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In Search of Catholic School Excellence
Exploring the programs, people, and practices making a difference in Catholic education. Join host Thomas Boles as we hear from principals, teachers, and innovators shaping the future of Catholic schools. Whether you're a leader looking for ideas or an advocate for Catholic education, this show is your guide to what’s working—and why it matters.
Thomas Boles: Welcome to In Search of Catholic School Excellence, the show where we spotlight the program's, people, and practices making a real difference in Catholic education today.
If you're a school leader striving to build a community of faith, excellence, and innovation, you've come to the right place.
Each episode brings you ideas that are working, stories that inspire and new possibilities for your school's mission.
Let's explore what's working and what's possible.
Welcome folks.
We're here for another episode this week, joined again by Becky Wong.
And we're talking about alumni and alumni engagement.
As we're sitting in this fall festival time, it makes me think that here's a great opportunity where the school is doing something really cool, and likely our entire community is invited.
But, you know, what have we done with the alumni and how have we been able to engage them and to, you know, let them know that we're still here.
And so that's the basis for our episode today.
Thank you, Becky, for joining us.
Thank you for inviting me again.
And the whole idea of having alumni as part of our community is not just, you know, sending that newsletter off and just asking for donations or that's the only time they hear from us.
We want it to be a positive interaction and needs to be constant where, you know, how many times, Thomas, have you gotten something in the mail that's like, oh, here's a newsletter, here's the envelope.
I'm like, I don't read it anymore.
Maybe I'll take a glance and go, oh, what are people up to?
Here's a donor list.
You know, I think there's, yeah, there's two sides to that though.
You know, one some of the schools that I've been to are regularly sending me things, right?
So I get things, you know, maybe four times a year.
And then other schools send me nothing.
And so, you know, when it comes time for me to make on my donations, whether that be a monthly donation, a yearly donation, whatever it might be, the schools who have asked me are the ones who get it.
And because I've had time to think about do I want to contribute at all to that school and do I. Does that fit in the budget?
And so I can decide when I'm gonna donate ahead of time.
Right.
And I think it's something that the colleges and high schools do a really good job of.
But the elementary schools do a very poor job.
And then what you happen, what happens is you have a situation where they come outta the blue and ask you for like a gazillion dollars
to rebuild whatever, and all of a sudden, you know, they're back in your life asking for money and you're nah, you know, because it's.
What have you done for me lately?
And that's a terrible way of thinking about it.
But you can't put it on the alumni to be the ones to have this original thought of, gee, I wonder what's going on with the school.
Let me go find out, oh, let me donate all my money to them.
Right.
It just, it's not gonna work that way.
So we have to find ways to be consistent, as you're saying, be consistent with our communication with them, and hopefully that it's not always asking for money.
You can always include a donate.
Button at the bottom of the email.
Or you can always include, you know, a paragraph saying, you know, or the same paragraph even, you know, please help us with our whatever initiative and that's all fine.
But if the only time they ever hear you for a fundraiser, then you're probably gonna get fall in deaf ears.
Oh yeah, definitely.
So we definitely have to look at three things when we're talking about building our alumni community.
First off, you know, like managing the data, where are we getting our alumnis?
And a lot of times what I notice is like at the beginning of the school year or the end of the school year when we send a email out with our newsletter.
I get a big long list of people unsubscribing and that makes me sad.
All of a sudden they're like, oh, we don't wanna hear from you anymore.
I'm like, oh no.
Why are they unsubscribing?
I guess they don't need to know, you know, this is the first day of school because their child graduated already.
But how do we, you know, keep people engaged and not just unsubscribe?
The second thing is like, how do we increase alumni engagement like.
What are we offering in terms of value?
Like you said, what are, what have we done for our alumni lately and is there different ways we can recognize our alumnis?
And lastly, like infrastructure.
Like, hey, now we have a database.
Who's managing it?
Who's maintaining it?
Where's this database?
Hidden or not hidden or who's in charge of it?
So a lot of times like, hey.
We have all these kids.
They're still part of our school family.
Once they graduate, do they leave us forever?
