Strategic Plan

Alumni Engagement Strategic Plan is a framework for creating opportunities in everything we do that connect UMass Dartmouth alumni with each other, students, and the wider UMass Dartmouth community.

This strategic plan is the shared work of key stakeholders across the UMass Dartmouth community and the product of research and discussions stretching over five months. The priorities and goals outlined in the plan reflect our commitment to building enduring and mutually beneficial relationships that inspire conversational, experiential, volunteer, and philanthropic engagement. These priorities will guide the development of programs valued by our alumni and the students who will become our future alumni.

Priorities & strategies

Connect with current students and inspire them to become successful and engaged alumni.

Strategies

  1. Expand opportunities for alumni to mentor, network, and offer internships and jobs to students.
  2. Create and build pride and traditions through the strengthening and growth of the Student Alumni Association.
  3. Connect students to alumni by school, sport, common interest, identity, and purpose (affinity groups).

Provide career programs and networking opportunities to meet alumni needs throughout their professional life cycles and across industries and job functions.

Strategies

  1. Create and expand opportunities for alumni to mentor fellow alumni working in the same industry/job function.
  2. Create programming for alumni to network with fellow alumni working in the same industry/job function.
  3. Reinforce Corsair Network as the hub for professional and career resources, networking, mentoring, job opportunities, communications, and events.

Create volunteer opportunities around like-minded alumni to build and foster personal and professional connections around shared interests, identity, purpose, and industries.

Strategies

  1. Strengthen and grow the Young Alumni Council.
  2. Launch the Black Alumni Council and Women’s Alumni Network.
  3. Explore and launch new affinity groups based on alumni data, engagement metrics, and university staff support and leadership.
  4. Develop affinity group programming around student engagement, professional/career networking, and affinity-specific program topics.

Leverage engagement, loyalty, and pride of UMassD alumni to increase student enrollment and retention.

Strategies

  1. Create programming that shares the UMass Dartmouth experience and Corsair pride with accepted students to help them decide to attend UMassD.
  2. Create an alumni legacy program that honors alumni whose children are deciding or have decided to make attending UMass Dartmouth a family tradition.
  3. Expand opportunities for alumni to mentor current students to keep students enrolled and progressing towards a degree.

Measuring Engagement

The UMass Dartmouth office of alumni relations currently tracks alumni event attendance, volunteerism, and philanthropy to measure alumni engagement. As we move forward with executing this strategic plan, we will implement the newly established industry metrics from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. These industry metrics include four categories of engagement:

  • Experiential
  • Volunteer
  • Philanthropic
  • Communication

Over the next three years, we will focus on:

  • Using a newly implemented system-wide CRM, Affinaquest, and digital marketing tool, Marketing Cloud, to capture more robust and timely data.
  • Setting future strategies, goals, and tactics for engagement based on alumni engagement metrics.
  • Using data to show the impact of engagement on giving.
  • Using data to determine affinity and regional programming.
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