Are you considering implementing an alumni network platform for your business? Read our guide to learn the nine questions to ask when making the selection.
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Establishing a corporate alumni network is a highly effective way to enhance organizational capabilities, including employee recruitment, workforce flexibility, knowledge retention, and organizational culture.
A corporate alumni network is also a way for companies to provide cutting-edge digital experiences for their employees - something Salesforce says 64% of consumer and business buyers regard as top of the list.
With that in mind, and with so many software solutions available to manage your business alumni network, what are the must-haves? And what are the nice-to-haves? It comes down to your operational needs, your budget, and how much you are invested in making an alumni network work for you.
A corporate alumni network is a structured community of former employees maintained by a company to foster ongoing relationships.
These networks support recruitment, brand advocacy, professional development, and knowledge sharing. By staying connected through dedicated platforms or programs, companies can tap into alumni as valuable brand ambassadors, talent sources, and potential clients or partners.
Many organizations use corporate alumni networks to strengthen long-term business impact.
Building a corporate alumni program has many benefits and advantages for both members and businesses. These include:
With so many options and an array of features, choosing the right alumni management software or platform can pose a challenge. Here are nine questions you can ask to help narrow down the best option for your business.
Before you create an alumni network, it's essential to consider why you want to build one, what you want to achieve from it, and who will be the core driver behind the initiative.
What are the core business goals for launching an alumni network? Is it to support recruitment, build brand advocacy, help with business development, or improve knowledge sharing? Knowing the end goal will help you choose the platform that best serves your needs.
It's also key to think about who will internally own and champion the alumni initiative. Will it be your HR department, Marketing or Comms? Again, knowing who will be leading the program will help determine what platform offers your must-have features and integration with current processes.
Setting up and maintaining an alumni association will require investment – how much is determined by the size of the business, the size of the alumni network, and the level of features required.
It's important to be realistic about your budget. While launching an alumni network doesn’t have to break the bank, there will always be some costs involved, whether that's platform fees, running events, or the employee time required to run the network.
The size of your alumni network will often determine the platform or software you need. There are some aspects here you can drill down into:
What personas exist within your alumni community (e.g., boomerangs, referrers, buyers, influencers)?
These questions can help you make data-driven decisions about your network and determine how best to build it.
Alumni recruiting is more than simply targeting suitable alumni for rehire (also known as boomerang employees). Using the platform’s recruitment features, you want to drive referrals that will empower your alumni to start a conversation about returning to your organization.
With an AI-driven recommendations engine, it's easy for any alumni thinking about returning to your organization to find their right opportunity.
An advanced recruiter dashboard should provide the tools needed to enable insights and analysis into your alumni population and their second-degree connections. This, in turn, will increase invitations and referrals from which you can start your recruiting journeys.
A complete member directory is the cornerstone of an alumni network. This data is centralized to enable easy management and export. With CRM and social-media integrations, information can be easily updated by either the manager or the user.
Your alumni directory should be searchable and offer filters that assist others in finding and connecting throughout the organization. Filters can be based on the group, location, industry, or any other custom fields.
High on your data management wish list is an interactive, visual map that displays employees' location and other vital information, making them hyper-findable in a visual format.
Today, employees are spending more time using apps such as MS Teams, Workplace, Slack, and instant messaging systems. These conversational interfaces have become natural ways to communicate, enabling all HR-related applications to operate in the flow of work.
Your alumni network platform should allow for single-click integrations into these applications. Seamless integration allows applications to synchronize data, configure flexible and intelligent workflows, and automate business processes.
Other helpful integrations include Workday, Adobe Suite, SharePoint, WordPress, Salesforce, Eventbrite, SmartRecruiters, Slack, Microsoft suite of products, Hootsuite, and Oracle.
Your alumni network platform should be flexible enough to make space for new products that come into the market.
Your alumni network software needs to provide a suite of analytics and reports that inform business intelligence. These include real-time insights, funnel reporting, conversion reporting, and predictive analytics.
A secure alumni network platform is essential for safeguarding user privacy and corporate data. The platform you choose needs to be regularly audited to ensure that it meets the latest local and global compliance and security standards for data security and privacy regulations.
This is important because we live in a world where data regulations change continuously. Your alumni platform must keep pace with these regulatory changes to provide privacy capabilities and best practices for your community. These certificates are non-negotiable:
These certifications, along with the platform, application, and operational controls, are designed to support customers’ IT requirements and provide robust, ongoing vulnerability assessments of the application and network.
Your platform should have a personalized dashboard that is accessible across all devices and ensures that each user only sees what is relevant to them. This will help to avoid disengagement.
Your alumni platform needs to be intelligent, meaning that it knows who your alumni are, where they are, and what they’re interested in. From here, personalization becomes easy.
Consider, for instance, that alumni in New York don’t want to know about drinks parties in Paris or seminars in Toronto. Former CEOs will want to interact with a different peer group than former interns. And retirees are not interested in graduate recruitment opportunities.
Knowing your alumni will make their experience applicable and personal.
Top firms choose Enterprise Alumni to recruit talent, provide contextual experiences, automate workflows and gain valuable market intelligence. The result is the strong, impactful connections they have built with their alumni networks.
What sets EnterpriseAlumni apart is our commitment to flexibility, customization, and the speed of innovation. This is combined on a platform that focuses on the experience and ever-changing needs of an alumni community, ensuring alumni engagement and value for both the members and the business.
We welcome the opportunity to show you the EnterpriseAlumni difference.
