The ways you can prepare for, serve, and leverage your alumni are limitless, but one task is vital: Start early and with intention. The earlier you begin to engage alumni meaningfully, the greater influence you’ll have on their involvement, their development, and your own organization’s future.
The funder’s view: Nonprofits tend to put more focus on near-term program activities (“what we do”) than long-term strategy (“how we’ll achieve our mission”). Nowhere are the risks of this myopia more apparent than in the construction of alumni programs. Even in organizations with a cohesive theory of change, the vision for alumni usually revolves around stewarding them as donors, rather than activating them as lifelong change agents. The result: Alumni programs offer little beyond standard networking, job boards, and newsletters. What would it look like to orient alumni programs not toward a trip down memory lane, but toward addressing the problem that attracted them to the organization in the first place?