As the president of your alumni association, you are doing your best to strengthen relationships between your members. In every alumni association, developing relations between members remains the key component that brings value to your association and makes your members more and more engaged.
Building sustainable relations is not an easy job and you are probably using many tricks to achieve that goal. Unfortunately, your insights can be biased by your personal opinion. Maybe it’s time for you to put your approach into question and ask yourself: is my approach really matching my alumni needs? How do they want to engage and support the institution? Am I using the right tool and providing them with the right information? What do they think of what I implemented so far?
Since you are actively involved in the management of your alumni association, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what makes an alumni group so important and so useful for your institution. I’m guessing you’re using many tricks to strengthen relationships between your alumni such as: organising social events, publishing newsletters or magazines, etc. Even if most of them really help to develop strong relationships and bring value in your alumni association, there is one more major component that is essential to improve the association’s value: the alumni directory.
Nowadays, too many associations are just keeping track of their members using a database or an Excel spreadsheet, which makes it very difficult to develop true interactions between members.
A case study on how the EPFL MoT Alumni Association launched its dedicated app and succeeded in improving its alumni relations.
Our collaboration with the Alumni Association of the EPFL Management of Technology program (MoT for friends) started about a year ago.
The association board was looking for a solution to better engage with the alumni, but at the same time, was wary of using yet another communication channel. Who could blame them?
But at the same time, social media and emailing were not pulling it off. The board truly believed in their alumni community and knew how beneficial it could be to all alumni, should they be able to improve engagement and increase their numbers.
It is also important to mention how both Tilo Peters and Olivier Courvoisier, the Executive Director and Program Coordinator respectively, played an important role too. They knew very well that the alumni were key to the reputation and success of their program and were eager to support the association in obtaining the right tools to strengthen the community.
The app has proven to be an effective platform for strengthening ties with the Alumni Association as well as facilitating communication amongst the alumni. These are key success factors for both the MoT EMBA program as well as the MoT Alumni Association.
Tilo Peters
Executive Director
MoT Program
Whether it is in a charity, sports club, or another entertaining context, everyone has already been part of an association, at least once in their lifetime.
If you’ve already been involved in managing an association, you must know how difficult and varied the tasks are: communicating with the members, organizing events, managing memberships, liaising with the board, managing the day-to-day operations, etc.
Daunting, isn’t it? This article is dedicated to people who have decided to start their own association, or those who feel their current association management strategy could use some spring cleaning.
Community managers need their own community - and their own communication tool too.
In October 2014, I was very lucky to find myself in San Francisco, attending one of the most interesting conferences out there for community managers: FeverBee SPRINT. Unfortunately, in November 2015, when the second american edition took place, work kept me from going there.
But still. I really wanted to contribute in some way and be able to take part, even from afar.
In a previous article, I wrote about switching from a traditional social network to one’s own community platform. Thinking about it now, I realize I may have cut some corners and should have started with simpler but essential elements like: what is a community platform? And when is it the right time to start your own? Fortunately, it’s never too late to make it right!
Techstars is building a global ecosystem to help entrepreneurs and they have helped over 600 startups so far.
Seriously, when John Hill, the Network Catalyst at Techstars told me they would use Minsh for FounderCon, their annual Founder conference, my first thought was: “Oh man. This is going to be a disaster.”
