What is alumni management software?

Put simply, an alumni management system is an online system to organise your alumni data and boost your alumni engagement efforts, by using software designed to power networking between your community and your organisation. 

The core components of alumni management software are a database to store alumni data, a CRM (customer relationship manager) to enable you to track engagement and share information with colleagues, and an online community platform to encourage engagement and build connections. 

Many alumni relations teams find themselves low on resource or managing many workstreams, but using multiple systems to host events, run mentoring or careers programmes, create a space for networking, and send email communications, meaning that activity on individual records and the ability to filter and segment based on engagement are lost.

Why does my organisation need this?

Alumni management software enables your alumni relations team to work in a more effective way, by managing different channels of alumni activity through one system. You can manage your events, including registration, promotion and payments, mentoring and careers support, networking, and content - and each piece of engagement is recorded automatically in a database designed for school alumni networks. 

It can be difficult to justify the cost of a new system if budgets are already tight, but by investing in an all-in-one software you can stop paying for incumbent systems that don’t integrate with one another, and invest in the long-term plan for your alumni relations programme. 

Using alumni management software helps you to save time on admin tasks such as and instead time can be spent developing new or deeper relationships through mentoring, careers support, you can unlock value for both your alumni and your development team and create a strong community that wants to give back. 

How can software help me to reach my engagement goals?

Alumni management requires careful and consistent relationship-building overtime, likely over years, and so you need software that encompasses a connected database, CRM and online community portal  connect the dots on data, and which encompass a wide range of features in one system to enable you to develop your alumni relations strategy over time. An all-in-one system packed with features for career development, communications, events and content enables you to pick and choose which channels of alumni relations activity you want to focus on, with room to develop new activities over time. 

In a busy development office with multiple channels of engagement and fundraising, you need to automate as much as possible to make your work efficient. Schools and colleges can often struggle to report on engagement metrics in order to share progress with stakeholders and build a strong internal case for alumni relations. As part of migrating your data into your new alumni database, your data should be cleaned to ensure that you can use it with confidence going forwards. You can then confidently organise tasks from hosting a networking event to creating mentoring matches based on career data. 

Creating strong relationships with your alumni will pay off, and investing in the future of your alumni community is essential to drive a successful development / advancement programme. An alumni management software will drive your campaigns to the next level and create opportunities to connect with untapped potential donors. 

Our customers are creating stronger alumni community connections and smarter fundraising campaigns all over the world. Discuss ways to make your community more engaged with an experienced ToucanTech engagement evangelist; organise a time to talk to the team here.