Making the Case for Nurturing Your Alumni Network

Engaging the former with the current

The Brief Case 📚→💼→📈→📊

Alumni are your forever products. If stewarded properly, they will feel an ongoing connection to your school and actively seek to serve a place that “knew them when…”

There is a win-win-win case to be made for the work that goes into sustaining such connections. Current students are enriched by knowing about, if not actually meeting and knowing, current alumni. Alumni themselves are enriched by being part of a thriving, fluid network. The school as a whole — its brand, its impact, often its finances — is enriched as alumni continue to spin up successful career, and life, stories.

One version of the case for nurturing your alumni network is that alumni networks, as a whole, are less philanthropically generous to their primary, middle, and secondary schools than they probably should be (glass-half-full: there is much more capacity to capture). A more nuanced and more interesting-to-us case connects to some powerful intangible effects of a healthy school experience: nostalgia, gratitude, and inspiration.