Of course.
We wanna hear from them.
And my husband grew up in the city, you know, he, during the pandemic, you know, and unfortunately the school closed in the last 10 years.
But during the pandemic was cool.
Is that.
There was a Facebook group and there was a meetup of all the alumni.
They're like, Hey, join us.
Just once a week meet up.
It's like, these are what people are looking for.
You know, they graduated like 30 years ago from elementary school, but they're still staying connected.
So how are we doing that?
I would say first step, start with our, graduating class, you know, right before graduation.
What are we doing?
You know, we always find out like, well, high schools are going going to in, can we collect their emails and not the school email, but like a personal email.
Have their parents update their contact information.
Maybe even have like a alumni parent group to keep them connected.
And put this somewhere.
You gotta have a database, you know, start with that.
I like that.
I like that.
Let's pause there for a second because thinking about even nothing else than.
You have this current graduating class coming up, right?
And so, you know, you have the opportunity before they graduate to set all this up.
So what if we we not only help them transition to, maybe it's just the parent's email for that moment, and you collect their student emails at this later point.
But what if you set up in April or May an event in September or October to get that class back together?
Have like.
You know, movie pizza, ice cream, social or whatever, something simple.
Invite all the families back and just like have a night.
Like this is the class of, you know, this will be 2026, the class of 2026 you know, party.
Have 'em get together, share stories, whatever, and make that a recurring thing that happens within, with the eighth graders every year.
Not only do you keep those kids and get their new email addresses, but you also keep the parents.
I love the idea of the parent alumni group, you know, and making sure that has some sort of purpose and that purpose isn't necessarily to raise money for the school, it's to keep those folks connected, because if they stay connected.
They're gonna support whatever it is.
And that support might be financial down the road, but it might also be showing up in numbers when you have an event or a, you know, a memorial or something like that.
It might be helping with donation drives for, you know, a. The service projects that the school is doing, whatever it might be, those people are still part of your community.
But I love about that.
Let's plan this ahead of time and let's set up structures so that this can continue.
And then you can say, well now we're gonna invite all the alumni for I don't know, trip to Great America, you know, theme park type thing, right?
We're gonna have, you know, the alumni and of course they're gonna pay for it.
This is all it takes is a little bit of energy to plan.
And at that point, those kids are old enough to get themselves there so you don't have to worry about transportation, right?
So, you know, it's there's lots of little things you can do, but if you set up that system before they graduate.
Then the parents won't unsubscribe because they know it's something special.
And as we get further along, you know that I think we talk about consistent communication.
It's you're not signing them up for the same school newsletter where it talks about like, what's pizza lunch on Friday?
And like what uniform day?
Like they don't want to hear any of that.
That's why they unsubscribe.
So if you already show them, like within that first weeks of them graduating, welcome to the alumni group.
You know, we're so happy that you've, you know, made it thus far and here's what you can expect and you can share something with them, remind them about the event, and so on and so forth.
I think it becomes very simple if you set up ahead of time.
I love that idea.
We should push more schools to do that.
Oh yeah.
And speaking of, you know, even the week after graduation, I don't know if you noticed this, but a lot of times I'll see, our eighth graders or our graduates come back
that following week, get the whole school involved, let the teachers know like, Hey, we're gonna have a few volunteers or just graduates coming back the following week.
What are some activities that you can, you know, get them involved?
So it builds in and reminds our graduates, say, Hey, you're welcome to come back, whether it's next week, next year, five years down the road.
You know?
I know.
You know, they don't have school.
What else are they doing?
Yeah.
Hanging out the local mall.
But I notice a lot of them come back the following week and you know, there's lots of things they can help out with, whether it's just
like reading the kindergartners, helping, take down bulletin board putting up bulletin board maybe running we'll have like field day.
Have them help out with field day or some sort of school-wide activity.
And it reminds our graduates that they're still part of the community and not, Hey, you graduate out.
You go.
Right.
Yeah.
I, and you can go a step further with that.
I mean, I know when I was a teacher, the eighth graders would graduate.
