Seven Secret Ingredients to Successfully Engage Young Alumni

Article from AlumGrow Consultancy …

(Exhibitors at the Educate Plus New Zealand 2022 Summit.)

If you’re responsible for Alumni Relations at your organisation, you no doubt find engaging young alumni to be one of the most challenging aspects of the role.

I’ve always found engaging young alumni one of the more frustrating, yet at the same time, most rewarding parts of my job.

Compared to other alumni cohorts, it always seems that we need to do so much more work to get their attention and then keep them engaged for any length of time.

So why do we bother then? Why go to all the effort of engaging this recalcitrant group of alumni?

Well that is an easy one! Because young alumni are the future of your organisation. They will play a major role in the financial prosperity of your organisation going forward. They will ultimately be your organisation’s future proofers.

When done well, engaging young alumni leads to many important benefits for education institutions such as volunteering, growing industry influence, increase brand recognition, enrolments and even fundraising.

Yet as an industry, we are getting it badly wrong when it comes to engaging young alumni – and sadly as practitioners we know we are making a hash of it too.

Recent research by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) shows that globally:

91% of alumni professionals believe they do a “poor job” or they “need to do much more” to attract and engage young alumni.
83% of young alumni think their alma mater should be doing more to engage them.
On average only 11% of young alumni actively engage with their alumni programs.
New alumni donor acquisition has declined by over 9% since 2016 in private education.

Hmm Houston it seems we have a problem…

So what is the solution? How can we more effectively engage younger alumni?

Well, there is no simple and magic fix here. It is going to take a lot of time, hard work and patience (especially from senior leadership) before realising any of the benefits that flow from engaging young alumni – let alone holding their attention spans long enough to engage.

However fear not! I am going to share with you my very own special never-fail seven ingredient recipe to help set you up for success and save you some valuable time and work in the process.