For alumni relations managers, donation history is just one piece of the puzzle when putting together the picture of engagement in your alumni community. Every email click, event attendance and content view is an important metric to keep an eye on, focusing on how this can help to inform your future strategy.

However, engagement data can be tricky to pin down in one place; many school development and alumni relations teams using siloed systems find that, for example, event attendees might be held in a spreadsheet, while email data is elsewhere in a dedicated system. This can make it nearly impossible to accurately track engagement with your alumni and make the right decisions when it comes to planning your annual strategy, or creating a tailored engagement plan for potential major donors. 

Using an all-in-one system that brings together all of your engagement data in one place, along with contact details, donation data, and consent preferences, helps you to accurately map and execute alumni engagement activities. Below are some of the data points that you can use to benchmark your alumni relations programme, which can be tracked in a connected system such as ToucanTech. 

Send and track emails

Email is one of the most important channels for contacting alumni, and tracking your email statistics can help to reveal alumni who like to hear from you on a regular basis and might be more incentivised to make a donation further down the line. By sending mass email through a system integrated with your CRM, you can view overall opens and clicks, or delve into an individual record and view email engagement. 

Speaking to an alumni individually via email? You can also keep track of emails sent externally from the ToucanTech system, so you’ll always have the latest communications to review. 

Manage your event attendee information 

Keeping track of data for your events is not only essential for smooth running on the day, but also helpful to co-ordinate follow-up activity. When your guests book their tickets through the ToucanTech system, they can share details on dietary preferences and choose seating arrangements, and also choose to add an extra donation to their ticket payment. On the day of your event you can easily mark attendance and add notes to attendee records. You can then filter by those who signed up to your event, who actually attended, whether they gave a donation etc, and share tailored follow-up communications with them. With all of your events data stored in one place, you can pull reports on attendee numbers and revenue/ donations to assess the success of your event.

Engagement with your online community

Online alumni communities have grown exponentially in recent years, due to the lack of in-person opportunities to connect. For alumni teams, it can be much easier to track engagement online, with software such as ToucanTech that integrates between your private community portal and CRM. You can monitor different types of engagement data - including news story views, downloads, comments, private messages and network connections - and use these insights to find out more about how your alumni community prefers to interact with your school and each other. You can also ascertain which percentage of your alumni community are signed up to your alumni community, and plan to grow your online community through a promotional campaign. 

Educational institutions all over the world use ToucanTech to engage their alumni community and accurately track their progress in alumni relations. With an all-in-one software that combines a database, CRM, community portal and events / email management system, you can build a better picture of your alumni relations success. To find out more, speak to a member of the ToucanTech team.