The following week, I'd have some of them come back and help me, like, you know, clean up the classroom or whatever it might be.
But then you can also set the precedent, you know, maybe there's a summer program.
Okay.
These are gonna be the junior counselors or the counselors at your summer program.
Oh.
You just building in the fact that like you are still a part of this.
And if you think forward, you know, to events you know, some of the other episodes that we have on this podcast, we'll talk about.
How the alumni are participating in these programs, but, you know, whether it be an art thing or a dance thing or a sports thing, bringing back the alumni for that and they know that they're welcome to those things.
You know, having a section at mass for the alumni, like once again, the church is too big for your population, therefore let's invite folks, right.
And you can set up these little things that make them feel like they are.
Still a part of the team and not, it's not like pretend they are, they should be a part of the community.
Right.
And you just, you can have all these little touch points along the way.
That's another great example of, you know, inviting them back for little things.
Oh yeah.
And other ways to just be consistent.
Having them involved.
It's like, I was thinking of like, you know, we're always asking alumnis to give, whether it's like.
Money or time, but also like, Hey, what have we done for alumni?
Like during graduation, there's usually an announcement of like, Hey, you know, there's scholarships or grants for like, you know, the top athlete, you know, you know, whoever the top student in the class.
But what if we had something where every year there's a grant or some sort of foundation that donates.
Or provides a scholarship to our alumni, like an active alumni because what's great about our student population is a lot of them go to private high schools and private colleges, you know.
And our top students can, we're encouraging them, we're supporting them and like, Hey, what if annually we have some sort of announcement or some sort of event Could even be simple as announcing a newsletter.
Like, Hey, so and so, was awarded the scholarship or from our foundation, our alumni foundation supported the student they're going to whatever nice high school.
You know, it keeps our alumni engaged.
Like, Hey, I wanna be part of the alumni, you know, group.
Maybe I wanna go to Stanford or MIT and down the road continue to have this scholarship to support.
Could be one, could be, you know, two half a dozen, and.
It gives our alumni reason to stay connected, especially our younger alumni.
You know, just kids in high school wants to go off to high school.
You don't want them to disappear.
You want them to keep coming back and stay engaged.
Like those are the kids we wanna like reward and say, Hey, come help us out.
You know, come join our, remain in the community.
Wouldn't be so great.
You know, I don't want our kids to think like, oh, I can't go to those really nice colleges or out of state colleges because I can't afford it.
If we set up an alumni foundation to support them, then we open up possibilities.
Yeah.
I mean, even if you can't afford to put together something like that, although that's very reasonable to be able to hand out even two.
Yeah.
And you could have it based on loyalty or whatever.
But you know, inviting them to be a part of a youth group, right, which keeps 'em part of the parish, keeps 'em part of the school.
Like, there's lots of little things that you can do to be to keep them in line.
I think that, you know, we talk about being consistent and that's communication, but also with those events, like if you have, you know, these fall festivals that we were just talking about a little while ago.
They are the, pretty much the same time every year.
So that's an event, right?
A lot of times folks will have the night before Thanksgiving as an alumni event because they know everyone's back in town.
So you have your alumni event that Wednesday night before Thanksgiving.
That's another simple thing, but it has to be the same.
Like, you gotta have the same thing every year in the Ian world, January 31st is, you know, the biggest feast day.
And so everybody shows up for.
Mass on that Sunday, whatever, which, whichever Sunday's around the 31st.
And oftentimes there's some sort of gathering on the 31st itself for alumni.
So you can take advantage of your feast days and just plop, you know, maybe there's one or two events that are being very consistent.
And you've got your four special newsletters that are going out, talking about.
How alumni are doing cool things, how the school's doing cool things.
Maybe you're highlighting businesses from the alumni, you know, that like, Hey, you know, we really appreciate the support of this business all these years.
You should go check them out to get your next used car.
You know, and they don't have to turn into commercials, but just the fact that like, let's highlight, you know, who is, who's doing what.
And I think that's, these are all very simple.
They don't cost a whole lot of money.
I think it's even more important to stress the informal, right?
