We all know that Alumni Associations are vital to colleges, universities, and schools around the world. The ability to tap into the network of graduates from your educational institution is important for many reasons. You want to be able to keep contact information up to date to build an effective directory. You want to allow alumni who have scattered across the globe to be able to find and connect with each other. And most importantly, you want to be able to know how to get in touch with your alumni when it comes to soliciting contributions back to the school.
As an effective Alumni Association is mission critical to increasing the profile of your college or university, have you ever wondered if your tools and methods are outdated? With so much of our personal lives and the information that goes along with them being ported online, have you wondered if your association may be lagging behind? Is your website stale and dreary, with no incentive for an alumnus to ever need to visit? Are you and your staff constantly buried under stacks of paper trying to organize and track the current information of your most important donor base? If you haven't started asking these questions, it's not too late. But you need to start now.
To be on the cutting edge of alumni relations, you need a website that goes to work for you. A website where people actively seek out, participate on, and find value in. Your website needs to do some, if not all, of the following:
Your graduates are already used to the MySpaces and Facebooks of the world, and your alumni assocation website should engage in the ways that has made social networking a worldwide phenomenom. Recently, Eastern Virginia Medical School of Norfolk, Virginia came to the realization that they could no longer afford to sit back and lose out on the potential of having a website that worked for them. Here's a case study of their fresh and exciting website, with all the features that can be available for you!
Next generation social networking!
According to recent surveys and research statistics, 55% of all internet users have visited a social networking site. Facebook, a leader in the field, claims that it has 70 million active members. These numbers will continue to rise with the growth of highly-targetd niche networks. More and more the social features found on these sites will be a centerpiece of all interactive websites on the internet, including Alumni Associations. EVMS quickly seized on the opportunity to develop their own closed-network social media site.
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Starting with the design of the "portal" main page, EVMS transformed their site into a dynamic source of information. Different groups of users from their different graduate programs have the ability to receive tailored content specific to their interests. The school has now become interactive with its alumni, with the additional step of the alumni themselves becoming interactive with each other.
Find friends and old classmates!
The new EVMS Alumni website made use of its existing database of confirmed graduates and linked them into all the new social features. As soon as a graduate walks across the stage and receives their diploma, they are entered into the website database automatically. When visiting the website for the first time, they confirm a few bits of information and then gain access to update their profile. As such, there is a continually updated searchable database of all alumni who can then begin to network amongst each other.
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A robust search feature allows your alumni to search among all other graduates from your school and add them as "friends" in their network. Users have the ability to search by name, graduation year, or any other number of advanced search fields. Previews of user profiles are then available, with limited information, for an alumni to confirm a connection. The ability of the search feature allows for alumni to find friends, old classmates, and make new network connections.
Allow Alumni to keep everybody up to date!
Every user of the website has a profile that they can update with current addresses, work information, and education information. These profiles, which serve as the centerpiece of the social network, allow for their friends to stay up to date, as well as your alumni assocation. Users have privacy option to determine which fields of information are viewable to friends and non-friends. EVMS uses a closed-network approach, as only confirmed graduates of the medical school even have the ability to get into the system at all.
EVMS Profile Thumb
Profiles are set up to allow your alumni to upload and share pictures, news updates on their lives, and upcoming personal events. A user who is just browsing over another profile can also view the friends of that person, leading to more network connections being made. The enjoyment of connecting to past and new friends is what keeps the users coming back. The added benefit to you, the school administrator, is that no longer must you track down all your alumni to keep contact information up to date... they now come to you!
Information and file sharing abilities!
A customized feature that EVMS requested was the ability for its alumni to have an online "briefcase" of files. The ability to store important work and personal related files at no cost is just another in a long list of utility uses for the website. As more and more people are engaging in new media, the ability to have data portability is an important factor to consider. The EVMS Alumni website allows for a robust but easy-to-use back-end search and export to easily create and sort databases of users.
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Another main feature of the EVMS Alumni website was the creation of an online forum, or message board, for use by the alumni. This section of the website is still behind the secure and login-protected wall, which allows for intimate discussions between former graduates that they would not be able to find elsewhere. Already. EVMS has planned uses for the forum including a Job Board, Classifieds, and a section where alumni can engage in discussions directly with the school president.
Improve event awareness and encourage online registration!
Encouraging alumni to attend events is a staple of any successful university's alumni association. However, with graduates spread out across the world with their own busy lives, it is a challenge to get them all in one place. Many people just don't have the time to go through their mail, notice alumni events, and go through the process of mailing in a registration. As such, EVMS opened up an online registration and payment system, with social features on top.
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Not only do your alumni have the ability to view, register, and pay for events all online, they can see who among their friends are going. This is just another social networking aspect that goes a long way in encouraging participation and interaction among your alumni. If one sees that people they know are going to be at an event, they themselves will be more inclined to attend. Payments can be processed through a merchant account, PayPal, or an electronic funds transfer system.
Control your site with a Content Management System!
How is your website managed and updated? Do you go through the tedious task of manually editing HTML files and using confusing FTP programs to try and keep track of your information architecture? Or do you spend thousands and thousands of dollars a year paying an outside firm to make any and all sizes of updates? EVMS does neither. With a custom developed Content Management System, any member of the EVMS staff, with no prerequisite technical knowledge, can go through and make changes on the website extremely easily. The CMS manages all the news articles, events, custom pages, and much much more. Instead of paying per page update, you can have 1,000 pages created on your website on demand with no additional fees.
EVMS CMS Thumb
Our back-end Content Management System is secure, user-friendly, and flexible in its functionality. As easy as using a text editor such as Microsoft Word, you can have full control over your website. EVMS had custom requests for updateable sections of their website, and it was all built-in for them. Not only is their website powerful in its user features, its simple enough for just about anybody to maintain and update.
EVMS Testimonial
How we can do this for you and your Alumni Association!
The system put in place for Eastern Virginia Medical School is just one example of the custom design and development that we can do. We work within your budget, design specifications, and implementation guidelines. This is not a hastily put together piece of software, it's developed with all your custom needs and wants accordingly. The bottom line is that the longer you wait to ignore the benefits that having dynamic, social feature rich website, the more you are costing yourself and your alumni.
If you're ready to get started, or simply just want more information, don't wait another minute. Use our quick and easy contact form and we will respond to your inquiry immediately. Or you can call us at 757-499-1990 with any questions you have. Ciniva Systems has 10 years experience with over 400 websites in our portfolio. We work with schools from all over the United States and we want to work with you!.