A fellow alumni recently asked one of our board members, "What if our alumni network worked more like the Obama campaign?"
The idea that groups like University alumni networks can organize with the same success as the Obama campaign is not only plausible—it's pretty much the perfect introduction to NationBuilder.
Many alumni groups focus their attention on people who have the most money—but real change works from the bottom up. In fact, throughout history, the most impressive organizing movements have been successful because they operated around the belief that everyone has leadership potential.
YaleWomen, a community of female graduates committed to advancing women’s voices and perspective, uses NationBuilder to easily identify the movers-and-shakers within their alumni network. They’ve turned their website into an interactive portal, using email broadcasts and social media to move members up the ladder of engagement and create a leadership-rich environment in which their local chapters will thrive.
One of the most common obstacles alumni organizations face is implementing a sustainable model of organizing. Ming Min Hui works with Yale graduates around the world and needed a strategy to create meaningful interactions with existing members while simultaneously expanding their new member base. NationBuilder provides new opportunities to involve members, both old and new, in equally significant ways—improving upon the prevailing alumni engagement strategy that involves asking the same donors for money over and over again. Using NationBuilder, your group can cater to members who prefer to write a check as well as the recent graduate who finds it easier to donate volunteer time instead of dollars.
YaleWomen has a member database of 50,000 people. With NationBuilder, they can send out a volunteer survey, tag individuals according to how they want to get involved, and create specific volunteer lists for email and social media outreach based on those responses. In addition to integrating their blog and merchandise store, YaleWomen’s website also features an event page where members can sign up to host their own events. They’ve created a digital home for their entire organization, so as participants come and go, they don’t have to worry about their entire infrastructure falling apart. Reassigning roles is as easy as logging into their NationBuilder account.
With NationBuilder Match, you’ll never lose track of alumni—it automatically matches a person's email address to their Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles and shows how they are connected to your most active supporters. Match turns an email address into a person. From there, your alumni group can set up tags and filters to create custom lists so you can target people based on their preferred communication method.
And that’s really all it means to work from the bottom up—NationBuilder helps groups organize so they can establishing meaningful connections with people who care about what they're doing.