I mean, you can have an alumni event that is, you know, you know, this isn't one of those yearly things, but you know, a movie comes out or there's bowling night or whatever happens.
You know, we're just gonna meet at this theater and go to this movie at seven o'clock.
Like.
It's alumni event.
So simple, right?
Ice cream.
Ice cream socials are so easy.
Like who?
Who doesn't like ice cream?
I mean, come on, right?
Come to the parish hall, we're gonna have an ice cream social.
All alumni are welcome, and whether you charge them for that or not, like.
A bucket of ice cream is surprisingly cheap.
You know, and there's probably a donor out there who would be willing to toss the a hundred dollars to cover all of the supply, right?
So in any case, you know, being informal but consistent about some of those things or consistent about all those things I think it's really important.
Yeah.
And then like there's other opportunities you mentioned, like, hey some of our alumni own businesses, like, whatever your school had a career day, invite your alumni because yeah.
You can have your teachers speaking, but they're all teachers.
But just having variety and get our, you know, our current students, like engaged in like, oh, they're young, but it gets them into like, Hey, that's possible because.
That is a student who came through our school and this is what they're doing.
Invite them to career days STEM day, have mentoring opportunities, whether it's and a lot of times, like, even last week, we.
A few of the high schools were talking to, our elementary schools are gonna they'll always send an alumni, you know, a graduate of the school.
They're like, Hey, this is how you apply to the school.
This is all the great things.
Have reunions and remember to invite your teachers and even coaches because.
Every time an alumni comes in, they're like, oh, is so and so still here?
Right.
So just having the whole community engaged in these activities that and it's doesn't have to be specific to alumni, but just having just reminding everyone like, Hey, you're welcome to come in.
Yeah.
Events like that are pretty easy, especially if you rotate through, like you think about, you know, the class of.
You know, 87 and the class of, you know, 92 or whatever it might be.
And to be able to find, you know, different people for your STEM day, your career day or whatever, the alumni speakers, you can rotate them through, right?
You can find different people in different classes so you can make touchpoints.
It doesn't take a whole lot of.
Effort to kind of dig that in initially.
Of course, if you're putting that together out of nowhere, it's a lot of work.
But once that's set, it's very easy to go back and you just have to get started.
You don't have to have as perfect all encompassing lists.
You just have to be able to start and say, okay, we've got these five people, we've had them out to these events.
Okay, let's find another five people for the next one, and so on and so forth.
It's not so time consuming.
Yeah.
And a lot of it doesn't even have to be in person.
I personally like in person events so that you can yeah, you know, talk and engage.
But then setting networking events up for, you know, current students, you know, recent graduates or even maybe our alumni from 10, 15, 20 years ago.
Like, Hey, if you have an opportunity.
Why don't you talk to our alumni base and like find people.
A lot of it is just like word of mouth.
It's like, how do you know who to hire?
What better is to talk to someone with the same values, someone from the same background as you?
It'd be so cool if, you know, we had an event, alumni event networking event where, you know, some people might be offering jobs.
Hey, Ian Academy.
Well, he's looking right for alumni, where we're like, Hey, we know that they have, they grew up the same way.
We know they have a good background and just to find out, like, or find people as opposed to someone just off the street applying to a job at your company.
But lots of opportunity or even mentoring opportunities, you know, like, if you're available and you're like, Hey.
You're looking to set up internships for younger people in high school or colleges?
Like where Better to look?
Speaking of where Better to Look?
Newsletters, there's lots of things we could do with newsletters as opposed to just asking for donations.
Like, I've seen in some newsletters and that's the first place I look is like, where are they now?
Like, oh yeah, I remember so and so.
Just having like.
Just updates.
Always remember to include, you know, a could be a Google form, could be a QR code.
Like, hey, how do you update your information?
We set up a few school websites and there's always an alumni section where people can fill out, you know, their new contact information graduation class.
But how great would it be?
It's like every alumni newsletter, there's a section like, Hey, update your information.
You know, tell us more about you.
It's not just a giant list of donors.
It's like people love hearing about like, Hey, what's your new job?
Or Where are you now?
