Challenges to Setting Up an Alumni Association Website
What are the challenges you face in setting up a dedicated school Alumni Association website and how will you overcome them?
Roszona,
So, what would say are the challenges you might face in setting up a website?
June Gudeman
This can be a challenge however knowing that it takes time is just half the battle. Everything will soon come together.
Shannon,
Those are very real challenges. I appreciate your strategy ideas to be able to move forward and further engage your alumni. If you don't have the resources to develop a dedicated alumni site, possibly you could consider using social media to provide a 'connecting place' for your graduates and a place for you to communicate with them?
June Gudeman
My current challenge in setting up and/or establishing a dedicated school Alumni Association website is personnel and resources. The way for my organization to overcome those obstacles and/or challenges is to effectively plan a strategy to develop and further engage our students and alumni. Some possibilities may be to cross train both student services or career service personnel to preform some alumni task because they already have a previous relationship with the student. Additional this would be a cost effective model to implement until additional resources become available.
Linnet,
This is definitely a challenge. I'm curious what you would propose to help you stay in contact with your graduates?
June Gudeman
I think the biggest challenge is trying to stay in contact with our former students. Keeping it up to date is really difficult too because the information continually changes.
Elizabeth,
You have articulated well both the challenges and your plan to battle those challenges. I really like your idea of positioning the alumni pages within your established home site. We all know the challenge of keeping a website fresh and thinking through ways of drawing our grads to the site.
Great thoughts!
June Gudeman
One challenge could be strategic placement and visibility of the Alumni Association website within the context of the institutional website. Positioning the alumni website as a top tier page, accessed with a minimal number of click throughs will contribute to a higher volume of users.
A second challenge might be in the content; especially keeping the content current and relevant. Content and website design should be compelling users to engage with the institution. A call to action is important in successfully such efforts.
Leticia,
This is a challenge for most institutions. What creative ideas do you have to meet this challenge?
June Gudeman
A major challenge would be maintaining and keeping the alumni association website current.
Milagros,
Some of the newer content management systems (like Wordpress) are pretty easy to set up and your IT person could probably help you. I agree that having someone designated to maintain and update the website is critical. If your website gets stagnant, your grads will quit coming back to visit.
June Gudeman
Karen,
I think you've come up with a creative solution and certainly your Alumni Department would fit nicely with Marketing.
June Gudeman
Our school is very small, so our staff members wear many hats already. The problem would be who is going to undertake an additional task? Perhaps our IT person could do the initial set up, but who would maintain the website? I believe hiring a new part time staff member to actually maintain the website would be best in our situation.
I think one of the biggest challenges we face is that we are a small school and many of us already wear many hats so to take on another responsibility would be difficult especially to be able to do the job efficiently and effectively.
One possible solution that might be approved would be to hire someone part time to work with the Alumni Association website and team up with the Admissions/Marketing department. This person can brainstorm with the Admissions/Marketing department but do the actual legwork and put in the time needed to make the website effective.
Shawn,
Budget is an issue many alumni offices face, especially when it comes to the desire to set up a complete and well designed website with all the 'bells and whistles' we'd all like to include. I'm wondering if there might be a way to set up a smaller scale website, or even a page or two linked from your main website, or maybe even just using a Facebook page to begin engaging your alumni. As you obtain some momentum with your graduates, it may be easier for your organization to designate monies toward the development of a full fledged alumni site.
June Gudeman
There are two major challenges our College faces in setting up a dedicated Alumni Association website - technology and budget. Although, as a staff member, I am aware of how to set up webpages, assuring that all of the functionality required of an alumni website (such as transcript requests, etc) are fully available would include more training in website development. The other challenge is whether or not paying for an alumni association website is currently in the budget. Moving forward, I will assure that this is something that is carefully considered as yearly budgets are evaluated.
Susan,
It sounds like you have done a great job of thinking through how to offer 'something' to your graduates with limited resources. Many times institutions just don't do anything because they can't offer a full scale service. Your idea about using a website host is a great start. It also give you time to think through and plan strategically for what you want to include in your full service site.
June Gudeman
Coming from a small, distance university background, establishing an effective Alumni Association can be challenging. Because of the small size, resources are limited so alumni activities and services have to be spread out among the existing staff, faculty, and administrators which helps to also get buy-in from these departments. Eventually, there will be a dedicated department, but for now, we want to show students that, although small, we care about our graduates success. In delegating responsibility, we use a website host who provides website templates which can be updated and monitored with limited resources by the university. In this way, it is relatively easy to establish an dedicated Alumni webpage to start the services and make it a part of the strategic plan to grow these resources and offerings.
Jody,
I would agree that keeping your site 'active' and 'fresh' is a constant challenge and requires time and energy. I'm not sure that one way is better than another. We currently have one person dedicated to updating our site, but I'm sure a couple people could coordinate the task.
June Gudeman
