We are delighted to announce that the Konnect Alumni Conference is at capacity and we will have a full house of attendees and speakers next Friday in Iveagh House.
Continue reading “Konnect Alumni Conference – One week to go…”
Over the past six months we have spent the majority of our time researching and learning from the top universities in the world and figuring out exactly what it is that differentiates them from the rest when it comes to alumni relations.
We wanted to understand why everyone knows about the Harvard alumni and why Stanford brings in hundreds of millions in donations every year. What exactly is it that they do that is different to everyone else.
That difference or secret ingredient that we found they had over the rest is ENGAGEMENT.
The very best universities create and establish strong foundations with their alumni that are built not just on their relationship with the college but on interests and topics that are relevant to each individual alumnus. Think about it, would you be more likely to engage and donate back to your university if they provided you with interesting content that you can view where you want and when you want.
It comes down to a simple concept explained below by Gary Vaynerchuk. Sometimes you have to see the bigger picture, don’t lead with an ask, in this case a donation. Instead if you can provide something of value for alumni, be it an event or interesting content, build up that relationship and then ask for donations, and your results will more likely be far greater. That is the best way to get the attention of your audience and create an engaged community of alumni.
After conducting research for the last 6 months we now have a greater understanding of the global university sector, some fantastic mentors and most importantly an understanding of the different trends in alumni relations. What we have learned has helped us implement and tailor our platform to give alumni officers the best software to help engage their alumni and manage them effectively to ensure both sides get the most from the relationship.
We want to help foster and improve the alumni culture in Ireland and we feel that sharing this information with Irish universities will help improve that engagement.
Here at KonnectAgain we have decided to host a conference that is solely dedicated to discussing the differences in alumni relations around the world. Topics will include what are the major challenges and different solutions, the future trends of alumni relations and how do we maximize our return on our investment in alumni.
We want to give all alumni officers attending the opportunity to learn from industry leaders and other alumni officers experiences. It is an opportunity to have conversations and share insights with a large number of people with the same goals. We will facilitate those discussions and help you take how you manage your alumni to the next level.
For more information visit www.konnectagain.com to request a demo or more information.
Our guest blogger this week is Connor Murphy, Founder of DataHug. DataHug works with companies internal contacts, emails, and relationships with clients and leverages that data to find the best way to connect and engage people. Here’s his two cents on alumni..
Let’s be honest, nobody’s dream job is to work at McKinsey or any of these “large firms” for that matter. They want to be Ex-McKinsey, let me explain why…
For most, McKinsey is the vehicle to getting somewhere else in your career. Yes you want to enjoy the journey but smart, ambitious and talented people also want to ensure that the journey helps them get to somewhere even better (or at least increase their odds of getting to where they want to go when they have figured it out). However both sides can see huge benefits from this if they are willing to look at it from an opportunist’s perspective.
The process generally goes as follows, first, McKinsey has access to some of the best new talent available when they graduate, which they can hire and help develop for a number of years while utilising their fresh perspective on the problems they face. While some do stay others then move on to be entrepreneurs, managers in top technology firms or very senior positions in the largest companies in the world.
So why do graduates choose McKinsey when a lot of previous graduates have moved on? How do McKinsey use this to their advantage? And what are the parallels between what they do and alumni management?
McKinsey have a fantastic alumni management system that monitors everyone from the very first day they become a new employee right until the end of their career, wherever they end up. They understand that sometimes they are a stepping stone to other things but instead of seeing it as a loss to the company, they celebrate the success of their alumni as they progress throughout their career, and emphasize how McKinsey helped get them there.
They have an amazing ability to brand these successes as products of their own ‘graduate academy’, something which many new graduates see. When ambitious people are looking at how they can climb the ladder they tend to look at the paths of people who are already in positions of success and attempt to mimic those paths as routes to their own success.
Some of McKinsey’s successful alumni include: Wolfgang Bernhard (Chairman of Volkswagen), Henrique De Castro (Former Google Exececutive & Chief Operating Officer at Yahoo), Bernard T. Ferrari ( Dean of Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School) and James McNerney (Chairman and CEO of Boeing), see here for a full list.
The above means that McKinsey have an already captive audience of the top graduates looking to apply for positions in the company, ensuring they have a huge competitive advantage over other companies when it comes to recruiting graduates. Thus always ensuring that they always have one of the most skilled and successful workforces worldwide.
