Pravara Group of Institutions successfully built 72,839 profiles amounting to 85% of their total database. The biggest achievement is major share of the profiles gathered i.e. 38,989 accounts are direct alumni sign ups on the portal. They have been working consistently for over 5 years with Vaave to achieve this result. It displays patience, commitment, and importance given by the group to alumni engagement. What’s more, is that the alumni portal sees an average of 350+ new registrations every month making the portal a thriving hub of connections and opportunities.
Background:
Dr. Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil, Chairman, Pravara Rural Education Society had a vision of bringing all the alumni from different institutions under one roof together so that all the stakeholders like alumni, students, and institutions are benefited. Institution tried with local vendors building a static website which did not meet their expectations. Then, he roped in Vaave as we had expertise in assisting another similar educational group. The idea was to build a dedicated alumni team for each institution and a chain of alumni coordinators at each level.
Mr. Radhakrishnan held a meeting with all the heads of institutions along with a few significant department heads and set a goal that each department should achieve 90% of their database. Mr. Patil’s vision has become the driving force in achieving such excellent results.
Hurdles:
Pravara Group had a static website until 9/2018. Their old website suffered from various logistical setbacks such as managing its members. Due to its outdated methodologies, the website made it inevitable for all the alumni coordinators to supervise the content being published in it. Various departments used Excel to maintain the data owing to the database issues making it difficult to maintain the data freshness index of the same.
Tactics & Techniques:
The group decided it was high time to move on to an efficient platform that would cater to their needs whilst providing a wholesome experience. Their deft maneuvering of portals offered them ample resources and talents at their disposal to completely indulge themselves in alumni management. The alumni office came up with some impeccable solutions to meet their goals. Some of them are:
- Importing Alumni Data: Vaave’s dedicated team helped the institution(s) migrate the data from the Excel sheets maintained by the individual departments onto the alumni portal.
- Onboarding & Guiding Alumni Coordinators: The alumni office onboarded their alumni coordinators to manage their members and content such as news, and events. They have appointed coordinators at all levels (institution, department and batch) and assigned them roles with permissions on the alumni platform.
- Targeted Content: To keep the alumni engaged, the news categories on the portal are customized according to the alumni with different backgrounds. Categories such as blogs, campus news, success stories etc are being published regularly to inform the alumni about what’s happening at their institution.
- Job Listings for Alumni: The group of institutions also leveraged Vaave’s dedicated team to help their alumni in placements. The portal had witnessed 750+ sourced listings for the alumni.
- Creating Chapters: Chapters are integral to the engagement of alumni. Realizing this, the alumni association assisted in establishing two well-functioning Pune and Nasik chapters with 3000+ alumni in each. Alumni in these chapters are very well connected to each other.
Impact Achieved:
- Database Building: Pravara Group placed itself as the frontrunner in alumni engagement by building 85% of its database. More than 50% (38,989) of the profiles in the portal are gathered from direct alumni sign ups. They could not get these many sign ups using a local static website.
- Increase in Member Count: By engaging alumni through various means, the portal is consistently receiving 350+ alumni registrations. With a pace like this, the institution will gain all the information of the alumni very soon.
- Regular Engagement via Content: The alumni team makes sure that the alumni are well-informed about the institution and their fellow members. Apart from posting regular updates, they put up information related to Training, Placement, Industry Visit, Mentoring, and Consulting as well. More than 450 articles have been published.
- Opportunities for Alumni: The jobs section in the alumni portal has seen 750+ sourced jobs along with additional 400+ listings posted by the alumni. The latter number tells us that the alumni are connected and want to help each other.
- Shared Responsibility & Ownership: The key to Pravara’s success is distribution and compartmentalization of work. They’ve appointed institution level coordinators, department coordinators (faculty) and a few batch level coordinators amounting to 180+ overall alumni coordinators. The operations are structured and the centralized alumni office is accountable for all the coordinators under the hierarchy.
As all the members of the institutions of Pravara Educational Society come under one umbrella, it became easy for the alumni coordinators to create great opportunities by leveraging their alumni community.