I think that's that's important.
It's so, it's easy too.
I think one of the things that people say often about this is like, oh, it's gonna take so much work.
Right.
You know, if I bought a t-shirt from a website, like they have no problem staying in contact with me for like years to come.
Right.
And their team of people is smaller than the team that we have at schools now.
I get it.
Schools have a lot of things going on and it's can be chaotic, but a lot of this can be automated too.
So, you know, taking that time to, to put that list together, to get that newsletter going and to include these things, you know, is far.
Far more worth it than a lot of the, a lot of the busy work that we're doing.
I don't wanna get us in trouble.
That same, we're, we end up doing a lot of busy work, but there's like, this is important.
It's important to keep your community together.
Right.
And it's an important to to take that time.
And it doesn't take much.
Of course it is work and of course it is hard work, but it's, you know, if the local yogurt shop can stay in contact with me for years to come after one sale, I'm pretty sure that somebody.
Who I spent 10 years with would have the time to, to stay interested in me, right.
Without asking always for, Hey, come back and buy another yogurt.
Sure, you can ask for that.
But you know, it's kind of a little bit more than that.
You know, my favorite automation is like Google Calendar, just to remind me like, oh, hey, what if we all set our Google calendars?
Like, hey, graduation.
Like week or month, you know, like in May, set a reminder, send out a congratulations email to like all our alumni who will be graduating from college.
How great would that be?
You know?
Yeah.
Or their birthdays.
We have their birthdays.
Oh yeah, that's right.
You can automate an email to all of your alumni.
Yeah.
You can automate a Facebook.
That's so true.
A Facebook notification for their birthday.
Hey, Saint Amazing Academy really appreciates you.
Happy birthday.
That's so simple.
Wouldn't that be so nice?
You got it.
So simple.
Happy birthday.
Congratulations.
You know, maybe someone started a family, right?
Congratulations.
You know, just little things.
They're free.
All free.
Yeah.
Something we should do more often is acknowledge alumni contributions.
Y you know, they do donate money and a lot of times we have like we have an office person sending a note saying, thank you for your donation.
Receive whatever it is, it's tax deductible.
But what are we saying in to send thank you notes to our alumni who volunteered at the fall festival?
You know.
It.
How nice is it that we do get volunteer alumni because they know how our fall festival run.
There's less directions that need to be given and they can even help you run it.
But you know, all that time, you know, have someone send a quick email saying Thank you for coming to the event or contributing your time.
Just little things like that.
All free.
Yeah.
Christmas cards, Chris.
Oh yes.
Christmas cards.
Kids can write Christmas cards or you even be the printed one.
Like the fact that, and not to mention once again spending a little bit of money.
Of course we like the personal message.
That's how you do this, like really well.
But you know, there are so many companies that will just take your list and you could upload your list and hit send and they'll all get a card in the mail that has your little message on it.
Thank you from the school.
You know, we're grateful that you're a part of our community.
So simple, right?
And secret sauce.
Is don't send Christmas cards, send Thanksgiving cards.
Oh, wow.
That's, they don't get one.
Right.
Years.
You don't get one, one very often.
So those are small things.
So before we, we run out of time here let's jump into like how we do this, right?
So we've now just discussed why you should do it and maybe, some of the events that you can do.
But let's get into the nitty gritty, 'cause this is the part that I think that most folks trip up over is, well, you know, you get a volunteer or a parent who's gonna take this on for you
and then it gets built in some sort of platform, and then somebody forgets the password to that platform, or it gets locked down and you've, you just struggling to keep this thing alive.
How can we build a system?
That will allow us to keep adding to it and to be able to, you know, forever stay in touch with our alumni.
That's the first question.
And then secondly, you know, how can we what other tools can we use to facilitate this?
Right?
So first thing we talked about developing a, an email list.
Right?
If we're gonna send, you know, just send quarterly emails.
You don't have to go crazy.
But send emails directly to alumni and of course you wanna invite them to your Facebook page and all that other stuff.
But, you know, we want four quarterly emails.
So you're gonna have some sort of email newsletter software, right?