There can be huge parallels between what McKinsey and alumni officers do if they take the same approach to managing their alumni. Managing your alumni from the outset will help you build a rapport with students before they even leave, making it easier to engage them once they have left. Like at McKinsey, alumni officers should, where possible, celebrate the success of their alumni with them as it’s helps build very strong relationships. If you can manage your alumni the way McKinsey do, not only do you guarantee yourself a much more engaged alumni base but you also increase the demand and calibre of people applying to your institution. You too can create a captive audience of excellentnsecond level students if you promote the success stories of your past.
You can’t judge a company or university on their current employees or students. The best place to learn about the culture, values and impact an organisation or institution has had is to look at their outputs, i.e. their alumni. KonnectAgain can be hugely beneficial in helping you build this picture as it gives you the most accurate and insightful picture of what an organisation’s alumni population looks like. It helps you engage, manage and understand this valuable cohort so you can maximise both the benefits you give and get in return. As they say, history is the greatest predictor of the future…
The power of Social Media when interacting with Alumni was brought to the attention of a potential client we met recently. They shared their story with us and we feel it is one the majority of Alumni Officers could relate to.
An alumni member of a Dublin college came to their alumni relations manager and said they were planning on travelling to Tanzania and wanted to reach out to some fellow alumni there to see if they wanted to meet up. The alumni relations manager of course said sure I’ll take a look on our system and see what we can root up on any alumni over there. The current system being used is one which the majority of universities are operating today, and after the Alumni Relations Manager searched the system, there was no information to offer. Not giving up, she used a LinkedIn group set up by alumni to pose the question and see if in fact there were any graduates in Tanzania. Within a couple of hours she had 5 alumni in Tanzania who were willing to take and email and meet up out there.
It’s amazing how much data is at your fingertips through social platforms and if you can leverage that to your advantage, you will inevitably make your task much easier, your time more productive and less costly.
A real difficulty for any Alumni Relations Manager, as I’m sure they will tell you, is keeping their alumni audience continually engaged. No doubt previous channels like email, print, telemarketing, events, and web are effective when used in the right context – with someone who is willing to listen. However, it’s very difficult to maintain that engagement on a large scale through those mediums without inevitably annoying some people.
The introduction and adoption of social media however has brought along with it a really interesting offering. It’s created, as we see it, a new form of digital newspaper tailored specifically to that person’s interests. Today with these social mediums, Alumni can skim through their newsfeed and quickly choose what content they want to engage with and read just like you would with a newspaper. Therefore, it provides you with a medium allowing you to push content to tailored groups or all your followers and only those who are interested in that content can engage with it.
For that reason and many more; we stress to all clients how important social is and why each must make sure to have not a good, but the best social presence.
It’s been an amazing few weeks and since our last blog post there’s been so many developments that we thought we’d put together a blog post to keep you all updated.
So first off, we’ve spent the last couple of months working really hard on expanding our reach and exploring the UK and US markets as well as Ireland. We are extremely excited to start working with Universities further a field and as a result we have moved offices from Wayra in Dublin over to Newcastle and London.
The expansion of course brings with it challenges, opportunities and plenty of long nights but we’ve spent a lot of time focusing on building our team and our product and feel like we are really in the right place to take the next step. Moving over to the UK has given us the opportunity to speak with some fantastic new investors, who we will keep under wraps for now but look forward to speaking about in due course.
We have also just brought on board our first new member of the team Tommy Dunton. Tommy is graduating from BIS this year and will be taking care of sales and marketing. Tommy is excited to tell you all about why he chose KonnectAgain over some of the top multinationals out there.
One of our biggest milestones over the past few weeks was the opportunity we got from Enterprise Ireland, to pitch in front of all the presidents of the Irish universities. It was a great platform for us to explain the current problems universities are having managing their alumni and why the KonnectAgain service is so powerful and valuable to them. Finally with the growth of our team we have been able to start adding more customers, with the National College of Art and Design coming on board as a trial user.
We have also just jetted off to San Francisco with Enterprise Ireland to hopefully establish a relationship with some new universities in the US market which we look forward to telling you all about in our next blog post.
