Creating and sending a quarterly or monthly newsletter is a great way to engage your alumni network. Here’s our top 5 tips for writing an engaging alumni newsletter.
1. Highlight Alumni Events
Showcase your events, whether these are for alumni specifically or another speaker series that they could attend. You could even invite alumni to become event speakers themselves, which is great for their personal brand too. Advertising and promoting key events in your alumni newsletter will keep your alumni connected and engaged throughout the year.
2. Showcase the Benefits
This is the reason for your alumni newsletter in the first place. A great way to keep readers engaged is to talk about the additional benefits of being in an alumni network. People love extra perks so don’t forget to let alumni know what they can avail of by being part of the network. This may be employee discounts, an alumni referral scheme or mentoring programmes.
3. Community Involvement
Think about the causes and role your company plays when it comes to corporate social responsibility. Just because the newsletter recipients have left the company, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve cut ties with your corporate values. Keep readers engaged by letting them know about volunteer initiatives, environmental innovation and other causes the company is making progress on.
4. Develop the Network
The alumni newsletter can be about much more than old photos and posts about past milestones. Think about the content you want to project and put time into development. Readers will want real content, real value and will respond more if you are authentic. Showcase your newsletter as a means of dual communication – be there for them as a source of new knowledge and resources and they will return the favour.
5. Evaluate and stay connected
Know your audience! Take a vested interest in what your readers will respond to by analysing your alumni newsletter performance – what’s most interesting to readers? Your alumni can use your newsletter as a source for job opportunities, professional development, networking and mentorship. Make sure to keep connected to your audience to ensure you are giving the readers what they want. Review, edit, revise and adjust based on recommendations and analyse your most popular content.
What other roles can alumni networks play?
- Become rehires (boomerangs) and be a source for referrals
- Act as brand ambassadors
- Create business development
- Lobby influencers on your behalf
- Invest back into the business
- Provide knowledge and expertise
Ready to build your own alumni community? We can help
Talivest is an online community platform that helps global companies tap into rich networks of their past and future talent. We help organisations understand why employees are leaving, stay connected with them and help re-hire high performing alumni as boomerangs. Unlike social media, on Talivest there’s no advertising, no noise and you control the conversation.