Ideally that can be attached to your database.
That database can be, you know, something that's really built for alumni, or it could be as simply as a spreadsheet.
But we need to get those names into an email list.
To be able to stay in contact with them.
So we're talking about four emails a year, minimum, and ideally with lots of information, which we've already talked about.
So what are some of the ways that you've seen that work out pretty well?
Oh yeah.
Oh, well.
I have an example of how it didn't work out well.
Well, let's start there.
Well, there's two things here.
Who's in charge of your alumni relations?
Like, who's in charge of it?
It doesn't have to be one person, but I really recommend having a staff person, like you said if it's a parent or some sort of volunteer.
The parent or volunteer sometimes goes away and w where's the password?
Who's taking over that gets lost?
So I definitely recommend having a school staff person.
Doesn't have to be the principal, doesn't have to be the office manager.
But what I do recommend is electing someone or asking someone who is an alumni of the school like you.
You're very involved.
At your school.
Make sure it's someone that is part of the school staff so that there's protocols set.
And think to yourself, you know, do you have an advisory board?
Is there a rep, alumni representative in that advisory board?
So one example is that in one of my schools before we had advisory board and we did have a parent who was connected with Salesforce.
It was great.
It was quite a process to set up, but the problem was that once that parent left and we had this great, very robust system set up with Salesforce, no one maintained it.
No one even filled in the database.
All that work was lost.
So like you said, we can't even start.
Simple.
Could be a Google sheet, you know?
For the websites we set up with alumni database where alumnis could just enter information.
It goes straight to a spreadsheet, you know, like keep it simple, put it somewhere, make sure it's safe.
Everyone knows about it, it's there.
And then we're talking about you could be super simple spreadsheet or something fancy, like a CRM, some sort of database and just make sure it's maintained.
You had a recommendation that I never heard of.
Before we jump into that, I just wanna highlight one of those points you made.
You know, if you have, I mean, we love to have parents involved.
We love to have volunteers, you know, even these alumni folks, they might work in these high powered industries, in which case, you know, Salesforce is a big part of their world.
But you know, Salesforce is something that you'd have a dedicated, you know, manager for that's not gonna be the kind of software that somebody at the school is gonna just casually be good at.
So, you know, it's important to think about, yes, we wanna take advantage of the folks who are volunteering and offering their expertise, but we also always have to have the lens of can we manage that if they're not around anymore?
And, you know, people jump at the free.
Offering from Salesforce, but that's just so that you get addicted to it like anything else.
So, you know, using much, something much simpler I think would be an ideal thing.
I think we do need to step up from a Google sheet, like that's, I think, too simple because it be, it becomes difficult, but there's a lot of, you know, email campaign software that will.
Manager list for you as part of it.
And so you can have everything in one place.
You can send an email, you can, you know, keep track of these things.
I think a lot of those CRMs are either inexpensive or free.
And some of the things that we've used in the past, you know, we've played with du od, OO as far as a CRM goes.
There's, you know, things like FileMaker Pro and Airtable, which represent glorified.
Google sheets.
Okay.
But then you can use those things in different ways and they can jump from there.
And then you have the end, the other end of the spectrum where you have these giant, you know, CRMs maybe not as difficult as Salesforce, but there's a lot of donation software out there.
I personally like little Green Light for this kind of thing.
It's very cost effective, very easy to use, very lightweight.
And so you could, excuse me, you can keep track of your.
Your donors, your alumni, and you can still interact with them.
And it's a pretty easy program.
And I wanna say it's like 300 bucks a year, so Oh, wow.
Almost nothing.
So it becomes very simple to track some of these things, but getting into some sort of system like that, whether it be a free one or one of these lesser expensive ones,
getting them in there and then, you know, setting up those automations so that you can get your newsletter out, you can get your reminders out, all those various things.
You can connect them to your Facebook page, your LinkedIn page.
Whatever other page you have.
And so you can publish.
In all areas at once, and I think that's where the real joy is when you start to think about, well, I want to do all these things with these folks, but you're
managing six or seven pieces of software so you can get, you know, one or two that can do everything you want to do and then they can publish to these other places.
