Get to Know Advancement and Alumni Relations
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Discuss the importance of alumni relations and fundraising, and identify common challenges.
- Describe how Agentforce Education helps to build alumni connections and facilitate fundraising.
- Explain the Advancement and Alumni Relations features and tools.
Before You Start
Before you start this module, consider completing this recommended content.
Cultivate Alumni Connections
How often do you think about your school days? Do you still keep in close contact with your alma mater, or have you lost touch over the years? For many, our time spent at academic institutions leaves a lasting impression, creates fond memories, and even shapes our identity and character. But, as with all relationships, these connections have the potential to either grow or fade away over time.
Now consider the other side of that relationship. As someone working in advancement or alumni engagement, you’re responsible for helping graduates feel that lasting connection and for turning those connections into continued involvement and support.
Keeping alumni engaged is essential to your institution’s future. Former students contribute not just through generous gifts, but also through mentorship, advocacy, and professional connections that open doors for learners.
Meaningful engagement starts with a sense of belonging. Alumni are more likely to invest their money, time, and resources when they feel connected to a vibrant community. Strong networks lead to lasting relationships and real results in fundraising, volunteerism, and strengthening your institutional reputation.
But maintaining those relationships is challenging. Legacy platforms and scattered, outdated information make it difficult to stay in touch, personalize communications, or track progress. Many advancement teams struggle to drive participation, manage gifts, or demonstrate impact.
It’s important to make your learners feel like they’re a valued part of the community, even long after they graduate. That’s why Agentforce Education provides a full suite of solutions to help you assemble a robust alumni network and track important data. Use the suite to engage graduates across different platforms and channels, and effectively manage all of your advancement operations.
In this badge, you explore the Alumni Relations and Advancement capabilities that help you boost relationships with your alumni. Along the way, you follow Sophia Sanders, a recent graduate of Astro University, and Delaney, the director of alumni engagement, who uses Agentforce Education to accelerate her institution’s alumni relations and advancement processes.
Discover Advancement and Alumni Relations in Agentforce Education
Advancement and Alumni Relations in Agentforce Education combines data, AI, analytics, fundraising and marketing tools, and an online community to simplify and improve alumni outreach and engagement. With the relevant system and information in hand, foster and nurture lifelong relationships, maximize participation, and meet or exceed your fundraising goals.
Next, take a look at how it all comes together.
Engage Alumni and Strengthen Relationships
Strong advancement begins with connection. Agentforce Education helps you create meaningful digital experiences for alumni while giving your advancement staff the tools to track engagement and personalize outreach.
Alumni Community Portal
Use Experience Cloud templates to create your own custom online community for alumni to interact with your institution and each other. Graduates can create personal profiles and search a directory to connect with fellow graduates, participate in mentoring programs, events, and volunteering opportunities.
Alumni Relations App
The Alumni Relations App unifies all of your alumni data for effective alumni engagement and fundraising. With accounts and alumni profiles, relationship officers and other advancement staff get a 360-degree view of each graduate. They can easily review and update information, including their philanthropic history, and track outreach efforts.
Here’s a screenshot of an alumni account for Sophia that provides comprehensive information about her.
This accurate and accessible data brings about more personalized and successful interactions with each alum.
Alumni Engagement Metrics
With Data 360 integration, capture a full view of alumni and supporter engagement, including volunteerism, philanthropic contributions, and participation in events and activities. Use Agentforce to surface actionable insights and summaries to better inform your engagement strategies through AI.
Identify Giving Potential with Intelligent Research
After your alumni are engaged, the next challenge is knowing how and when to deepen those engagements. Agentforce Education helps you move beyond guesswork with powerful research tools and AI insights that guide your advancement strategy.
Philanthropic Research
Effective fundraising starts with understanding the person behind the gift. Agentforce Education provides a structured research workflow and comprehensive profiles that help advancement teams capture key life events, financial signals, and engagement history.
Take a look at Sophia’s research profile.
Research profiles give advancement teams helpful, at-a-glance information about prospective donors.
Philanthropic Research Agent
To move faster and dig deeper, advancement teams can use the Philanthropic Research Agent, a conversational AI assistant built with Agentforce. The agent uses prebuilt research topics and alumni data to answer questions about a donor’s history, interests, or estimated wealth.
Plan and Manage Gifts with Confidence
When alumni are ready to give, Agentforce Education helps you move from interest to impact through streamlined planning, processing, and stewardship.
Fundraising and Marketing
Salesforce provides a comprehensive fundraising solution to enhance productivity during every stage of advancement operations. Use a single system to engage donors, manage gift entry and processing, and expand your outreach. With integrated Agentforce Marketing tools, segment opportunities, launch impactful fundraising campaigns, and tailor your communications to alumni interests and preferences.
Gift Planning and Management
Cultivate and track the evolution of fundraising proposals for potential donors, and manage key details, such as the estimated gift value, likelihood of commitment, and timeframe. Oversee ongoing gifts by monitoring the total amount, payout rate, and duration. Simplify payment processes for one-time or recurring gifts, and quickly direct funds to the initiatives and programs that are important to the donor.
In this unit, you discovered how Advancement and Alumni Relations in Agentforce Education helps you reconnect with past students more effectively. With this unique blend of features, bring past students back into the fold, forge new communities and experiences, and set your institution up for lasting success.
In the next unit, you explore how Agentforce Education deepens alumni relationships with an online community to foster engagement and a centralized app to capture alumni history and insights.