The Power of Social

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.

Zanzibar in Tanzania

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.

What happens in 60 seconds of the internet

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.

 

Our new Chief Marketing Officer Tommy on why he joined KonnectAgain

There are a million and one reasons as to why I wanted to join KonnectAgain but first let me give you a little bit of a background on myself. I am a Business Information Systems student in UCC and will graduate in September this year. I had an amazing four years in UCC and learnt more than I could ever have expected between things like being the president of the Entrepreneurial and Social society(E&S) for two years, co-founding the UCC CoderDojo and co-organising Ireland’s first ever Student Startup Weekend.

I have always maintained and expected the highest standards of myself in college and as a result had the opportunity to interview for some of the best large companies out there but as someone who is an aspiring entrepreneur, gaining some experience and working in a startup seemed like the only logical option.

So why KonnectAgain?

One of the main reasons I chose KonnectAgain was down to the fantastic co-founders, Jayne and Helen. They are two people I know very well and two people I know who are going to be very successful. The fact that there is already a relationship there with the trust I know they have in me and vice versa makes it a very happy working environment. Having worked under Jayne with E&S she has a good idea of my strengths and abilities, which means that she trusts me with the responsibility to make certain decisions that other “Head Honcho’s” wouldn’t do initially.

Already in the two weeks or so that I have been working I’ve had more responsibility than I did in 6 months while on placement in the US last summer. I really believe that startups are unrivalled when it comes to the amount of experience and steep learning curve that you can get.

When Jayne invited me for a coffee to explain the idea I must admit I didn’t know a huge amount about KonnectAgain which made me a little sceptical but I came out of the meeting asking where do I sign and knowing that it was the right next step for me. After all if she could sell it to me, I knew she could sell it to pretty much anyone.

The opportunity to have a huge role in helping KonnectAgain grow is something that really excites me. To help take the company from what it is today to something which hopefully will be hugely successful in the future seemed like something I couldn’t afford to miss out on. I think all in all a sense of achievement is what really motivates me and I know KonnectAgain will provide plenty of opportunities to achieve great things.

 

Twitter: @TomDunton

LinkedIn: ie.linkedin.com/in/tdunton/

Our San Fran experience so far….

San Francisco is like the holy grail for startups, so naturally when we learned we would be travelling there with Enterprise Ireland’s Access to Silicon Valley initiative we were extremely excited. This is our third week here and we are quickly falling in love with the place, the people, the atmosphere and what it has to offer for startups.

At first we imagined that the universities and colleges over here would have fantastic alumni management systems as there is a huge emphasis put on alumni engagement and donations in the states. In fact after meetings with the likes of Stanford University, Hult International Business School, UC Berkley, Cogswell College and Wharton Business School we are quickly realizing the huge potential market out here. We have received some great feedback and comments on our product and value proposition for colleges saying that we are filling a badly needed space.

In our first week here we competed in the Enterprise Ireland Access to Silicon Valley Demo night and we fought off some stiff competition to win best startup out of 12 Irish companies. This was a huge achievement as we pitched in front of some amazing judges including Gareth Keane of Startup Grind and Charles Dowd of Facebook. We also got the fantastic opportunity to explain the importance of KonnectAgain to our Taoiseach Enda Kenny.

Another great development we’ve had is the fact that we are now working with some major people within Facebook going forward as we look to transform the donations platform. Their offices at 1 Hacker Way were amazing and we even got to take a night cap there!

It’s been a whirlwind couple of weeks and we have certainly learnt a lot, the overall message out in the states is that it is hard to have the best of both worlds which is merging social media with current databases but we are excited about trying to leverage the strengths of both of them to deliver the best solution possible.

We are looking forward to filling you all in about the rest of the trip very soon!

What we’ve been up to for the last few weeks

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.

How Ignite100 helped us gain global exposure

You know what causes headaches, stress and that general this feels kind of shite feeling… trying to find the best accelerator program for you and your company!

 

 

Now a days there are HUNDREDS of accelerators and incubation programs around the globe all offering different deals, investment and terms. But its like like picking a partner without getting to know them and only going by word of mouth and first impressions. We spent a lot of time looking for the right accelerator that was right for us at our stage of the company.

Our Head Honcho Jayne really wanted to make sure to enquire, speak and meet up with as many accelerator programs as possible to ensure we had all the options. To us we wanted an accelerator program that gave us

•  exposure to the global market
• top class mentors
• short program
• pushed and challenged us as a team to ensure that our product had value and more importantly finding out would people pay for KonnectAgain !

We spoke with accelerator programs in US, Ireland, UK and Germany but we really got the ‘yes’ feeling with Ignite100. We found that Ignite100 understood us ,understood where we are and where we wanted to go with KonnectAgain!  They told us instantly how they can help us get to where we want to be!

We choose Ignite100, perfect first partner hands down.

Its a small thing but something small that stood out for us even at the very beginning is that after each interview stage we always got feedback from Ignite100. They either told us how wonderful and great we are or  equally how they couldn’t understand a word we said or how our value proposition isn’t as fantastic as it could be! But we did receive valuable feedback on our interview process and things we should improve on moving forward.

 

Mr Paul Smith himself, Director of Ignite100( Great crack altogether!)

Now, its no secret that you have to work hard, really really hard in an accelerator program and Ignite100 was certainly no exception to this rule.  Everyone worked hard… as we all wanted to meet  our deadlines to achieve the funding. But we ALWAYS received guidance from amazing mentors and Lyndsey, Paul and Tristan who were there day and night to help us along the way and were always free for the few pints in our local Brewdog to go through the shitty days and the best days!

Can honestly say this beer is the greatest craft beer EVER!

 

Ignite100 was unique and why it stood out for us was the investment deal, exposure to the UK and US market and being located in one of the up coming tech scenes Newcastle.

London Demo day!

Newcastle upon Tyne

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The investment deal that Ignite100 have is unique, it’s by far one of the biggest incentives for any team to work hard to achieve their milestones as the end goal is the £85,000 convertible loan note. We were one of the lucky teams to achieve this and it is something we are massively proud of as it has helped us move forward on a global perspective.

So if you are in a new start up company and your not too sure where you should go or who to apply for I would highly recommend Ignite100. If your team is impatient, passionate about their business, have a global vision , kick ass team who want to grow fast then apply for Ignite100. We have gained invaluable contacts and experience in New York and UK, gained traction, acquired customers and have become investor ready.

We are delighted that we are nearly closing our first round  of funding which is going to help us grow on a global stage, this is only after 3 months after we finished Ignite100.

We made life long friends with both the program directors Paul, Lyndsey and Tristan and all the other start up companies and all the investors/mentors. Everyone at Ignite100 wants you to succeed, so go do it!

The whole Gang in foursquare, NYC

Importance of fundraising and how only 1% of alumni in Ireland donate

 

 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

Female entrepreneurs, ‘The Summit’ and what we really thought!

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!

 

 

The power of being apart of an alumni network

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.

Introducing KonnectAgain!

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.