Ideas for Spring Alumni Engagement

Schools are always seeking ways to meaningfully engage with their alumni. The spring season offers several opportunities for alumni outreach including graduation, college acceptance, alumni reunions, and more. Below highlights a few ways you can bring your alumni into community initiatives.

Graduation: Graduation is a time for celebration. Everyone looks back fondly on their school departure as seniors celebrate their next step in their journey. Asking alumni to send in quotes or videos honoring this passage of time is a great way for seniors to feel welcomed into the alumni community.

College Acceptance: There is a high likelihood that your alumni have attended several of the institutions your graduating seniors are attending. Requesting these alumni to share advice or welcome fellow alumni onto campus promotes alumni engagement and recognizes the power of your school community.

Alumni Reunions: Schools oftentimes host reunions in the spring (or it might be the fall!). The pandemic is obviously continuing to impact in person events, however several lessons from COVID should apply to future reunion planning. Having a plan for alumni engagement that doesn’t require in person attendance is valuable. It recognizes those that can’t make it back and allows you to maintain a relationship no matter where people are across the globe. Consider bringing in remote access to your programming moving forward.

Senior Projects/Career Day: Whether you have career day panels, senior projects, or special guest speaker series, your alumni are valuable assets for all of those initiatives. By keeping a strong alumni database, you can find members from your community to meaningfully connect with your students.

The key to alumni engagement is to not reinvent the wheel but to strengthen the ongoing initiatives you already have underway at your school. Cross departmental partnerships is necessary to build a strong community of students, parents, and alumni all supporting each other.

Originally published at https://www.searchwavelength.com on March 19, 2021.