Ireland as a country is widely known around the globe for having an educated, english speaking and highly skilled population. We are lucky to have some of the top companies in the world base themselves in Ireland with even more companies arriving on our shores including Dropbox, Twitter and and Apple.
We have 7 main Universities on our Island who produce top graduates but yet out of all our graduates only 1% of our entire alumnus is giving back. This results in Universities depending on the semi state bodies for finance and constantly losing out on opportunities with their graduates due to lack of correct information.
The total of alumni donations was €50 million last year in Ireland in comparison to the UK with £856m and US with $23.1 billion. Universities in Ireland have a huge dependency on the state for funding such;
UCD- 60% funded by semi state bodies (€87million)
UCC- 81% funded by semi state bodies (€81million)
Ireland isn’t the only country battling this problem as the UK has becoming increasingly aware of the lack of donations into the third sector.Last year only 1.2% of all UK alumni donated back to their Universities totalling €856 million. Oxbridge University was one of the only successful Universities who had a successful fundraising model as they raised €329 million alone which confirms that by having a strong fundraising management team and tool that higher donations will be received.
Over the past six months we spent a lot of time in the US and the UK researching the alumni market and the importance of alumni relations and reasons for lack of donations.
Some of the most popular reasons are;
− Lack of a strong relationship between University and alumni
− Low attendance rates at events
− Alumni becoming irritated by constant calls for donations
− Universities having incorrect information to communicate with their alumni.
The UK and Ireland have a very traditional style when it comes to dealing with their alumni. It is extremely time consuming as it requires the University to have a large workforce trying to constantly keep up to date with the changing of information. This leads to
– Low turn out of alumni networking events
– Extremely low donations
– Difficult building business networks
– Hard to promote the success of graduates as a promotion tool for potential students
– Disadvantage to alumni community as they can’t reach out to alumnus community
The US is a dominant leader with alumni donations with their main source of income received from their alumni. Universities in the US have as high as 60% of their alumni donating back to their institutions. They have established long and strong relationships with their alumnus, which helps donations in the future.
It is essential that we improve significantly our fundraising model both in Ireland and the UK as fees are only due to increase. We must ensure Ireland is still globally recognised as an educated country by establishing stronger relations and realising the importance of keeping up to date with our alumnus.
By 2015 Irish student fee’s are expected to rise up to €3000 which is going to be a struggle for future and current students. Irish Universities can help this by working with their alumnus to have a strong donations platform that will help future students attend University. Education is the key to economic growth and there must be a stronger emphasis on donations.
Small changes Universities can make are as follows:
− Improving their donations by adding a ‘ click to donate’ button on their website.
− Establishing a stronger relationship with their alumnus by targeted events
− Keeping up to date with contact information
− Engaging with a platform to help them achieve goals
− Ability to demonstrate that public good is being served
We have just returned to the UK from spending the past week in Dublin at the Dublin Web Summit, now known as ‘ The Summit’. We had a display table for the Tuesday along with another few hundred start up companies. We took a lot from the two days some good, some bad but some incredible things!
Jayne & Saskia getting ready to board the Express!
We started our journey off by boarding the Start Up Express train organized by Trustev, PCH and Voxpro. This was by far one of the most well organized events I have ever attended and also my first time attending an event that was constantly on the move. It made us very proud to be a Start Up company from Cork as the quality of start up’s and attendees from Cork was utterly amazing. We take our hats off to Trustev for a really amazing job.
We had the opportunity to talk to some media and we had a very interesting interview with Silicon Republic around the topic of being a female entrepreneur. This topic is always highlighted as we are a team of three females, which isn’t usually the ‘norm’. This is something we are very proud of but we also never expect to stand out as much as we actually do. It is great to be a team of female entrepreneurs as the support is brilliant and it only seems to be getting better.
Jayne (Head Honcho) had the opportunity to pitch in front of TechStars on the train. This was a tough pitch as it was 30 seconds and every team was warned to expect some hard criticism but we seemed to come out smiling at the end. The feedback we got from TechStars was really excellent and they highlighted some points that every start up company should know immediately:
– How are you going to make money?
– How big is your market?
– TELL A STORY
– And how important your hand shake really is!
Over all we really enjoyed the experience of Web Summit especially getting to see some of our super star companies including EverNote, DropBox, Stripe and of course Elon Musk.
