Alumni Business Information - How much and who collects it?

Tom Klimchak

We're looking to really increase the amount of business & employment information that we have for our alumni. Would any of you be willing to share percentages of how many of your alumni records have employment data? Who is responsible for actively collecting that info at your institution? Any ideas would be appreciated!

Gina Gerhard

If you have an alumni community set up in NetCommunity, you can compose and send out BBNC surveys to your alumni asking for all sorts of questionnaire data, including current employment, contact information, their areas of interest, etc.  



This is a convenient way to ask your alums for data.  Typically you have to manually look through this data and enter into the RE records, but you can also record on their records when you last sent them the questionnaire data so you can develop a scheduled program for reaching back out to them for updates.

Paula Alionyte

This entirely depends on organisational startegy and there are a number of ways to gather this information. I have not heard of any positions spefically designed for collecting alumni employment data, and would suggest that most of the times it's various departments working together to collect data from a number of sources and database administrator who puts it all together on the database. 



Email communications with integrated profile update forms, various competitions asking to update details in return of a chance to win a prize, magazines with update forms, alumni network sign-ups, DLHE data by HESA (Higher Education Statistics Agency) at universities, university destination surveys for leavers at schools are one of the major sources...

Darren Ponce

As other posters have suggested, having a carrot at the end of a stick for your Alumni to enter tehir data on their own is probably best. At the CHM we had our grant and coporate officer work together with the person in the fundraising department responsible for entering data to input contacts and their affiliatoions on the Relationship tab. Unfortunately, contact updates and employment entry into the tab has been underused and it is still not very helpful when cultivating. To be fair, there has been little interest in putting the Relationship tab to good use (targeting cultivating, prospect vetting, etc) so interest in putting a heavy amount of resources into it has been limited.