Insights, Best Practices & Thought Leadership Articles

Beyond an Alumni Directory: The Evolution To Platform

Written by EnterpriseAlumni | Aug 13, 2016 9:06:49 AM

An Alumni Directory is how many organizations started keeping tabs of their ex-employees, however as the Alumni market has matured and the needs of the Alumni are better understood, many organizations are seeking to move off their legacy software or custom website into an Alumni Platform that fits both the organizational and Alumni needs.

Organizations are looking to move to a more unified, integrated and functional platform, future proofing the investment they make and finding the right tools to best optimize and harness the power of this vast and powerful community.

Whether customers are moving their Alumni Directory from a mailing list and excel spreadsheet, homegrown websites, silo alumni website providers or out of date WordPress platforms, the need to ensure the transition is flawless is paramount.

We believe that given you only have one chance to make a first impression, it should be a dazzling one. And that your Alumni, HR and other stakeholders should be as thrilled with the process as the end result. That’s why we built our EnterpriseAlumni from the ground up, to deliver a brilliant and engaging experience to your Alumni community.

Customers want native integration into their HR System of Record. They want to push and pull data into the Sales CRM, expose deals from procurement platforms, create workflows using automation builders for manual tasks, leverage intelligence functions to deliver Alumni insights, send content personalized emails… but most of all they want to serve their Alumni community with a mature, innovative and valuable product to deliver contextual and relevant information, content, deals, events and more.

The difference between an Alumni Directory and an Alumni Platform is a platform is designed to serve the Alumni, understand their values and iterate a relevant suite of benefits. Platforms evolve.

The migration responsibility, contractual obligations including downtime and/or other service interference are, of course, the responsibility of the vendor. But despite where this burden lies, in the event of an issue, it’s on everybody’s head. We have therefore developed a failsafe process to allow the lift and shift of Alumni from whatever system is currently being used over to our platform with no interruption of service.

We are proud of our process-driven approach to migrating from another vendor’s Alumni Software to ours: customer success is part of our DNA. And we look forward to showing you that!