Engagement quantified: A guide to measuring impact in a Gravyty engagement platform (+ Infographic)
Engagement is key to a thriving, connected, and philanthropic community. But how can you truly measure ROI of your Gravyty-powered alumni platform? And what does real success look like? Although each school may define success differently, there are key metrics and statistics that can serve as common benchmarks.
What alumni say about the value of a thriving alumni network platform
In recent years, advancement teams have had to drastically rethink their alumni engagement programs. From COVID halting in-person events to a digital shift in giving, alumni are showing institutions how and where they prefer to engage with their community.
And the transition in alumni behavior isn’t just a presumption – we asked nearly 600 higher education alumni about their experiences, preferences and plans for engaging with their alma mater and fellow alumni community. Here are some of the most influential learnings from our study:
- 60% of alumni are using virtual networks like alumni platforms or social networks to connect with fellow alums.
- 93% of alumni donors engage with their institutions through a virtual alumni network like Gravyty.
- Alumni who participate in a mentoring program are 209% more likely to donate to their alma mater in the future.
It’s clear that both alumni and alumni relations teams place value in a virtual community like the ones Gravyty can power.
Dani Martinez Carpizo,
Program Manager, Forever Buffs Network, CU Boulder
So now that we understand the importance of a digital alumni engagement, we’ll break down how you can measure the success of your own Gravyty alumni engagement platform.
Key performance indicators for your alumni network & how to measure alumni engagement
You invest in your alumni engagement technology and programming, so how can you make sure the areas you are focusing on are working? Use these benchmarks from our data of peer institutions to track your own platform’s success and find areas of improvement.
User engagement & platform adoption
New users: Gravyty’s real-time analytics shows the number of overall users and compares it with your pre-populated alumni data.
How The John Cooper School drove a 40% platform adoption rate
Starting with a small pilot group of alums, the engagement team at The John Cooper School invited the most recent alumni class and alumni board to join their Gravyty-powered alumni engagement platform. After seeing promising engagement results, they rolled out the platform to the rest of their alumni base ahead of homecoming. In the last three years, they have tested and optimized their strategy to drive more student and alumni engagement, ultimately driving 40% of their alumni base to register on the platform, more than their social platforms combined.
Page views: See the number of page views broken down by sections of your platform, making it easy to see which services and initiatives are most popular amongst your community.
Most active monthly users: This metric can signify those community members most likely to give, give more, volunteer, or participate in ambassadorship.
Return users: See how many users – and which ones – are returning to the platform. CU Boulder and Wesleyan University see a 70-75% return user rate on their Gravyty alumni networks.
Wesleyan University’s keys to a 74% return rate on their alumni platform
Wesleyan University’s alumni engagement team relaunched their alumni platform in tandem with the public launch of a capital campaign. By incorporating valuable information that ties directly to the giving campaign, alumni are incentivized to join and engage with the new platform. Wesleyan’s team created a dynamic content calendar to ensure there was always something new posted to the feed, keeping the platform feeling fresh, organic, and exciting for its users.
In just one year, Wesleyan’s alumni platform welcomed over 1,800 new users. 74% of these new users have returned to the platform, consistently engaging with the university, other alumni, and current students.
Newsletter opens/clicks: Use newsletter engagement metrics to take a pulse on how engaged alumni are with your content, news and updates. Mulgrave School in Vancouver reports platform newsletter open rates upwards of 90%.
New/updated profile information from users: Profile updates to fields including email, phone, address, social URLs, career data, and education data are tracked through Gravyty’s CRM integration. Alternatively, you can extract user profile updates manually via downloadable reports.
Networking, mentorship & career development
Number of messages or networking activities between users: In addition to tracking how many messages are sent, Gravyty provides a Safeguarding Report so that schools – particularly those with minors on their platform – can easily see individuals’ engagement activity with other platform users.
Number of formal mentoring relationships: This metric can vary greatly, depending on institutions’ size and type of the mentoring initiatives. While some schools prefer to focus on small, niche mentoring programs for select groups, others choose to prioritize large flash mentoring programs with hundreds or even thousands of participants. Many schools do both!
CU Boulder’s mentoring platform drove 400+ new relationships in one year
By partnering with departments across campus and using data to inform decisions, the CU Boulder’s alumni association team focused on increasing awareness and participation in their alumni network, Forever Buffs. The team introduced a seamless onboarding process, utilizing an algorithm to match mentors and mentees within the Gravyty platform.
Their strategy has driven more than 17,400 members to the platform and almost 500 new mentoring relationships created in one year.
Number of user career updates: Alumni career data – such as current and former job titles and employers – can be easily synced back into your records via CRM integrations. This metric can help you report on alumni career outcomes and to assist with donor prospect research.
Number of job & internship postings: Measure job board activity in the analytics dashboard. See how many jobs are shared, clicked on by alumni users, and applied to. You can also track how many users are accessing career resources like videos, templates, and links.
Program & volunteer engagement
CASE Alumni Engagement Metrics: Gravyty’s analytics dashboard features a CASE Alumni Engagement Metrics tracking feature that gathers alumni activity from across the platform which fall into their respective categories measured by CASE (Philanthropy, Volunteer, Experiential, Communication). Within two years of using Gravyty for alumni engagement, The University of Houston doubled their CASE alumni engagement metrics (from 9% to 18%).
Users who are “willing to help”: This is your “volunteer pipeline.” On average, 60% of users across all Graduway platforms indicate that they are willing to help the school or their peers in some way.
Events & content interaction
Event RSVPs: See this metric in the automated RSVP list for each event.
Listings & special offers in the Business Directory: This is a great way to discover business owners within your community. Several Gravyty partners have reported new corporate sponsorship relationships that have blossomed as a result of this feature.
Fundraising impact
Gifts raised through the platform via embedded giving forms: Gravyty’s integrated donation forms come with their own analytics dashboard to measure fundraising outcomes.
Let’s get started
Measuring the impact of a strategy is just as critical as the planning and implementation of it. After all, you can’t fix what you don’t know is broken. From volunteer engagement to mentorship and beyond, consider these metrics as a framework to build upon when analyzing your own alumni engagement program.
Gravyty makes it easy for you to measure the impact of engagement on your alumni community. And our team goes beyond just the technology. We work with you from onboarding to strategizing and beyond to make sure your program succeeds year after year. Get started with Gravyty’s alumni engagement platform.
