Learn how to establish and manage a successful corporate alumni program, from design and sponsorship to measurement and scaling for lasting value.
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Building a corporate alumni program starts with the recognition that it’s worth maintaining relationships with people who used to work for you, and that these relationships will need to live somewhere other than a spreadsheet.
There are a few vital ingredients to secure as soon as you can, such as: a clear owner, a senior sponsor who treats the program as their own, a simple early design that looks to your company’s strategic objectives, and a platform that holds the data properly. And you can probably add ‘a healthy amount of patience’ to this list, because a program built on a solid foundation is more likely to last.
We’ll take a walkthrough of some of the main decisions you’ll face when you build a program from the ground up, such as where it sits in your organization, who your sponsor should be, and how to approach design, launch and measurement.
Every company has alumni – the question is whether you have an actual program.
This difference matters because many organizations think they have one, when what they actually have is a LinkedIn group started by someone who has since left, a spreadsheet called Alumni-List-Final-ThisOne_v3, and an annual email sent to everyone that nobody responds to. These are not so much programs as ‘goodwill kept alive by individual effort’, and the danger is that these are lost the moment that person also moves on.
A program is different in that it is purposely designed, has a name, an owner, a budget, and a stated reason to exist. It produces value that the business can point to, including business development, hires, referrals, and advocacy. It survives leadership change because it doesn’t depend on any one person. Genentech, Marks & Spencer, BlackRock, LinkedIn: every consequential alumni program in the world began as a deliberate decision to treat former employees as a category of relationship worth investing in, and to build an operating model on the back of that decision.
Acknowledging that you want a program (rather than a directory) will lead in turn to a series of decisions to make over the next 12 months, resulting in an up-and-running working program that provides value that your company cares about.
If you are still working out whether the case is there, the strategic value of an alumni program is a good place to start.
The first real decision is organizational. Whose job is the alumni program? This question gets asked at the start of every new program and has more options than you might realize:
The right answer for your organization usually comes from two things: which company objectives the program’s purpose aligns with most closely, and who is most likely to actually execute.
What works better than any single function owning it, in our experience, is the hub model. As Charlotte Wager, CHRO at Jenner & Block, puts it: “we own it in talent and strategy, but we’re a hub. The whole point is to leverage all those different functions.” The owner makes sure the program runs, while the structure makes sure the value gets distributed.
Kathi Enderes at the Bersin Company makes the related point. “HR doesn’t own talent any more than finance owns financial performance,” she says. “Every manager, every leader, and every person actually owns talent.” Apply the same logic to alumni. The alumni program is the operating layer; the value is created by the people across the business who use it.
Once you have settled where the program sits, you face the next question: who sponsors it?
Sponsorship is separate from ownership and can be easily confused. Ownership is who runs the program day to day. Sponsorship is who champions it at the most senior level, signs off the budget, and lends their visibility to make the program credible. The two functions are different, and you need both.
A good sponsor is treated by the organization as the alumni program’s face. Marks & Spencer’s former CEO Steve Rowe is now president of the alumni network. After 39 years at the company, his presence is what makes the program a continuation of the M&S culture rather than a marketing initiative.
But not every company will have a former CEO both available and willing. The next-best version is a sitting C-level (CHRO, CFO, CEO, or in some cases the COO) who treats the program as part of their own portfolio rather than as something they wave at from a distance. The least desirable situation might be a well-meaning senior sponsor who shows up at the launch event and then disappears – that’s as bad as no sponsorship at all.
If you’ve not yet found a senior sponsor who will own the program publicly, you might want to consider delaying the kick-off until you can. As for further down the line, programs without sponsorship might struggle to survive a CEO transition or a budget cycle.
The most useful published framework for designing a corporate alumni program is TRAILS, by Alison Dachner and Erin Makarius, published in Organizational Dynamics – see How to Systematically Design Corporate Alumni Programs for more detail.
TRAILS names six design decisions every alumni program implicitly makes, whether or not the people designing it know they’re making them.
T – Tracking and Analyzing Data. What you measure about your alumni and your program. Without measurement, you have no way to defend the budget, no way to improve the design, and no way to spot value being created or lost.
R – Recognizing Achievements. How you honor what your alumni do in their lives after the company. Done well, recognition is one of the cheapest and most reliable engagement levers available.
A – Allocating Resources. The budget, time, headcount and platform investment that the program gets. It’s not uncommon for programs to be (or to feel) under-resourced.
I – Information Sharing. What you tell your alumni about the company, and what you learn from them in return. This is integral to the two-way relationship.
L – Learning and Development. The ongoing growth that the program can offer alumni. Some companies treat this as central to the program, while others use it lightly.
S – Socializing and Networking. Events, communities, meetups, mentoring. The bits that connect alumni to each other, not just alumni to the company.
You can’t get all six perfect from the get-go. Pick two or three to focus on – for example: Tracking, Information Sharing, and Recognition for the first year of the program; Allocating Resources and Learning & Development for a year-two expansion; Socializing and Networking once you have an active enough community.
The framework is also helpful because it forces decisions about what the program actually does. Ask any program owner to score themselves out of 5 on each of the six dimensions and you get an unsentimental picture of where the program is and what it needs next.
