Your university’s brand is one of its greatest marketing assets. For many alumni, the university they attend is a core part of their identity, and it’s common for alumni to remember their school’s colors, mascot, and theme song decades after graduation.

As such, universities looking to engage their alumni should leverage their brand to form a sense of community. When alumni then feel a sense of kinship with their former university, they’re more likely to donate, volunteer, and otherwise support you.

To help your university make strategic use of its brand, this guide will explore digital outreach strategies for higher education institutions.

1. Expand your brand beyond your logo and color palette.

Consider Nike’s branding. Beyond the memorable “swoop” logo, Nike’s brand is exemplified in its written messaging with the tagline “Just Do It” and its visual assets, which often depict the stories of everyday people pursuing greatness in their personal fitness journeys. Nike’s audience isn’t just professional athletes but the everyday athletes who aspire to something greater. The company built its brand on empowering and encouraging individuals to do just that with the aid of its products.

Nike is one of the most recognizable brands in the world, and it’s far from the only company to recognize that branding extends beyond logos and well-coordinated color palettes.

If your organization hasn’t refreshed its branding strategy in some time, it’s worthwhile to revisit your university’s current positioning and how you can further refine, expand, and elevate your brand. Address the following aspects of your brand:

• Visual Elements: This includes your logos, photo and video assets, color palette, and typography. Visuals are your strongest asset for evoking your audience’s emotions. When curating your visual brand, consider how you want alumni to feel when they receive your communications or visit your website. Nostalgic? Proud? Hopeful? Motivated?
• Messaging: What key phrases or topics do you want to be associated with your university’s brand? What is your brand personality when greeting alumni—formal and businesslike, or nostalgic and lighthearted?
• Channels: Consider how you will adapt your brand for various communication channels and platforms. These are minute differences that still pack the full power of your brand, such as using different abbreviated logos on social media posts.

When crafting any external outreach materials, consider how you will infuse your brand into them. This applies to everything from personalized emails that might include your logo in the heading to events with branded banners and posters.

For direct communication with individual supporters, such as email outreach, strive to create a personalized but branded experience. This means referencing specific details about that alumni’s engagement history while speaking to them with your university’s branded voice, whether it’s warm and friendly or formal and inspirational.

2. Conduct research to understand how your brand will perform.

Once you’ve refined your brand, research how it performs with your alumni audience by:

• Sharing surveys. Send out a preview of your organization’s updated branding to a sample of your university’s alumni audience. Attach a survey that asks respondents about their opinions on the changes, staying open to a diverse range of perspectives and responses.
• Conducting focus groups. Ask a few of your university’s most active alumni to participate in focus groups where they’re shown your brand and invited to share their opinions. Consider segmenting groups by different demographics, such as having a group full of recent graduates and a group of older alumni.
• Reviewing existing data. Review granular data from your previous alumni outreach campaigns, including those shared on your website, social networks, and via email. Which campaigns had the most positive responses? Which campaigns were largely unsuccessful? What made those campaigns unique, and how can they inform branding updates?

By conducting this research, you can understand what your alumni respond well to, whether it’s phrasing changes (such as leveraging a positive, upbeat tone) or content updates (such as highlighting workplace giving in fundraising appeals). With this knowledge, you can continue to develop and refine your branding strategy.

3. Highlight what makes your university and alumni unique.

When refreshing your branding for alumni outreach, highlight what makes your university and alumni unique.

Your alumni don’t feel a connection to your university simply because they attended it. It’s because of the experience they had while at your institution—the small, specific details that made up their time at your school and how they can help foster similar experiences for generations to come.

Consider how you can highlight that connection in your marketing materials, such as adding “throwback” images and stories from a memorable football season, hosting campaigns tied to the memory of beloved instructors, or even launching forward-thinking campaigns, such as one that highlights successful alumni and their careers after attending your institution.

To keep consistent records of your university’s marketing efforts, brand identity, and history, ensure you have software with cloud storage and extensive integration capabilities. For instance, universities that use tools like Salesforce Education Cloud can continually update and customize their technology as their school grows and evolves.

4. Tap into shared nostalgia.

Avoid considering your brand in isolation, and instead, think of what it means to your alumni specifically. Most alumni have or will develop a sense of nostalgia for your university, and you can tap into that feeling in your outreach strategy.

Associate your university’s brand with past positive experiences by:

• Sharing old campus photographs. Tell stories about past events accompanied by old photographs. Ensure your university keeps an archive of old promotional photos, and if it currently doesn’t, now is the time to start one. This not only helps with outreach but also preserves your university’s history.
• Incorporating past branding into new outreach materials. Give alumni a blast from the past by playing with old branding. For instance, on your university’s founding anniversary, you might create fundraising materials that showcase how your logo has evolved over the years.
• Connecting alumni with each other, not just your organization. Alumni are more likely to continue supporting your school if they are part of your greater alumni community. Encourage graduates to develop local alumni societies, offer excursions for former students and their friends and family, and host events that invite alumni back to campus.

Nostalgia is a powerful feeling, and the right branding strategy can leverage it to earn tangible support. When contacting alumni from specific graduating classes, reference campus events they’re likely to remember to transport them back to their time as students.

5. Connect your alumni brand to the future.

One of your university’s main marketing objectives is garnering support for future generations of students. Share this goal with your alumni to motivate them to help fund positive experiences similar to the ones they had.

For instance, you might invoke specific clubs or departments alumni were a part of, encouraging them to keep those organizations going far into the future. Use language like “Help secure the debate club’s future,” “Make an impact that lasts,” and “Keep our community going now and for years to come.”

As part of your marketing, you might even have current students get involved. Ask them to share their stories that explain how alumni contributions fund their current experiences. Then, have them sign messages with their name and future graduation year to emphasize your university’s commitment toward the future.

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Branding is one of your university’s strongest assets for inspiring support. Refine your brand identity by gathering alumni feedback, then create messages that invoke alumni’s past to encourage them to fund the future.

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About the Author:

Carl Diesing Managing Director – Carl co-founded DNL OmniMedia in 2006 and has grown the team to accommodate clients with on-going web development projects. Together DNL OmniMedia has worked with over 100 organizations to assist them with accomplishing their online goals. As Managing Director of DNL OmniMedia, Carl works with nonprofits and their technology to foster fundraising, create awareness, cure disease, and solve social issues. Carl lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife Sarah and their two children Charlie and Evelyn.