Community, alumni and donor engagement

Trend 8. Alumni engagement

Institutions can gather more engagement data from social media interactions, email communications, mentor-mentee collaboration, and volunteer participation. Digitization of alumni engagement offers advancement teams the essential knowledge they require to make smarter decisions and develop stronger alumni relationships.

Trends in alumni engagement are further extended to help prospective students in their admission and enrollment. For example, institutions can encourage prospective students to connect with alumni for guidance and suggestions in choosing the right courses.

Institutions are enlisting alumni to mentor current and recent graduates in career guidance and placement and coordinate student internships. Alumni can also facilitate collaboration between their employers and institutions for research projects.

To encourage lifelong learning goals, institutions are providing alumni with access to learning and social platforms. Based on career aspirations, alumni can upskill and reskill to advance in their current industry or switch to other sectors. Nanodegrees and microcredentials offered by the university not only help in achieving the alumnus's career goals but also showcase the institution's success.

Advancement teams connect with alumni for gifts and sponsorships. And alumni can also choose to sponsor specific students, or the system can recommend specific students based on criteria such as common interests or location. Alumni can choose multiple ways to contribute to college donations, such as funding classes for low-income students or helping them find off-campus jobs.

Some of the other trending technologies that are used in community, alumni, and donor engagement include:

• Personalized learning recommendations, skills recommendations (adjacent skills)
• Sentiment, trend, and predictive analysis
• Video analytics - improving conversation, interview, and presentation skills
• Improving the discoverability of content, AI in search (learning to rank)
• Profile synthesis for recruitment and expert matching