Plymouth State's portal is an extension of the one used for the university's undergraduates, providing a seamless experience for students as they graduate and go out into the professional world. The portal, called myPlymouth, is built on the Luminis Platform and Banner administrative system from SunGard Higher Education. Since data from Banner is integrated into the portal, the university is able to keep track of an individual even as his or her status changes from student to alum.
A web portal for alumni can help streamline the crucial turning point between college and the working world.
The Plymouth State portal also changes with users' enrollment status; alumni see such things as "Alumni News" and have the ability to print out unofficial transcripts. Graduates receive lifetime e-mail accounts through the portal (and so far, 25,000 alumni have signed up).
Administrators hope to smooth the student-to-alumni transition even further by creating a portal for students in their senior year, to be rolled out in fall 2007. Users will be presented with such senior-specific content as tips about graduation, careers, and activities.
These strategies do not require deep pockets. Since Plymouth State already had an undergraduate portal in place, adding the alumni portal and the senior portal to myPlymouth only cost the university in-house personnel hours for development. Plymouth State's Alumni Relations office pushes use of the portal through an online magazine and an e-mail newsletter. After each mention, a 20 to 25 percent surge of activity on the portal is common, Long says.
The benefits of the portal are already clear. "It has increased our level of volunteers," notes Long. With the alumni portal in place, the number of online gifts has also increased fourfold since the university launched online giving in late 2004. The portal helps Plymouth State capture that crucial turning point between college and the working world. "This is our way of making sure that alumni think of themselves as alumni at 21," says Kenneth Kochien, director of management information systems and instructional technology. "They probably want to graduate and get on with their lives, and so this is our one chance beyond a post-graduation letter or e-mail to say, 'Think of yourselves as alumni. There are benefits for you to be engaged.' "
Alumni portals are not new. But rather than separate sites where alumni can go to update their listings in an online directory, alumni relations officers now seek more online services for their constituents and the ability to host it all within the institution's official .edu site, notes Karli Grant, a product manager at Datatel, which offers the ActiveAlumni solution.
While alumni may want to be engaged, they are also inundated by cell phone messages and e-mails from countless sources. Administrators should tread carefully in how, and how often, they use online tools to connect with graduates. Targeted e-mails-such as to members of the Class of 2000 who support athletic programs-help prevent e-mail inboxes from overflowing with news and donation requests.
RSS feeds, podcasts, and rich media presentations can also provide high-impact means of attracting attention in an overstimulated world. For example, the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles has used Sonic Foundry's Mediasite to offer online access to alumni-only events. The business school invited former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden to campus, then made his speech available to alumni via a rich media presentation on Mediasite.
RSS is another promising area. When alumni relations first went electronic, many schools put their class notes online. Now, says Waugh of Convio, many alumni want class notes supplied to them through webfeeds. "Ultimately," says Waugh, "they'll be able to go in and say 'I want you to push notes to me for this year, or this major for this year.'"
That's the type of user preference that administrators will want to follow into the future. Doing so may not be easy, but will pay back in strengthened alumni involvement and even giving levels. "You have to realize that it's very early days here," Waugh observes, "so everybody's trying to figure out how this works."
From "Birth to Bequest"
For institutions of higher education, maintaining points of contact with enrolled students is important. But these days, schools are trying to track and engage students years before they enroll and long after they leave.
It's all part of what Joe Long, director of alumni relations at
Plymouth State University (N.H.), calls a "birth to bequest" strategy, giving everyone from prospective applicants to enrolled students to older alumni an ongoing source of information and point of interaction. "If we can offer them one area to maintain that contact point, it increases the possibility of them engaging with the institution," he says.
Connecting with individuals throughout their lifetimes is a hot topic for colleges and universities, observes John Beahm, external communications manager for Jenzabar, which offers administrative solutions and constituent relationship modules designed to build and serve the college community. The current thrust is toward "building your community," says Beahm. "Get them as early as you can and hold them as long as you can."
At
Abilene Christian University (Texas), coordinating communications between various campus departments has helped unify efforts. That is particularly helpful since the school has a strong tradition of legacy admissions: Last year, 29 percent of the freshman class was legacy.
Each department at ACU once had its own database, so prospective students, enrolled students, and alumni were "living" in multiple sites. Using Talisma Advancement CRM, departments at ACU now work off of one database, but staff can customize the ways in which data are used.
For example, the institution has a function set up that automatically shoots an e-mail to an advancement officer if the child of a donor is admitted to the university. "We were able to write rules to share information that otherwise someone would have to look up manually," says Kevin Campbell, CRM program director for ACU.
Now, Campbell observes, an advancement officer can quickly contact a family and offer a note of congratulations shortly after a student receives an offer letter.