I think that's the real magic.
Oh, right.
There's so many automations out there that we don't even know about.
Just think of like.
What's the pain point?
Like, oh, you know, having to send that one newsletter, but in six different places, especially with social media, it's like, Hey, there's automation set up.
We can help you with that.
Yeah, definitely.
I know some people are pretty good at this kind of stuff, for sure.
All right, so as we're getting close to the end here, I wanna do recap, but is there anything else that you wanna share in terms of the alumni world?
Things that we wanna just wanna make sure we get over to everybody?
Oh, it's just definitely staying com communication, stay in contact, you know, it's all about, you know, building your community.
Just it's all word of mouth and it connects to all our other podcast topics.
You know, talk about fundraising, admissions, like where are we getting all these people?
And, you know, we don't have to get them.
We already have them.
They're alumnis.
Yeah.
I would say the thing that, I mean, I'm already repeating myself at this point, but for me, the most important piece is let's get that list together and if nothing else, start with this upcoming eighth grade, right?
You probably have 10 years of.
Students in your student information system that you could pull that information from, and you could send an email to all those folks and saying, Hey, you know, we're starting, this is an example of this newsletter that we want to have for alumni.
We're hoping that you'll subscribe to it.
Like you can't automatically subscribe people, but you can invite them to that list and ideally some of those folks will stay on.
But I think the most important thing to start right now is.
Figure out how you're gonna manage your list, get it together, and figure out how you're gonna manage eighth grade, because here's your opportunity to get one class right.
And, you know, you can take baby steps towards those other 10 classes, towards the other 50 classes that, you know might still be alive.
That's a daunting task.
But if you can think about building the list now and how am I gonna deal with the eighth grade?
I think that's a great first step towards this.
Lastly, just be consistent.
There's some natural things.
If you send four emails and invite them to two events, I think you're doing more for your alumni than you've ever done before.
And those folks who've already got something robust going, you know, you can probably take it step further, but build it first.
You're playing the long game.
This isn't.
You're not gonna get 20 grand back from these people you know immediately, and that should not be the focus.
Your focus should be that they stay in contact with you throughout your life, their life.
Like it should all be part of this one community.
And they should feel connected to you.
You know, I've got schools who contact me all the time, and I have schools that never contact me.
And so it's I can see my behavior in relation to those.
Different kinds of schools and you know, maybe I'm giving more to one school or the other because it had a bigger impact in my life.
But if there's no contact, I'm not giving it all.
So not to mention, am I donating anything, time telling other people about it, because if it's outside of my.
Outta sight outta mind, then I'm not gonna be like, Hey, you should go check out this great school.
Like, that's not gonna be my first thought and be like, oh, you know, there's lots of great schools.
You know, no, well, you gotta talk about your school first.
You gotta have that pride.
So let's, absolutely, let's keep 'em connected.
So as we finish here Becky, will you give us our, reminders?
What are the three things we have to worry about?
Oh, for sure.
Build your database, have them stay connected.
Secondly, it's like increase alumni engagement.
How are we inviting them back?
Right.
And then lastly, like, make sure someone's maintaining that database.
What's build your infrastructure?
What are the processes?
Keep it simple.
Let's just, even just even thinking while you were talking about like, hey, using fancy software, I was like, my school used MailChimp.
We categorized our groups, our mailing lists by class.
At the end of the year, I automatically move the eighth grade class into alumni newsletter list.
You know, those things can be automated.
Super simple.
You don't have to build something outta nothing.
It's already there, you know?
Yeah.
Keep it simple.
Keep it consistent.
Just get it started, right?
Yeah, get started.
Yeah.
Just made me, me think.
Just start.
Just start.
All right.
Well, thanks Becky again for joining me today and for sharing all these ideas about alumni.
I'm hoping that some of the folks out here will listen to this and take some action and whether they've got nothing out there or if they've already started some things that hopefully they'll take another step forward.
But I appreciate your time and we'll see you on the next episode.
Okay, thank you.
Talk soon.
Bye.
Bye.
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