Or maybe you’re still working out of Excel files? From LinkedIn Sales Navigator to good ‘ole elbow grease, we map your community and find the gems within it.
3. Lack of Personalization: Generic, mass communication methods often fail to resonate with alumni, leading to low engagement rates. Personalization through targeted messaging and tailored content is crucial for building meaningful connections. The good news is technology is making that simpler to implement – so simple that we’ve figured it out!
4. Insufficient Feedback Mechanisms: Without regular surveys or feedback mechanisms, institutions may not be able to gauge the effectiveness of their alumni engagement strategies or identify areas for improvement. From choosing the right survey platform to getting the responses to actually creating actionable insights from the data … these are the ways Starling can help.
5. Competition for Attention: Alumni are often bombarded with requests for donations, volunteer work, and other commitments from various organizations. This can make it challenging for institutions to stand out and capture their attention. You won’t maximize your outreach if you don’t understand what you’re up against – and you can even learn some things along the way.
6. Maintaining Consistency: Consistency in messaging, tone, and engagement strategies is crucial for building trust and credibility with alumni. However, this can be difficult to maintain, especially across different departments or teams within an institution. Simplifying a complex issue is one thing. Repeating it over and over is whole other. So you should say things again and again. And again.

Fostering an engaged alumni community requires strategic planning and dedicated resources, but the returns are exponential. At Starling, we fill in the gaps to help our clients connect with their “people” and build valuable communities of credible and influential ambassadors.