More than 80% of alumni responding to the survey ranked email as “highly effective”. In order of preference, this was followed by online newsletters, printed newsletters and direct mail. Conversely, social media, personal visits and phone calls ranked significantly lower than other communications avenues.

Fifty percent of those alumni regarded as ‘strong advocates’ for their institutions, indicated that social media was an effective communications vehicle. However, “less connected” alumni rated social media much lower in terms of effectiveness.

The implications of the survey findings are explored in the second in a series of white papers published by Converge Consulting, a marketing firm, and licensed exclusively to CASE. The paper’s authors noted that, while phone calls and personal visits ‘will never be abandoned by fundraising professionals, particularly where major gifts and annual funds are concerned,’ institutions should note that respondents viewed them ‘as highly ineffective across the board in terms of reaching them with messages.’

Due to the relative cost-effectiveness and broad acceptance of email and online communications, the authors suggested that institutions may find value in using these channels to reach all graduates, whilst targeting more costly alternatives to more engaged alumni.

More information can be found on the CASE website: www.case.org

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The new system – already rolled out to assist almost 90,000 Aluminati customers –replaces an older, and at times, inadequate layer which was regularly causing bottlenecks and mail delays.

The state-of-the-art system has taken several months to develop, test and implement, and is now routinely available to all Aluminati users, regardless of account level.

In simple terms, the implementation allows users a choice of personal anti-spam options – “blacklisted” addresses, from which emails are automatically blocked; “whitelisted” addresses, from where emails will always be delivered, but still scanned for viruses; and a “greylist” status, which gives the user the option to enable or disable senders’ messages. A guide to using this new system can be found within the help sections of our various service websites.

Daniel Watts, Managing Director of the Aluminati Network Group, says: “Our new anti-spam layer is a tried, tested and trusted system, using established anti-spam techniques.

Until now, spam mail seems to have been the greatest concern to our users, so – in direct response to this vital customer feedback – we have addressed the problem by developing and implementing the new system.

The new system is, of course, in addition to our existing RBL (realtime blacklist) which already stops the vast majority of spam from hitting inboxes. I am therefore confident that the implementation of this extra security will be welcomed by all Aluminati users.

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By necessity, the new service, ed-alumni.net, has been integrated into Edinburgh’s existing system to add valuable facilities and resources previously unavailable to university users. Daniel Watts, Managing Director of Aluminati, takes up the story: ‘When students are at Edinburgh they simply log into www.myed.ed.ac.uk to access their student email. And now, when they are due to leave their place of learning, the content within that portal is updated to show alumni information. This includes a tab called ‘Alumni Email’.’

‘The system we have developed specifically for Edinburgh allows users to migrate all their student email to their new alumni account, together with their complete address book. They can also set up forwarding from their student account to their new alumni account for as long as their student account remains open.’

‘It was quite a challenge to integrate the new system into the existing Edinburgh portal, with many quirks encountered along the way! But I and the ANG team are delighted to be able to use this system as a fine example of the bespoke services we can offer. Rather than merely off-the-shelf solutions, it shows we can work with any existing systems to achieve the desired results – quickly and cost-effectively.’

The Edinburgh Alumni Email system went live in the middle of September and within three weeks nearly 1000 Edinburgh alumni were registered users.

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