Alumni services:Alumni services was responsible for establishing and maintaining contact with students after they graduated.
Like Recruiting services, which stayed in close touch with prospective students until they had made a decision, Alumni services was responsible for establishing and maintaining contact with students after they graduated. Among other activities, Alumni services organized networking events to help graduates in their job search or to reconnect with classmates. In 2013, the service entered a transition period, with personnel changes (including a new director) and a new strategic direction. Rather than seeking to re-establish contact with alumni that had graduated years ago, the service now focused on creating ties with graduates as soon as possible. They hoped this more proactive approach would make it easier to maintain this contact over time.
For the exclusive use of m. yildiz, 2022.
This document is authorized for use only by mesut yildiz in APM Fall 2022 taught by SUSAN STEVENS, Endicott College from Sep 2022 to Dec 2022.
From Students to Alumni: Implementing CRM to Build Lifelong Relationships at HEC Montréal – Part A
© HEC Montréal 6
One of the challenges facing Alumni services was keeping contact information current. In an ideal world, they could have sent targeted communications to alumni groups based on factors such as geographic location, graduation year, or completed programs or degrees. HEC Montréal’s recent opening to the international community had made this more difficult, however. Graduates’ career paths had become much more convoluted, and the mobility of the modern workforce made it more difficult to keep track of them. Both snail mail and email addresses changed frequently. Although every new student at HEC Montréal was given a permanent HEC Montréal email address, it was not uncommon for students to stop using that address after they graduated. As a result, Alumni services couldn’t be sure their communications were reaching their target audiences.
To help keep alumni’s contact information up to date, staff used Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT, a cloud-based fundraising and donor management software solution. A folder was created for each graduate to store their contact information, their current position, their year of graduation, and the Alumni services events they had attended. Alumni registered for those events via the school’s website, and there was no integration between those events and Raiser’s Edge. A part-time employee was thus tasked with entering the data from event registrations into Raiser’s Edge. This data was supplemented with business cards collected during the events.