Also note however that TRAILS describes the design decisions, and doesn’t set how to make them. Two programs can both put weight on Recognizing Achievements and look completely different in practice. M&S chose to lean into customer-style loyalty mechanics, letting former employees link their Sparks ID to their alumni profile. Genentech recognizes the contribution to science, celebrating research milestones throughout the contributor’s employment lifecycle. There might be a very different approach that suits your organization: the job of design is to use a framework to make a small number of deliberate choices that fit your own organization’s strategy, brand, and capacity.
See AlumniAcademy Course 2 to go deeper into using TRAILS to make design decisions.
The platform question is where most programs face their first real spending decision. Sadly, you can’t run a corporate alumni program at any meaningful scale on a spreadsheet, or even a CRM repurposed for the job. For example: spreadsheets do not enforce data consent. Social media groups won’t let you own the data, or segment your audience, or run measured campaigns, or integrate with your HR systems. A CRM is built for known customers in known stages of a known buying cycle, not for thousands of former employees with shifting careers and fluctuating engagement signals. These limits will become very evident just at the point that your program needs to do something serious.
A dedicated alumni platform does five things a general-purpose system cannot:
Integration is a significant dividing line between enterprise-grade tools and lightweight ones, and should be considered a phase-one requirement. A platform that holds alumni data but cannot push a boomerang candidate into your ATS, or surface a key alumnus inside your BD team’s account view, is creating more work than it removes.
Security is the second dividing line, especially in regulated industries. Programs that handle alumni data without proper consent, encryption, and certifications are exposed to legal and reputational downside that dwarfs any operational upside. The bar to clear at minimum is GDPR alignment, ISO 27001, and SOC 2 Type II. Higher bars exist (e.g. Cyber Essentials+) and are worth the additional investment in regulated sectors.
The platform decision is not the most strategic one you will make: the design and ownership decisions matter more. But it is the one that determines whether the rest of the program can scale, or stalls at year two. Get the platform decision right early, even if you start small.
How Large Companies Keep Track of Former Employees covers the specific operator decisions inside the platform choice (data enrichment, segmentation, integration discipline) in more detail.
You will likely start as a team of one. This is the realistic ownership state for nearly every new corporate alumni program.
The Year One ambition shouldn’t be to build a 10-person alumni operations function – rather, the job is to begin a working version of the program, prove it generates value, and use that proof as a foundation for growth.
A pragmatic start, drawn from how mature programs actually got launched:
Align and audit. You don’t launch straightaway! You spend time understanding what already exists (the spreadsheet, the social media groups, etc.) and what the sponsor actually wants the program to do. You decide the most important dimensions to lead with, where the program sits and who formally owns it, and audit the alumni data you already have access to inside the HRIS, for example.
Design and decide. You agree the launch design with the sponsor: the audience for the launch (who will you be including in the program?), the initial offer (what alumni get for joining, e.g. professional development, networking, and some access to opportunities), and the communications cadence (monthly minimum). You agree the platform decision. You plan or write the first three months of content. You enroll a small pilot group from an already-engaged cohort and stress-test the program design with them.
Launch. You might do this with a bang or consider launching in a more low-key way than the comms team would like. You announce to your alumni, your current employees (so they know it exists when they eventually leave), and your sponsor’s senior network. The early engagement metrics to start keeping track of include registrations, opens, click-through, and quality of response.
Soon after go-live, you should have a working program with a decent membership, measurable engagement signals, and a foundation for gathering data to eventually make the case to the sponsor for the second cohort, the second budget cycle, or both. One thing you certainly won’t have is a finished program – yet.
If at any point the build-it-yourself path stops looking sensible, Managed Services is a formal alternative: outsourcing the operator function to EnterpriseAlumni’s own team while keeping ownership of strategy and outcomes in-house.
It’s not uncommon for alumni managers to measure the wrong things, then wonder why the budget conversation goes badly.
It’s easily done as there are important metrics that tell you the platform is working, but nonetheless don’t tell you how the program is creating value. For example, how many people have signed up, how many emails got opened, and how many people clicked. These are activity metrics, and unfortunately the CFO who funded your program isn’t asking these questions.
The ‘right things’ differ depending on how mature the program is.
A useful frame might be that in years one and two you’re measuring activity and audience. Sign-ups, engagement rate, content interaction, growth in addressable population – you’re establishing that the program exists and is being used.
In subsequent years, you’ll be able to get on top of measuring leading indicators. Number of boomerang applications generated through the alumni network, referrals tagged to alumni sources, business development conversations with alumni at target accounts, or brand sentiment from alumni surveys. These are not yet outcome metrics but they predict outcomes. They are also the metrics that will tell you whether your program design is working as you expected.
In year three and beyond you’ll be better able to measure the outcomes themselves. Boomerang hires placed and the cost-per-hire saving relative to external recruitment. Revenue influenced by alumni relationships, where the data exists. Retention rate of boomerang hires relative to first-time hires. Brand-sentiment movement measurable against control. These are the kind of numbers that justify the program at board level.
For example, one global bank examined its data on around 32,000 EMEA employees, and found roughly 10% had left and returned, and that each returning employee represented between $50,000 and $75,000 in cost savings against the equivalent external hire. A 1% increase in the number of boomerangs yielded $1.25 million. That is the kind of number that elevates the alumni program to strategic priority.
One quick point on benchmarking: don’t automatically benchmark against companies with ten-year programs, but against where you were last quarter. Year-over-year improvement on the metrics that matter is the most helpful measurement at the beginning.
The strategic value of an alumni program covers the deeper financial and business-case framing for the metrics-mature stage.
Five things to do if you have read this far and decided to move ahead.
If you want to go deeper:
