When people first hear alumni what do they think… old, outdated, pointless, hard to know who is who? That’s what most people feel like when they have no connection with their alumni or their institution? Do people ever think of alumni as invaluable contacts, potential employment, giving back?

Four years my University knew what I studied, where I lived, what my number was and probably where I had my morning coffee. Then I graduated.. and now they know nothing about me! This is why we wanted to build something to connect back with our University and connect back with our alumni and so KonnectAgain was established.

Over the past four months the team have been researching the alumni market and talking to nearly all the Universities/IT’s and schools in Ireland  and the UK just to see how they value their alumni are. The response was staggering, nearly every single institution admitted that their alumni is invaluable to them but yet they don’t have an effective system that gives them up to date information on their alumni..?

Some Universities use these big systems such as Razor Edge and Goldmine, these are massively expensive and massively inefficient. These systems are not easy to use and still don’t solve the problem of giving the institution the opportunity to have consistent and relevant information about the alumni. Why pay so much for a system that is only doing half  a good job?

This seems to be the main problem; students don’t feel the need to connect back with their institution for the following reasons;

–       What’s the point?

–       What do they gain?

–       Do they really want to go to the effort of informing the University of their where abouts?

Universities aren’t making the connection back with the graduates user friendly. The tradition of sending our graduate magazine and paper to fill in your new information is still happening. This method isn’t efficient and doesn’t give the alumni an incentive to connect with them.

Alumni don’t understand the value of having this connection? Here at KonnectAgain we are all recent graduates and we have all lost touch with our institution within A YEAR. We don’t have access to our massive 100,000 alumni family around the world as a result our institution don’t know where we are or more importantly what were doing!

We are building the KonnectAgain platform to fix these problems. We want to create a platform that is time efficient, easy to use and gives you the opportunity to have all of your alumni at the tip of your fingers tips when you need and want them.

Its simple really, you log on, create a profile and that’s it, your one stop shop for your alumni. We want to make it easy for the user to connect with both their alumni and institution instead of trailing through other social media sites trying to find who they want connect up with.

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