Webinar Recap: Young Alumni & Fundraising — Reaching a New Generation
February 05, 2018
During this webinar on January 30th, we dove into the latest trends and consumer research to reveal the evolving digital behavior of young alumni. One thing is clear — young alumni are not reading emails. Increasingly, they are messaging their friends, family, and even brands. And interestingly — it is not texting, but rather using messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp. Furthermore, we explored the exciting opportunities that this trend has opened up for universities to reach their alumni with an 80% open rate.
TOP 3 takeaways:
1. Legacy channels need innovative supplementation
2. Facebook Messenger is at the forefront of communication trends
3. Chatbots allow for immediate access to your alum & tangible campaign results
Further Questions:
- “How are institutions finding their alumni on Facebook?”
Nowadays, you don’t need a strong Facebook organic presence to reach your alumni. You’re able to import custom alumni data into Facebook’s system, which then converts it into an anonymous “hashed” audience to target with Paid Social advertising. This protects alumni’s personal information, as well as allows you to reach solely your specified target. On average, this method matches 84% of your alumni database and serves your content directly to them right in their social feed without needing to “like” your page or follow a specific group.
2. “What demographics do you recommend for targeting these messages?”
- When participation rate is a priority, we recommend targeting custom audiences built from ingested alumni databases so that everyone who sees your ad will count towards this rate & therefore have a positive impact over non-applicable users. The alumni databases can be all alum, or segmented into “never-givers” to move the needle more clearly.
- If a campaign is relevant to users even with just an affinity for your school, we recommend running a second audience based on interests and educational demographics within your Paid Social campaign. Facebook removed the educational institution targeting for a period of time, but has since brought it back. This isn’t guaranteed to be 100% accurate, however, as it may include people who have untruthfully added a school to their profile — either due to participation in a summer program, or without any actual attendance.
3. “What do you think about newsletter format? Is it yesterday too? And what about the communication via Graduway or similar alumni systems?”
- Digital newsletters as a format aren’t passe; the problem is more in regards to low email open rates. You can supplement these communications by sending a broadcast to your Messenger subscribers with similar content, just reformatted to be more native to social media and taking advantage of Messenger’s average 80% open rate, thus increasing the likelihood that your announcements will be seen at all.
- Since messaging apps allow for a 1:1 communication between alumni & their institution, prompted by a targeted ad and/or targeted based on previous interactions, it’s a separate purpose than alumni networking destinations like Graduway. Additionally, messaging apps allow for schools to communicate with their alumni where they’re already active, rather than communicate via incremental sites & apps that require alumni to register for a new log-in or download software to their devices, thus removing technological barriers.
Originally published at blog.funderful.com.