The only criticism that we would have over the few days was with the registered workshops. We had registered for an education workshop to meet investors in that certain field but when we arrived at the event there was over 20 start up companies and only 2 investors. As a result we didn’t have the opportunity to speak to any investors as there would be at least five start up companies talking to one investor at the one time!
Some of the things we learned were:
– BE PREPARED: Having your elevator pitch prepared helped us a lot. People don’t have time to listen to your entire story you need to captivate them within the first few seconds. This worked really well for us as we could explain who we are, what the problem is and how we are going to solve it in under 30 seconds.
– Always be friendly when you have a booth. If you look disinterested and distracted than people are more than likely not going to come up and say hi. It is super important that you look happy and excited because than it is likely that other people will feel that way as well.
– Don’t be afraid to just go and say a quick hello to anyone. One thing we notice time and time again is that people are more than likely always willing to help or at least say hello, you’d be surprised what could happen!
– Find a wing man/woman: Get to know someone who knows the web summit better than you do! We had a fantastic wing man this year who told us the best places to go at night time and the best workshops and speakers that would be good for KonnectAgain.
We met some amazing investors during the two days and one of the investors we met has now established a very good relationship with us. Everyone that we met in the Summit has already exchanged emails with the KonnectAgain team and we have made some great friends and contacts as a result!
But all in all it was a great few days we learned a lot, gained a lot and ate a lot!
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.
KonnectAgain is a very young startup based in Cork that since it’s inception 4 months ago has built a product, acquired 5 paid trials and fought it’s way to the final 20 companies in the prestigious Wayra incubation program.
16 months, 2 start ups later, products sold, risks taken but it was all worth it to have founded and developed KonnectAgain , our “third time lucky” start up that is growing fast and furious.
To give you a proper introduction of who we are and what we do: KonnectAgain is the ideal solution for you and your institution to keep up to date with the essential information that forever connects you and your alumni base, making sure that neither ever lose touch again and no more opportunities are missed.
KonnectAgain was one of these ideas that began as a seed in co founder’s, David and Jayne’s, heads 16 months ago when they started their first start up company urYearBook. urYearBook disrupted the traditional method of how yearbooks were created and brought the traditional yearbook creation process to an online experience making it more secure and enjoyable for users to create yearbooks.
Throughout the urYearBook journey David and Jayne were in the fortunate position of meeting many Universities and school departments in the hope of growing the urYearBook brand. After meeting teachers, parents and students it was clear that there was a problem with institutions and alumnus alike in keeping in touch with each other. It also became clear that this led to a lot of missed opportunities in terms of graduate job opportunities, funding opportunities or simply friends trying to reconnect with classmates. Jayne and David found the more popular approaches that institutions would take to keep up to date with their alumni would be trawling through Linkedin with the hope of finding their alumni’s relevant and up to date information or if all else fails picking up the phone and ringing to see if they can gather more information on their alumni.
Jayne and David decided to explore this problem in more depth and rang every IT and University in Ireland and many in the UK to see how they keep in contact with their alumni, do they have consistent and up to date details for their alumni and do they find current systems in place such as Gold Mine and Razors edge effective? The results were astonishing as many Universities find that a staggering 60% of alumni contact details were either incorrect or not relevant. This problem arose as institutions became unable to keep up with the ever changing contact career and location details of their alumni base. This is the problem that KonnectAgain solves.
We found being recent graduates of a University that we were unable to take full advantage of our alumni network around the world. We always enjoy the experience of meeting new people in our line of work but always seeked a tool that we could use to link directly to our alumni networks to give us more opportunities to meet our alumni around the world and a tool that was exclusive for our alumni.
KonnectAgain platform is built for two reasons, to reconnect with your lost classmates, which over time become distant contacts in your social media address book, and to give you the opportunity to connect with your entire alumni base that are around the world to ensure that you use every potential opportunity to leverage that diaspora.
In the past 4 months we have been in a great position as we have secured 5 trials from different educational departments in Ireland to use the KonnectAgain platform over the next month. We are excited to see the results of the trials and see if people enjoy the new experience of linking up with their alumni around the world all under the same roof which is KonnectAgain.
The KonnectAgain team are waiting to battle it out in September to holpefully make it into the final 10 for Wayra program.
KonnectAgain 