How is your relationship with your alumni?
The balance between give and take makes any relationship healthy and the same applies to Managing Alumni Relations. Here at Vaave, we have worked on understanding the basic essence of it and we created our very own BEHA (Build-Engage-Help-Ask) framework. The Alumni Relationship Matrix is a measure for us to understand the outcome of the BEHA framework, a measure to understand the relationship an institution shares with its alumni.
The Alumni Relationship Matrix
This matrix is created based on considering two factors:
Level of Engagement (E+H Efforts) and Level of Connect (B + A Results).
On the vertical axis is…
Understanding the Alumni Personas to Strengthen your Alumni Engagement
Alumni are the most important asset for any institution and meaningfully engaging alumni directly helps in the prime areas of student development, bringing placements/jobs to the institution, raising funds and meeting the accreditation requirements. Building strong alumni communities is very important to help the students, alumni and the institute as a whole.
While the concept of alumni engagement is not new, engaging them meaningfully is where we at Vaave have built our expertise over the last 10+ years serving 1000+ institutions.
The First step to building an alumni program is knowing the end user — The Alumni and cater to…
“Hey, we are planning to build our Sales Team, you guys are doing great sales, how do you do it?” asked my alum who started his company, but was the only one in the team who was doing sales.
Sales have been our primary growth driver, it brought in customer money which helped us bootstrap the company and be profitable. We doubled our numbers in last one year and have been consistently been able to sign-up ~10 customers a month! The most interesting part is, it is all with an Inside Sales Team[1], contrary to popular belief that selling to…
Most of the organizations today realize the importance of staying in touch with the former employees. As quoted by Reid Hoffman (Founder of Linkedin) in the article “Four reasons to invest in a corporate alumni network”, a company’s alumni can be a treasure trove of brand ambassadors, great rehires, potential referrals and a source of network intelligence. Establishing a well structured corporate alumni program is paramount in maintaining a great relationship with ex-employees.
We believe the following drivers help design a very good corporate alumni program:
1. Design at Organizational Level
A meaningful corporate alumni program needs to be an organizational level initiative driven by…
In my previous blog post Our Tryst with Y Combinator, I wrote about our failed attempt at getting into YC and why it left us more enthusiastic than ever. In this blog post, I am sharing the details on how our preparation to get into YC helped us gain clarity and direction and why I feel every serious entrepreneur should answer the YC questions regardless of wanting to get into the accelerator.
To give an overview, YC calls for applications 2 times a year and you need to apply by answering a set of questions. If shortlisted, they fly the…
Getting into Y Combinator is a dream for almost every founder, so was it for me. It is considered the world’s best accelerator for startups and there are many posts explaining “the benefits” of the program. However, I would consider it the best, just for the way it helped us while preparing to get into it.
We had our YC Interview this week. No, we did not get in. It may look disappointing. But surprisingly, it made me more enthusiastic than ever!
Part 1: The Tryst
I first wanted to get into YC last September when I read everything about it just before I…
Jan 2017 would mark 8 years of me out of college and about 7 years of following the dream full-time — wanting to connect every institution in the world back to their alumni! That’s Awesome!! can be the first reaction. But wait! Is it really? People these days are building startups, raising funding and going places within 2–3 years! “What the hell are you doing?” my best friend taunted me.
The question put me in deep thought. As I discovered the connecting dots, I thought it would be good to share them:
The journey has been tough, some ups and…
My friends know that I always claim to be 23 years old :D. Ok here I admit today, I am 23 since last 7 years. I formally started the company when I was 23 and ever since my age refused to grow.
Today, not sure why, I feel a little old, a little wise. I look into the mirror and see the white hair shouting at me — “Oh Paresh, you entered the Thirties”. That left me wondering — how fast the last 10 years went by? …
yes the same seagull in the book “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” by Richard Bach that inspires all of us
[caption id=”attachment_493" align=”alignright” width=”257"]
During the initial days @ NITIE, trying to pose like a “seth”[/caption]
It’s been little more than 5 years since I moved out of college to choose entrepreneurship over placement @ NITIE. I came back to Hyderabad in Jan 2009 with the “Guru” style thought “mai biginess karunga”. Though there were many ideas shortlisted to work on and a little prize money from b-plan competitions, I had no plan laid out. Coherendz was started while in campus and…
Entrepreneurship is like a Sport!
Originally published on July 23, 2012.
I was at my campus (NITIE) couple of days ago, had a small session with juniors who were interested in starting business. A nice metaphor came to my mind when they asked a few questions — how do I get funding?, how do I find a co-founder? Which idea is the best? I am making an attempt to jot down the insights, like any other metaphor, I request to take this in its spirit. This post is intended to my young friends who are planning to start business.
Entrepreneurship…
