Global or international alumni have steadily gained more attention over the past few years. However, engaging international alumni is still a relatively new field for non-Ivy League institutions due to the sheer difference in number of international students that they engage with regularly. However, today’s digitized and hybrid alumni engagement strategies combined with a healthy increase in international students make it necessary for any university, college, or even school to keep their international alumni engaged and feel truly appreciated.

Today, we will look at some of the challenges that institutions just starting to engage their global alumni inevitably face and how they can overcome them.

Challenges of Keeping International/Global Alumni Engaged

• ‍Distance: Let’s start with the obvious. International alumni may be in any other state, country, or continent, which makes it nearly impossible to guarantee their presence for in-person events. This presents a unique challenge. If you develop separate alumni programs for global alumni, it risks making them feel even more alienated, and if you try to make them feel included in your overall alumni program, you need more investment in people, data collection, and tools/resources to make sure you get it right.‍
• Time Zones Differences: A natural offshoot of the above point is that global alumni, depending on their number and distribution, can be very spread out in the worst-case scenario. Say 90% of your alumni are in the US and UK, but the remaining 10% are in Asia, do you host your virtual event in a time convenient for the 90% of alumni, or do you try to find a good time for everyone? Either way, you risk inconveniencing a certain number of alumni. And that’s just taking a virtual event as an example. Depending on their spread, global alumni may need much more strategic marketing and engagement strategies.‍‍
• Cultural Diversity: While having a diverse alumni demographic is certainly welcome, it also presents an interesting challenge when they are located globally. Your events and programs need to be sure that you understand and respect cultural differences and nuances among your alumni. Apart from this, you also need to understand that an alumni’s willingness to give back can also be culturally different. Historically, Americans have had a culture of giving back to their alma mater and helping to raise funds for them. However, this may not always be the case for alumni depending on their upbringing and culture.

"…systematic and organised philanthropic giving and fundraising towards higher education, up until relatively recently, was solely a U.S. phenomenon"
‍
- Noah D. Drezner, The global growth of higher education philanthropy and fundraising (2019)

• ‍Resources: Keeping global alumni engaged naturally requires much more effort, manpower, and resources. Depending on the number of internationally located alumni, you may require anywhere from a separate list to a dedicated team just to ensure that you have their current information and are in touch regularly. It also requires you to be proficient in digital and social media platforms, especially for organizing hybrid or virtual events, which also require separate investments.

How you can keep Global Alumni Connected

1. ‍Communicate to Update: Human interaction is vital and so is keeping alumni information updated in your database. You can solve these two problems at one go by having human interactions and catch-ups with global alumni through social media, emails, or other similar forms of communication. This not only makes them feel appreciated but also helps ease the burden of keeping their information up to date as you can ask them directly about what they are up to or if they have moved locations. This approach benefits institutions with smaller numbers of global alumni and doesn’t require any major investment. For institutions with more global alumni, communication can be done instead in well-segmented groups which we’ll mention a bit later.‍
2. Provide Constant Educational and Professional Value: As an educational institution, alumni see you as a place of learning. One of the best ways to make global alumni feel valued is to continue to provide this learning as they move further in their lives and careers. Provide your global alumni with online courses and workshops, work or internship opportunities, guest lectures, and mentorship opportunities (both as a mentor or mentee). This will make sure that alumni, both local and global, continue to see you as a place of lifelong learning.‍
3. Virtual/Hybrid Events: A common strategy that universities have taken up ever since the pandemic is to introduce more virtual and hybrid events into their alumni programs. This benefits global alumni who may not always be able to attend in-person events due to geographical differences or professional commitments even if they wanted to today. Having these modes of events be a core part of your alumni engagement strategy is crucial today as events even outside of advancement spaces are becoming more flexible and digitized.‍
4. Regional or Localized Online Communities: One of the more creative strategies you can take is to put the spotlight on your global alumni through localized or regional initiatives. On a more consistent scale, you can establish communities segmented by cultural or geographical clusters and keep in touch with them. These localized communities can become powerful catalysts for nurturing alumni in that area/demographic or host their own events. One thing to keep in mind is to not completely silo these communities and to make sure that they feel a sense of oneness with your overall alumni.‍
5. Omnichannel Approach: On a more strategic level, if you are planning to start engaging with global alumni, it is vital that you start to move towards an omnichannel approach, that is, alumni engagement that involves multiple channels to make sure that your alumni have multiple avenues of communication and engagement opportunities. A very important thing to understand is that an effective omnichannel approach isn’t just about having both a physical and digital presence, it is making all channels under them work together effectively. For example, if you have a mentorship program inviting experienced international alumni on a webpage, you can have an online community for that program on social media, have regular newsletter emails to promote the mentorship program, and you can send appreciation gifts for active mentors through mail, or even offer to sponsor a trip for them to personally present them with an award.

‍