Engagement

To make your alumni value your university, make them feel valued in return. As your alumni age, they may feel as if the bond between their identity and their alma mater weakens. However, by harnessing the power of nostalgia to reconnect alumni emotionally, you can transport them back into “the good old days.”

By providing alumni with a channel to share their memories of your institution, you show them that their past experiences are relevant to your university in the present day. Furthermore, show alumni that their professional expertise and wisdom matters to current generations, and recognize their contribution to your university network.

Don’t bombard your alumni with one-sided solicitations. Give them something in return. Grant alumni the platform to feel valued by their alma mater, and to feel their footprint on your campus once again.

College is a time for students to grow socially, professionally, and academically. Yet, when your alumni leave their alma mater, they often forget the impact that their college experience had on their life. After they embark on their lives post-graduation, they grow further and further away from the sphere of your university’s influence.

However, by inputting targeted prompts, such as, “What was your first job out of college? How did you get it?” you encourage older alumni to remember how their time at your university impacted their career, while simultaneously sharing valuable information with younger generations.

Furthermore, prompts can be used to uncover the impact of your university on the personal lives of alumni. For example, on Valentine’s Day, ask alumni if they met their spouses in college, and to share their stories of how they met. Not only will this prompt remind alumni of the positive impact of their college experience, but their stories will connect alumni across generations and unify your alumni network.

Take them back to their college years with a single click. If an alumni clicks “1978” (their freshman year) on their personalized timeline, they'll see all of the memories and events that occurred that year. They can engage with curated playlists of popular music from that year, photos of campus from the college's digital archives, as well as other alumni’s shared memories of that time period.

CueBack acts like a time machine, allowing alumni to effortlessly return to their college days. By allowing alumni to interact with and add to the timeline of your institution’s history, you create a dynamic portrait of your college through the years. Not only will this allow alumni to see their contribution to your institution’s legacy, but it will remind them of their best moments at your college.

Your digital archive contains a record of the history and tradition that shape alumni identity and binds alumni to your university. By targeting specific archival material to alumni who were students at that time, you can crowdsource personal stories and bring your archive to life.

CueBack enables you to seamlessly integrate your alumni’s stories and your digital archives to create a living timeline of the people, places, events, and experiences that comprise your institution’s fundamental identity.

Alumni can tag their old friends in archive photos, offer personal anecdotes about cherished university traditions, and tell the stories behind the photos. By providing an interactive engagement experience, your alumni can add to the value of your digital archive for generations to come.

While traditional social media platforms promote short-form, disposable content shared on a mass scale, CueBack is different. CueBack encourages alumni to take the time to write longer posts, centered around the meaningful memories that have made them who they are. These posts are then shared with the alumni's friends and family members, or the people who lived through the experiences with them.

The meaningful, long-form nature of posts shared on CueBack means that every post holds emotional significance. Reminiscing has been proven to strengthen identity, encourage a positive outlook on the past, and lead to a sense of personal significance. CueBack is bringing the power of personal storytelling to the digital sphere, connecting your alumni with each other and strengthening their relationship with your institution.

As we grow older, we accumulate more experiences, memories, and life lessons. Unfortunately, our ability to remember them decreases as we age. This phenomenon is known as the memory gap–and it is a pressing issue for older alumni who seek to remember their college days. However, these memories do not have to be lost. Employ the power of collaboration to “fill in the gaps” of forgotten details and allow alumni to help each other remember.

Collaboration is one of CueBack’s core values, and our application reflects that. Alumni can give editing capabilities to fellow alumni with whom they shared an experience. By allowing multiple people to add their recollections and viewpoints within a post, alumni can combat the memory gap and create a more complete and accurate picture of what actually happened.

Rooftop escapades, intoxicated nights out, that one incident with the tiger...these are memories that can only be made in college. As the years go by, your alumni won’t remember quiet nights spent studying, nor will they want to reminisce about them with their friends. What your alumni need is an avenue to share their craziest college experiences---without worrying that these stories will be read by the wrong people.

Think about telling a story to your buddies in a beloved hometown bar. As you recall a particularly juicy incident from your college heydays, your friends chime in, clamoring in with extra details and offering up their own perspectives. This kind of collective reminiscing is pleasant, engaging, and beneficial in cementing one’s identity.

