How to start an alumni community?

Are you interested in starting an alumni community? Well, starting or creating an alumni community is not difficult but managing such community where members are equally knowledgeable and experienced is really challenging. Alumni management is as important as starting an alumni community for your organization. But the question is why and how to start an alumni association.

For starting a successful alumni association, it is important for organizations to have a clear vision and purpose as to why they want to have one. Generally, organizations want to start an alumni community for the purpose of nurturing the spirit of loyalty among the members, their professional development and to strengthen ties with the alumni for future business objectives. An alumni association supports organization to achieve intangible aspects of business and strengthen relationship among alumni, the community and the organization.

There are some basics steps which should be followed while starting an alumni community:

• Form a group of like-minded alums- for that you have to informally meet with alums to obtain names and directly ask for their interest in participating in the association.
• Communicating with the interested alumni, inviting them to join the community and requesting them to spread the word among their contacts.
• Getting organized by preparing By-Laws for the steady progression of the community.
• Arranging finances for a newly built community- it is sometimes difficult to arrange finances but there are several ways through which it can be done, like collection of dues/donations, annual membership fees, capital fund raising campaigns, and others.
• Engaging members through various activities like, blogs, forums, newsletters, events, meetings etc.

Community Software Vendors providing value to business

A software vendor is a company that makes and sells software products designed for a specific or niche market. Such markets may be diverse, including software for real estate brokers, healthcare personnel and so on. Similarly, the vendors that make and sell software for building online community are called community software vendor. These software vendors provide community software to the organizations that want to build an online community, be it for corporate alumni, consumers, vendors, etc. to deliver value to their business, keep the members engaged and integrate with membership management database, events system, and website.

How can community software help organizations to increase revenue?
Community software is one of the most active sectors in the tech industry. Large companies are depending on these community vendors to provide them with robust community software that best suit the requirements of the business, the culture of their organization and can generate significant revenue through various functions:

1. Physical Product Sales : Selling books, education class, industry-related material, magazines, and items branded with company’s logo by associations and user groups which are then shipped from the organization to the members.
2. Virtual Products Sales : Boost profits with high margins by selling recorded webinars, audio training, electronic documents or online tools. With virtual products, members and customers will use the familiar shopping cart process while enjoying immediate access to what they purchased. 
3. Membership Dues : Online community software can handle all the membership management dues allowing staff to use a single system to handle member engagement tasks and back-end membership procedures.

Why to start Alumni network?

If you think your former employees are valuable for your organization and want to keep in touch with them, then start thinking of building a corporate alumni network to tap full potential of your former employees. There is no doubt that your people are your greatest asset. 

Companies have realized the fact that alums are that intangible asset of a company who can play an important role in their business success. When employees eventually leave an organization, they take with them wealth of knowledge capital, their understanding of the organization and their corporate network. Moreover, despite being detached from their previous organization, ex-employees can remain a part of their previous organization’s business activities. Some of ex-employees become clients and some become business referral sources. It’s just a matter of strengthening relationships with them and maintaining contact on a regular basis which in turn form advantageous business connections and continue building professional relationships over time.

This can only be achieved by having a successful alumni portal through which organization and its alumni members can stay connected with each other. Since contacts and recommendations in business world have an important role, utilizing a corporate alumni network to improve these should not be ignored. 

Viburnix, a robust corporate alumni software helps the organizations to build and maintain a successful alumni network. It is a user friendly software which comes with various interesting features, like creating and managing profiles of the members, event management feature, collection of dues/ donation online to name just a few. Besides it also keeps the members involved and engaged by creating polls and surveys, encouraging blogging and host forums, jobs postings and members referrals.