Alumni Relations
The record does not end at graduation.
Every alum was a student first, and the relationship is one story. On one platform, graduation is a change of status, not a hand-off to a different database — the history that makes outreach personal is already on the record.
Functional scope
The relationship, on the record.
Alumni work is relationship work, and a relationship is only as good as what the institution remembers.
- One constituent record
- Student history and alumni engagement on the same record — degrees, programs, affiliations.
- Engagement and events
- Reunions, volunteering, mentoring — participation recorded against the person.
- Communications
- Outreach informed by the actual relationship, with the history kept where it can be seen.
- Relationships and affiliations
- Employers, family connections and institutional ties, held on the record rather than in memory.
Our approach
Engagement you can actually see.
- Engagement is measurable
- Events attended, volunteering, mentoring, referrals and directory activity add up to a picture of who is genuinely connected, rather than who opened an email.
- One person, several relationships
- An alum is often also a parent, a volunteer, an employer partner and a returning student. One record holds all of it, so nobody gets four uncoordinated approaches in a month.
- Mentoring, actually staffed
- Matching alumni to students is the program most offices want and cannot run by hand. Built properly it runs itself, and it produces the richest engagement data you will have.
- The relationship starts before graduation
- Final-year students are already alumni in everything but status. Engagement that begins in the last year is the difference between a directory entry and a lifelong connection.
What it runs on
The stack, named.
- Education Cloud, Alumni Relations
- Alumni directory, engagement tracking and activity, continuing on the student record.
- Mentoring
- Mentoring programs, assessment-based matching of alumni to students, and a mentor portal.
- Experience Cloud
- A branded alumni portal where alumni update their own details and find each other.
- Volunteer programs
- Opportunities, sign-ups and hours, recorded against the person.
- Marketing Cloud
- Communications and journeys by class year, region, program or affinity group.
- Data Cloud
- Alumni engagement metrics across events, activities and personal engagement.
AI
Agents that keep alumni connected.
- Alumni portal agent
- Answers the routine questions and handles the routine changes — a new address, a reunion date, how to volunteer — so a two-person office is not the bottleneck.
- Mentoring summaries
- Einstein summarises a mentoring relationship, so a coordinator running two hundred pairings can see which need attention.
- Engagement, surfaced
- Activity across events, volunteering and the portal resolves into a ranked view of who is becoming more connected and who is drifting.
Implementation
Six phases. Twenty-one weeks to a live alumni program.
- Align · 2 weeks
- Constituencies, affinity groups, and what engagement means here.
- Envision · 4 weeks
- Current state, alumni data quality, integration scope.
- Iterate · 6 weeks
- Directory, portal, mentoring, volunteering and communications, built in working increments.
- Validate · 3 weeks
- Tested with real alumni on a real event and a real mentoring cohort.
- Onboard · 4 weeks
- Cutover, training, and a full engagement cycle.
- Hypercare · 2 weeks
- The team that built it stays on daily through the first live weeks.
Start with the class about to graduate.
The cheapest engagement an institution will ever buy is with people who still feel like students. We launch with the outgoing class — portal, directory and a first mentoring cohort — and widen to older cohorts once the program is running and the data is arriving.
Start here
Start with the graduates you are about to lose.
The strongest alumni relationships begin before graduation. If your student record and your alumni database are different systems, the conversation about connecting them starts here.