Building the foundation for alumni community growth

As an Alliance partner of NationBuilder, Alumni Nations has grown to become the leader in K12 alumni engagement, partnering with more than 50 K12 Education Foundations across 13 U.S. states. Many Alliance partners lead community-building initiatives using NationBuilder’s tools with access to exclusive resources, co-marketing opportunities, implementation, and digital strategy, but Alumni Nations has a slightly different approach.

Alumni Nations combines white-labeling NationBuilder with a strong focus on hands-on, responsive customer service. Alumni organizations can be easily spun up for K12 education institutions that previously struggled to maintain meaningful connections with graduates due to financial constraints, lack of tools, or insufficient personnel to run an effective alumni program.

"Schools inherently understand the value of engaged alumni, but rarely have the resources to build sophisticated, modern programs," explains Jonathan Rivera, who took over as CEO in January 2024. "Our NationBuilder-powered services give our K12 clients all-in-one enterprise-level capabilities without enterprise-level complexity or cost."

Under Rivera, Alumni Nations completed a rebrand in 2024, refreshing their identity with a new logo, website, and marketing assets, with new website themes for their subnations on the way. To scale their impact and gain more clients, Rivera expanded his client services, ensuring that the user experience for their clients was as simple and pleasant as it could be.

Gold-star fundamentals

Alumni Nations as a success story is built on their service model and utilizes the four core pillars of NationBuilder’s platform as an integrated system.

A+ alumni database

Replacing spreadsheets with NationBuilder's People database allows K12 alumni organizations to segment, tag, and visualize their community. "The ability to see your alumni on a map gets education leaders really excited," Rivera says. "Once alumni data is all in one place, you can start slicing and dicing and thinking about engagement and communications."

Websites that pass with flying colors

Each Alumni Nation client receives a professionally designed digital hub tailored to their organization’s identity. "One of the things we love about NationBuilder is its theme-based design. It allows us to quickly create a custom website—clients simply provide their logo and colors, and voilà, you’re up and running with a personalized site," Rivera says.

Empowered communications

The platform's built-in mass notification system enables K12 education institutions to maintain consistent contact with alumni through templated emails and detailed reporting. Alumni Nations often handles this communication on behalf of clients, providing additional support for time-constrained staff.

Streamlined donation tools

The native fundraising capabilities in NationBuilder allow Alumni Nation clients to capture and process donations without needing separate systems, consolidating all alumni engagement functions into one platform.

"In the K12 space, technology has to come with white-glove, hands-on support,” Rivera says. “These organizations are often stretched thin—small budgets, lean teams, and big responsibilities. Our solution lets us walk into any meeting and confidently say, ‘Yes, we can handle that for you.'"

The white-label model

A unique aspect of Alumni Nations' approach is their complete white-labeling of the NationBuilder platform, meaning "many of our clients don't even know they're using NationBuilder—they just think they're using Alumni Nations," says Rivera. This partnership, combined with Alumni Nations' dedicated services, ensures that clients receive personalized support while the more complex coordination is left to the parent nation.

K12 organizations using the Alumni Nations platform report significant increases in alumni engagement and fundraising capacity. The all-in-one approach is especially valuable for education foundations without dedicated staff for alumni relationship management.

Cracking the code on alumni engagement

Beyond their core platform, Alumni Nations is driving industry leadership through two major initiatives:

The National Alumni Institute has grown from concept to a true professional community in its own right, providing resources, podcasts, templates, mini-courses, and professional development for alumni. It represents the company's commitment to sharing resources across the K12 alumni engagement space.

Give-Education Day, a national giving campaign specifically for K12 schools, saw its biggest year yet with 50 participating organizations in 2024. "It creates awareness about the importance of K12 education and charitable giving while generating partnership opportunities for us," Rivera says. "When education leaders understand how we're investing in Give-Education Day, they recognize we're genuinely committed to helping schools raise funds for student programs."

Looking ahead

With a strong foundation in place, Alumni Nations enters its second decade focused on accelerated growth, aiming to add new education foundations to its roster while maintaining high retention rates among existing clients.

Looking further ahead, Rivera sees untapped potential: "Only a small percentage of public school districts have mature alumni programs at their high schools today. There's still an enormous opportunity to grow and make an impact in K12 public schools."

With a clear vision and growing momentum, Alumni Nations is empowering K12 institutions to find, connect, and engage with their alumni in ways that drive real impact. By delivering sophisticated relationship management tools to schools that need them most, the company is helping even the smallest and most under-resourced districts build alumni programs that support greater student achievement. “This isn’t just about growing a business,” Rivera says. “It’s about creating a movement—one that ensures every school, not just the well-funded ones, has the ability to build a thriving alumni community.”