Alumni communities are too important to be managed from a spreadsheet, or left languishing on a newsletter list. Here’s how you can level-up your alumni engagement strategy with Gecko.
Email communication is wonderfully scaleable. But it is not the most impactful channel when your goal is to drive your alumni community to take action, especially when it is used on it’s own.
Other channels, such as texting, calling and running live events, are more likely to influence your alums to do what you’d like them to do. And the real trick to seeing increased impact at scale is to combine all of the above into a single, multi-channel strategy (using automation to tie them all together.)
Managing your alumni community from a spreadsheet (or even a simple email tool like Mailchimp) limits the quality of communication they’ll receive from you.
And it doesn’t do your staff many favours either. Trying to shoe-horn a robust communications strategy into simple tools leads to duplicated contacts, untracked communications, and tons of copy/pasting. Leveraging Gecko as a CRM for your alumni community gives your team access to robust contact management features that’ll make your team’s lives so much easier.
No doubt you’ll already have a CRM for handing prospective students. So why couldn’t you augment that system to handle your alumni engagement strategy too? If your institution has an easy-to-use CRM, you might even be lucky enough to have the resources to change it up. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Why?
Augmenting a CRM to handle two or more audience types will add complexity. Whenever a system becomes more complex, it becomes harder to use and difficult to change. In turn, this reduces your ability to launch campaigns quickly, as the average staffer won’t want to “break” anything.
That’s not to say that it’s impossible to serve multiple audiences from a single system. But you should be aware of the trade-offs before you commit.
An alternative strategy would be to bring your alumni data into a siloed system, where your team are empowered to run their own campaigns without worrying about how it affects colleagues in other parts of your institution.
Gecko is used in hundreds of different ways, by Higher Education teams large and small from around the globe. Check out these use cases for more inspiration.
