Explore Alumni Communities and the Alumni Relations App
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Discuss the importance of tracking alumni information, and the benefits of an online portal for alumni.
- Explain the purpose and benefit of the Alumni Community online portal.
- Describe the Alumni Relations app and related components.
- Explain how you can track and measure alumni engagement in Agentforce Education.
Keeping Up with Alumni
Aside from the occasional fundraising email, many alumni don’t hear from their alma mater at all. When they do, it can feel one-sided, as if their only lasting role is to give money. To make matters worse, alumni are often scattered geographically and don’t have an easy way to connect with their old classmates or alma mater.
As a result, graduates miss out on reunions, sporting events, and other enriching activities. Meanwhile, institutions struggle to gain financial support and participation in volunteering activities, networking events, and mentorship programs.
Creating a strong sense of community is paramount for an effective alumni engagement strategy, which is why Agentforce Education includes the Alumni Community Portal.
In this unit, you discover how this online portal brings alumni together, and explore how the Alumni Relations app provides a central workspace for gathering and analyzing your alumni data.
The Alumni Community Portal
The Alumni Community Portal is a vibrant digital home that brings together graduates across generations, class years, and locations to foster social connections, business partnerships, and a renewed sense of school pride. This common platform also encourages greater advocacy, involvement, and contributions to your institution. It can also result in unexpected and immeasurable benefits, such as the rekindling of old friendships or the formation of enduring business partnerships.
The portal includes these key components to help alumni stay engaged.
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Dynamic alumni profiles: Alumni create and update personal profiles to share their academic journey, professional experience, interests, and current contact details.
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Interactive Alumni Directory: Alumni connect with fellow graduates using an online directory.
Depending on your configuration, alumni can also use the portal to explore and register for mentorship programs. To learn more about Mentoring in Agentforce Education, view the Mentoring article in Salesforce Help.
For example, Sophia, an Astro U alumni, receives an email inviting her to check out the new Alumni Community Portal. Feeling nostalgic, she creates a profile, browses the directory, and reconnects with former classmates.
Here’s a look at Sophia’s alumni profile.
On her profile, Sophia adds information about her personal and professional life. She also searches the Alumni Directory to find her classmates.
Setting up your Alumni Community portal doesn’t require any technical expertise. Use Experience Builder to customize an included template to match your institution’s needs and brand. After your site is up and running, provide alumni users with site access by creating permission sets and profiles.
Behind the scenes, flows automatically update Alumni Directory data to keep information up to date, and you can use preconfigured flow templates to speed up your configuration.
To learn more about creating an Alumni Community for your institution, view the Set Up Your Alumni Community Salesforce Help article.
Now that you understand how the portal brings your alumni together, check out how the Alumni Relations app helps you stay connected with former students and simplify your engagement and fundraising efforts.
The Alumni Relations App
Effective alumni engagement and fundraising starts with the proper data. Up-to-date and detailed alumni information, such as contact details, life events, and donation history, is essential for tailored marketing and personalized interactions with potential donors. Unfortunately, these types of data are often stored in separate systems, making it difficult for advancement teams to manage.
Agentforce Education provides a comprehensive data model to help you get a holistic view of each learner throughout their journey–from prospective student to graduation and beyond. This way, you can capture and maintain a comprehensive record of each graduate, and then use this foundational data to drive deeper connections and more productive communications.
Alumni Accounts and Profiles
On alumni accounts, you can view historical information about each graduate in a timeline format, view past interactions and contributions, capture alumni interests, and view their education and employment details. Here’s what Sophia’s alumni account record looks like.
Here’s what you can use each component in the alumni account record for.
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Highlights Panel (1): Quickly see basic details about the alum, including their contact information.
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Alumni Profile Card (2): View the profile information that the alum has submitted through the Alumni Community Portal.
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Alumni Activities (3): Review recent activities related to the account, including past engagements.
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Action Launcher (4): Quickly add a note, create a task, send an email, or request research.
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Life Events (5): View and add events and milestones in the alumni user’s life.
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Related Lists (6): View past engagements and giving history, manage portal profile preferences, access cases and alerts that are assigned to the user, and more.
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Interests (7): View and add tags related to the alumni user’s needs, interests, and engagement opportunities.
For example, on the Giving History related list, Director Delaney views past contributions that Sophia has made to Astro University.
Along with giving history, you can also view and record philanthropic milestones to help you track the alum’s giving activities and financial status over time. From the alumni account, you can also create a case to request philanthropic research, which you explore later.
Alumni Engagement Metrics
Agentforce Education gives you a full picture of supporter engagement over time, helping you to measure success and make necessary adjustments to your alumni relations strategies.
By integrating Data 360 with your org, you can connect, organize, and unify all your alumni data from various institutional systems, including student information systems, learning management systems, and enterprise resource planning systems. Then, use Agentforce to measure each individual alum’s engagement level, analyze the overall health of alumni programs, and pinpoint opportunities for engagement.
Use Alumni Engagement Metrics to track individual engagement across different categories, including:
- Email open rates and responses
- Event and activity participation
- Contributions and investments
- Volunteerism
For example, on Sophia’s account, Delaney views AI generated summaries of key alumni engagement metrics, including Sophia’s personal engagement activity.
These summaries quickly surface key findings and highlight opportunities, giving advancement staff valuable insights to help them develop stronger relationships with potential donors.
Now that you’ve discovered the Alumni Community and learned how the Alumni Relations app helps you store and analyze alumni data, you’re ready to discover the powerful objects and tools for conducting vital philanthropic research.