Community Building

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?

We’ve all been there. You pull a lot of weight to organize a great event that by all means promises to be super interesting. And nobody shows up. No more!

Here are the top 10 alumni events you can organize to ensure a good show up rate. I’ve categorized them into 3 main types:

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.

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.

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!

Managing a community is hard work. You have to keep your audience entertained, motivate members to post their own content, minimize the number of lurkers, and make sure there is a constant flow of new users joining in.

Tough job!

In the first part of our blog post series about the ways to successfully launch your community platform, you discovered 6 efficient tricks to achieve it. Now it’s time for the second part, let’s have a look to 5 and one more other tricks that will help you onboarding your whole community in your brand new community platform.

Social media are great to raise awareness and grow an audience. But once you reach that stage where you start having an actual community, it comes a time when social media cannot help you anymore.

In a previous blog post series, we covered how to implement your own community management strategy. In the last part, we introduced the importance of sharing your content. Time to get into the gritty details.

Community Management and Social Media Marketing are two practices born at the early age of social networks. People did the mistake of considering both as identical whereas each of them means radically different things.