Enhance the Digital Alumni Experience

Graduation cap iconWe will broaden our approach to engagement of alumni and friends to encompass interest and affinity groups, and to leverage more diverse forms of digital interaction.


Scope

The goal is to provide the Office of Development and Alumni relations with a manageable digital ecosystem in which current engagement activities are accessible to DAR staff for KPI monitoring and decision making.  We will provide a robust predictive analytical environment to support alumni engagement and philanthropy activities. We will implement solutions to acquire and retain alumni and donor affinities in order to better understand their current interests, leading to personalized communication with prospects and donors which demonstrates that Boston University understands their engagement and philanthropic affinities.  We will deliver intuitive tools, assisting engagement officers to connect with potential donors.  We will implement better data integration between platforms, particularly events management and marketing solutions, to ensure an accurate and current 360-degree engagement profile of our alumni and friends.

Major Projects

  • BU Connects Implementation – Complete
    Implement the BU Connects service – a platform enabling users to search for and connect with other users affiliated with BU for professional/career networking opportunities based on group(s) affiliation. Establish a data integration between BU Connects and the existing Alumni CRM.
  • Salesforce Consultation – Complete
    Consult with Salesforce to investigate and propose potential solutions in support of the recommendations laid forth by the Boston University Alumni Relations Task Force (ARTF) to enhance digital alumni engagement. This will provide DAR with a world class engagement platform that will be updated with quality current alumni professional, life stage, interest, location, and communication preference data.
  • Event Data Improvements – Complete
    Optimize event management capabilities between the current Alumni Portal and BU’s existing Alumni CRM. This includes creation of a mechanism enabling bi-directional synchronization of event records such as registrants and attendees. Improvement of event data hygiene and DAR user experiences within existing CRM event management features. This will ensure that event quality attendance details are available as engagement factors within our data analysis ecosystem.
  • Affinity Tagging Platform – Complete
    Build a new, custom Affinity Tagging platform within BBEC to enable gathering and analysis of constituent affinities and interests. Ensure that alumni interest information is current and contemporary based on various engagement points, including interactions, event registrations, and giving history. This will make possible the real-time collection of affinity information, while also indicating areas of philanthropic interest.
  • Salesforce Implementation Planning – Complete
    Select and partner with a 3rd party consultant to investigate and design an implementation plan for potential Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Experience Cloud, Salesforce CRM and supporting event management software. This will prepare BU to leverage more diverse forms of digital interaction to better engage alumni and friends.
  • Affinity Tagging: Phase II – Identified
    Expand and enhance DAR’s application of Affinity Tags and Strategic Interests to provide richer constituent data for optimizing alumni and donor engagement. Phase II of this initiative augments the new DAR Affinity Tagging Platform in BBEC with additional capabilities to intake affinity tags in bulk via a batch entry solution, automatically derive affinity tags based on revenue transactions, improve user experiences through surfacing the affinity tag wizard on research and constituent data entry forms, among other features.
  • Salesforce Implementation – Identified
    Implementation of selected Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Experience Cloud, Salesforce CRM and additional event management software. If experience cloud is selected, a basic prerequisite instance of Salesforce CRM will be implemented. This will implement select digital interaction functionality to engage alumni and friends.
  • Alumni Engagement Dashboard – Identified
    Creation of a next-generation, user-friendly, intuitive dashboard reflecting various alumni engagement indicators.​ This will be used by the alumni engagement program to evaluate and manage strategic direction.

Stakeholders

      • Alumni, donors and unaffiliated prospective donors will have an opportunity to engage in the manner they wish with BU about things that interest them.
      • Alumni engagement DAR staff will have new capabilities for better communication targeting, data gathering, volunteer management, and event management.
      • Development officers will benefit from lead generation as a result of better understanding of prospect funding interests.
      • Development and Alumni Relations leaders will gain new insight into drivers of engagement and philanthropy, based on current interest information.

      Representatives of these groups will be involved in decisions as the new system is designed and be provided early looks and demonstrations of new systems, in the lead up to launches of new functionality.

      Key Success Metrics

      • Person holding a phone while social media product icons float in the air above it.Increase in alumni engagement
      • Adoption and breadth of use of alumni web portal
      • Engagement via new communication channels
      • Increase in annual giving donors
      • Increase in affinity group activity
      • Ability to measure and report on robust engagement metrics