College campuses are a unique hub of tender memories and unforgettable experiences. Albeit the students being in these institutions to study various disciplines to follow their career paths, they also actively engage with one another and forge strong relationships and bonds.
For college campuses, the commitment and love of the alumni can serve as a strong tool for marketing, brand awareness, not to mention fundraising.
Nonetheless, to effectively take advantage of these benefits, you must identify a way to rekindle and maintain the relationships with your students even after they leave college.
A while back, the most popular alumni engagement practices entailed phone calls, organizing student reunions, and relying on direct mail promotions.
Currently though, owing to the significant advancements in digital technologies, college campuses and universities can now actively engage with their alumni much more easily and consistently through modern channels.
If you are looking to enhance your institution’s marketing strategy into the modern digital realms, below are four effective alumni engagement practices to consider.
1. Gather Valuable Alumni Information:
When a brand wants to actively engage with its customers through any sns social network such as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, it uses buyer personas in determining precisely who they are engaging with.
This also helps the brands determine the type of content they should generate to relate with their target audience.
Similarly, creating useful connections with your alumni mandates for higher learning institutions to follow the same path. Exactly what type of content do your alumni respond to and what makes them tick?
Getting answers to these queries among others allows you to create a specific engagement strategy for your alumni for every persona and segment.
Some of the few ways that a college or university can collect important information on their alumni are as follows:
- Keeping tabs with the content that is most engaging from your campaigns
- Monitoring keywords and hashtags commonly used with regards to your institution
2. Using Appropriate Tools to Help Monitor Your Specific Alumni Engagement Tactics
Effectively managing social media campaigns can sometimes be a challenging endeavor, regardless of how big or small a brand is. Ideally, in order to determine the success of your campaigns, you must keep track of their performance.
However, to successfully do this, you need a unique and effective tool that helps you continually improve your efforts.
One example of such a tool is Sprout, an exclusive social media management software that assists higher learning institutions in measuring followers’ engagement habits.
What this means is that you can ably determine the specific sns social network your alumni followers are spending most of their time on. Is it Twitter, Facebook, or even Instagram?
This way, you can identify the social media networks you need to direct your social media campaign efforts on for optimal alumni engagement.
3. Romance your Alumni Engagement through Instagram:
Undeniably, one of the main reasons behind institutions establishing engagement with their alumni is for fundraising.
If you are looking to create a successful fundraising campaign without necessarily appearing too needy, you need to incorporate a tactic known as ‘Romancing’.
Yes, romancing your institution’s alumni means constantly prompting some unforgettable experiences they had while at the campus.
This is in addition to helping them understand how their active involvement and donations can help improve the institution’s future. Instagram is one effective social network that can help you through this.
Instagram campaigns are an effective way to promote emotional interaction with your alumni before asking for their donations.
You can share photos from their time at the campus as well as post some past and present photos of the institution to highlight the positive changes that have resulted from alumni funds within the campus.
People want assurance that their resources will be used for a good and transformative cause and what better way to demonstrate this than by sharing snaps of progress within the institution via Instagram?
Conclusion
Ultimately there are multiple ways you can interact with your alumni through social networks. Understanding which social media platform most popularly used by your target audience and subsequently producing material that captures their attention is vital.
Try out these few alumni engagement tactics by utilizing a social media management platform and live to enjoy the rewards!