5 Things To Consider While Choosing The Right Alumni Database Software
Alumni Database

5 Things To Consider While Choosing The Right Alumni Database Software

Often, the chief concern of educational institutions remains concentric towards finding a substitute to maintaining records of alumni using traditional excel sheets. With thoughtfully-purchased alumni database software, you can eliminate the daunting tasks of juggling through spreadsheets. Colleges and universities can benefit a lot from the alumni database. 

They can leverage it for maintaining alumni relations with ease. Different alumni databases worldwide have disparate features. In the race of offering novel and price-worthy solutions, you might not get tricked into buying a brilliant technology. What to do then while selecting a perfect alumni database software for your requirements? Follow this piece to know the top five things to consider while choosing an alumni database software.

1. Data Validity Management

“Having the data is not important. Instead, having valid data is super important.”

For any alumni database software, the ability to identify the validity of data is a must-have. However, for any institution, identifying the validity of data is the second biggest challenge after gathering the data. Colleges and universities collect email IDs from alumni but fail to keep up which of them are valid or active. 

In this case, an alumni database software could help scan the data with technology and identify whether it is relevant or not. Besides this, you can check the number of your alumni count and all the unique IDs with the record in the database and come to a conclusion fast. Beyond this, data validation is also necessary to extract, transform, and load data from the source database to a target data warehouse for analysis.

Think if you don’t have valid data in the first place, how will you ensure perfect alumni relations management? That’s why you should invest in an alumni database platform that has data validation features. 

2. Alumni Database Organization

After validating the data, it comes to organizing the data in a way that essential information can be accessed when it’s time. There are lots of alumni database software available in the market claiming their platforms are easy to use for alumni management. But, in reality, these platforms give you a hard time when it’s the time of usage. Before investing in alumni software, you should consider its features of data organization.

To decide upon the right software, you must seek answers to these questions addressed below

  • How well are the alumni profiles sorted? 
  • What are all the filters available to find data as per needs on the spot?
  • How responsive is the professional directory designed?
  • How easy or difficult it is to extract the information?
  • How relevant results do you get when you add a filter or search for a keyword? 

These are a few questions that might help you recognize how well alumni software can organize data for you. If you get answers to these questions, it means bingo! You have found the most suitable alumni database software for you.

3. Real-time Updates 

Once you validate the data and organize the data chunks well in order, your job does not end yet. The third big responsibility comes to maintaining the available data and keeping it up-to-date. Most of the time, Alumni offices/Professionals face challenges when it comes to updating alumni data. Why? Because traditional methods involve manually updating all the profiles. For this, alumni professionals have to call or email the alumnus, seek updates, and take follow-ups with them. Whether they revert or not with their details, you have to update the data on your own in both scenarios. 

Sounds tedious?? It is indeed!

However, if you want to change this and adapt more advanced solutions for keeping up-to-date alumni profiles, You must switch to a sophisticated alumni database software, which can make it really easy and simple, add your alumni to the platform in bulk, send follow ups to all with a click, let them update their profiles by themselves, track the progress and connect better!! Sounds easy??? This way, you can save hundreds of hours and still maintain the latest data changes swiftly.

Do you want to know more about the features of AlmaShines alumni database software in detail?

Request Free Demo

4. Analytics And Reports Generation

“You need to know your alumni first to manage them wisely.” 

And what could be the best way to know your alumni than tracking their behaviour? But the real question is, how can you track the behaviour of your alumni? The answer is simple – through alumni database software. 

An excellent alumni platform lets you track your alumni, their location, organization, industry domain, their response to your communication and everything that you may need to make your alumni relations highly relevant and engaging for your alumni

A great alumni platform lets you evaluate all the analytics based on the real-time demographics and download the demographic-based reports. Using these insights, you can understand and improve your content strategy and decide what content to modify to increase alumni engagement at the maximum. 

5. Hassle-free Access of Database to Alumni Office

Above all, team members from the alumni management office of an educational institution use the alumni database software the most. That’s why it is super significant that they should be able to access the database effortlessly. Right from updating the data to maintaining and managing it, from organizing alumni events to promotion, from launching campaigns to fundraising, alumni office members do a  bunch. To ensure their alumni management-related operations go hassle-free, you should invest in proper alumni database software. Doing this will give you three benefits:

  • One – alumni office members could access the database from anywhere and at any time. 
  • Two – anyone with admin rights from the alumni office can share the entire database with authorities in the time of need.
  • Three- All of this has to happen in a secure manner

Conclusion

The bottom line is you should purchase software that offers you all the features to ensure successful and stress-free alumni management. On top of all, your alumni engagement strategy plays a pivotal role in your triumphant alumni relations. But, technology can make your work a lot easier. 

Almashines has already empowered 800+ alumni offices with its advanced alumni database software to build, manage & grow the alumni database seamlessly. Click here to know more or drop us a mail on [email protected] with all your queries and feedback.