SC G2 ERA

Exploring robust alumni engagement in remote environments  

Addresses objectives:
C2C Sustain a meaningful relationship with alumni world-wide

in progress

Alumni are important members of Waterloo’s community. Working with faculties, Alumni Relations transformed traditional events to an online platform and developed a new LinkedIn Learning pilot to enhance engaging, bite-sized learning opportunities for alumni to stay connected to the University. New engagement metrics and enhanced data tracking processes were implemented. These efforts improve the quality and availability of data for decision-making focused on building relevant and meaningful programming. Despite the pandemic, and restrictions on hosting in-person events, Waterloo maintained alumni engagement scores with increases in the proportion of alumni who volunteered and who registered for one or more event.

Remote event opportunities provided an opportunity for more diverse alumni to become involved and new collaborative partnerships with alumni chapters. Two examples of alumni events are:

Financial Literacy Event Series: Four Canadian alumni chapters (Waterloo Region, Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary), collaborated with TD experts through alumni’s TD Affinity partnership, to offer a Financial Literacy series. Each individual event focused on specific topics offering alumni a uniquely targeted and curated opportunity to expand their knowledge, while the overarching event series as a whole catered to alumni seeking wide-ranging learning around financial literacy. A volunteer from each of the respective chapters hosted each event, while alumni from all four regions were invited to attend. Total registration for the series was 895 unique registrations, the highest chapter event registration to date.

“Humans and” Event Series: Alumni Relations partnered with the Faculty of Arts to host a series of four alumni events called “Humans and.” Each event was livestreamed, and the videos remain available for viewing. This event promoted pan-university participation with over 1300 alumni engaged.

Jump to: SC Goal C2 | Strengthening Communities Goals

Moving forward: Using a hybrid model for alumni events — that is, both in-person and remote — will maintain the progress made in alumni engagement using these varied approaches. However, hybrid approaches also increases both the complexity involved in planning these events and related costs. In 2022-2023, a new partnership with Mathematics called “Data +” was launched, using remote and in-person strategies, to continue to engage alumni.