Once performing arts students graduate from your college or university, maintaining relationships with them is vital for your program’s longevity. While many schools focus heavily on fundraising when developing alumni engagement strategies, your performing arts program can also benefit from alumni involvement in other ways.

Successful, engaged alumni can boost your program’s reputation and help current and future performing arts students thrive in college and beyond.

In this guide, we’ll share four proven tips for keeping your performing arts program’s alumni engaged after graduation, including how to:

1. Your Alumni Database
2. Recognize Alumni Accomplishments
3. Facilitate Connections Between Alumni and Current Students
4. Be Strategic About Alumni Fundraising

Keep in mind that you’ll likely need to connect with your college’s main alumni engagement office to ensure your strategies are aligned before implementing these ideas. However, these methods can work for programs of all sizes and operational models with a little adaptation and creativity. Let’s dive in!

1. Maintain Your Alumni Database

You likely already know the importance of maintaining databases for various university operations, from application management to faculty course assignments. A robust alumni database is just as important for staying connected with program graduates!

In this database, make sure to include the following key information on each of your alumni:

• Graduation year
• Major(s), minor(s), and concentration(s)
• Other student involvement (shows they performed in, extracurriculars, internships, on-campus jobs, honors or fellowship programs, etc.)
• Post-graduate education (if applicable)
• Current job and location
• Contact information (phone number, email address, mailing address, social media handles, etc.)
• Preferred communication method

These details can help you send more tailored communications to each alum, demonstrating that your program values them individually and thereby encouraging them to stay involved. At least once a year, reach out to alumni to request that they update their contact details, post-graduate education status, and employment if necessary to ensure your database always contains the most current information.

2. Recognize Alumni Accomplishments

Another way to demonstrate to alumni that your program values them is to celebrate their achievements after graduation—whether they’ve landed a great new job, completed an advanced course of study, or received an award. Additionally, public recognition demonstrates that your school produces exceptional graduates in the performing arts and shows current students where they could end up.

Here are a few ways to recognize alumni accomplishments both publicly and privately:

• Send them a congratulatory email, card, or small gift depending on their communication preferences and the size of their achievement.
• Spotlight them on your program’s social media accounts with an eye-catching graphic and a caption that includes their name, graduation year, and an overview of their success.
• Submit a blog post to your college website providing a more in-depth description of the alum’s accomplishments, both in college and since graduation.

Before sharing any form of public recognition, get the alum’s consent to use their name, photo, and story. If possible, have them share a few quotes you can use in your blog post or social media caption to add a first-person perspective to the content.

3. Facilitate Connections Between Alumni and Current Students

While public alumni recognition gives your program’s current students a general sense of what performing arts opportunities are available to them after graduation, directly connecting alumni with current students can help them figure out what they want to do more concretely. Forming these relationships also allows alumni to stay up to date on your program’s current happenings, helping them feel more connected to your school over time.

Some ideas for facilitating alumni connections with current students include:

• Hosting an alumni panel or alumni-student social. You could either do this in person during homecoming weekend (since alumni are likely to come to campus then anyway) or virtually at a different time. Whether this event is a formal discussion or a more relaxed meet and greet, it provides opportunities for alumni to discuss their post-grad experiences with students and for students to ask questions.
• Organizing an alumni showcase. Seeing their older peers perform can help current students learn by example in addition to providing a fun experience for them. Plus, according to Acceptd, it’s beneficial for artists to have low-pressure performances to look forward to that fuel their passion for their craft, so this idea has advantages for alumni as well.
• Starting a mentorship program. Pair up interested alumni mentors with student mentees based on their student involvement history and career goals. From there, mentors can schedule in-person or virtual meetings as their schedules allow and provide advice on any area of performing arts that their mentees want to learn more about, from job hunting to auditions to stress management.

Besides allowing current students to learn about the world of performing arts from alumni, these connections can also provide networking opportunities that lead to more students finding jobs in their field after graduation!

4. Be Strategic About Alumni Fundraising

The reason most of the alumni engagement efforts at colleges often revolve around fundraising is that alumni have historically made up a large portion of university donors. Therefore, it can be tempting to send your performing arts program graduates a donation request after donation request in the hopes that one will persuade them to give.

However, quality is more important than quantity when it comes to alumni fundraising, meaning your program should:

• Run different types of fundraising campaigns throughout the year to appeal to more alumni’s preferences. For example, some alumni may enjoy attending in-person or virtual fundraising events, others would appreciate text-to-give opportunities, and still others might want to mail in a check in response to a fundraising letter campaign.
• Leverage your alumni database to determine reasonable donation request amounts for each alum. A seasoned, successful alum who has been out of college for 20 years will likely have more financial flexibility than someone who graduated from your program a year ago and is still getting a foothold in their profession. Segment alumni based on how much they could potentially give and tailor your asks accordingly.
• Incorporate employer-matching gifts into your alumni fundraising strategy. Make a note in your database of any alumni who work for organizations that will match donations to higher education institutions. Then, reach out to them with information about how to request these matches to further the impact of their gifts.

As you create donation requests using these strategies, remember to intersperse other types of communications between fundraising appeals (such as updates on program initiatives and invitations to non-fundraising events) to prevent donor fatigue among your alumni.

While the tips above provide a good starting point for performing arts alumni engagement, the best way to keep your graduates involved with your program is to ask them what they want to see! Send out surveys asking alumni what opportunities and communications they prefer, and take their responses into account when laying out your alumni engagement strategy.