But in a more public setting, you can’t just recall “the tiger incident” without a judgmental glance or two. That’s where CueBack’s Flavors feature comes in. With this feature, alumni can reconnect with old friends over shared stories of the past–just like they would in real life. However, by customizing who sees their stories, your alumni won’t need to worry about accidentally sharing the memory of their first keg stand with their former professor.

Most importantly, CueBack doesn’t take an “all-or-nothing” approach to sharing memories. On CueBack, users can hide some paragraphs from everyone who isn’t a close friend, while allowing other paragraphs to be read by the general public. With this system, your alumni can customize who sees their content and to what extent---encouraging them to share more and engage more, with an audience they trust.

Older alumni are an especially important resource for universities, as they have experienced far more than their younger counterparts. They can offer advice about a range of life events, ranging from the professional to the personal, and yet they often are underserved by alumni relations officers.

However, CueBack is designed with this group of older alumni in mind, and allows alumni relations directors to target them directly in order to gather meaningful stories and advice. By collecting the wisdom of older alumni on an accessible digital platform, your university can offer a resource that will be valuable to graduates of all ages and generations. Instead of meaningless Tweets and Instagram pics, you offer a repository of meaningful content that will connect with your alumni on a deeper emotional level.

A group of alumni offers an incredible wealth of information about different industries, career paths, and life post-graduation, yet this resource often goes untapped by universities.

Fortunately, Cueback allows you to collect alumni’s most salient advice and memories, building a powerful asset of wisdom.

By sharing memories of their first jobs post-college, their first time buying a house, or their advice for acing an important interview, older alumni can give back to younger generations--- creating a web of interconnectedness for your alumni network. This encourages younger alumni to be active members on your alumni platform, while giving older alumni a sense of emotional satisfaction. Being recognized as cherished members of their university community is extremely important for older alumni, while younger members will appreciate the value of career advice and external opportunities. In this way, your university will simultaneously offer the benefit of meaningful reminiscence to older alumni and useful professional and life advice to younger alumni.

The professional and personal needs of your alumni will change as they move through their lives. The most effective engagement platform will continuously provide value to your alumni throughout their lives, encouraging them to be perpetually connected with your university. For this reason, your university’s engagement needs to adapt accordingly to your alumni.

In contrast to other social media sites, CueBack’s search features are accessible and intuitive. An alumni needs only to type in the topic they want to learn more about—ranging from “Professional Resources” to “Financial Advice”—to receive a repository of information about that subject. Older alumni may be interested in information about planning their retirement, while younger alumni may care more about finding their first job out of college. In this way, alumni of all different ages and priorities can find the information that is relevant to them, and your university ensures that your engagement platform offers pertinent content for every graduate.

Authentic stories are the key to effective marketing techniques, yet alumni professionals currently lack a simple, crowd-sourced method of gathering such valuable and personal material. However, on CueBack, advancement professionals can not only gather meaningful stories, but they can shape alumni responses according to their needs.

For example, if recruiting talented first-generation college students, collect personal stories from first-generation alumni. By reaching out to this group of alumni with targeted prompts, asking them to share memories of how their acceptance to your university impacted their families, you generate a source of authentic, meaningful stories that your university can then use in its recruitment efforts.

Alternatively, if raising money for new equipment for the physics laboratory, ask alumni who graduated with a degree from the Physics department about how their research impacted their career. Use the responses to add a personal touch to your marketing efforts and directly illustrate the benefit that the department adds to students’ lives.

As your alumni get older, the probability that your institution no longer has updated contact information for them drastically increases. Often, colleges have less than half of their total alumni contact data. Worse, about 10% of alumni data is lost every year. Your contact with your older, high-value alumni slips away as they change their names, switch email addresses, or move their country of residence.

To mitigate this dire trend, employ crowdsourcing to easily replenish your pool of alumni contact information. On CueBack, users are encouraged to input the full names and email addresses of their friends to invite them to join the site. Your university benefits from receiving updated contact information for your constituents, while your users benefit from having more people that they know on the platform. This simple, mutually advantageous method allows your university to work with alumni to ensure that you have the most updated information possible.