What Is Graduway? A Complete Guide to the Alumni Engagement Platform
If you’ve searched for alumni engagement software, you’ve almost certainly come across the name Graduway. It’s one of our flagship products here at Gravyty, and we built it to solve a problem advancement teams know well: keeping alumni meaningfully connected after graduation — at scale, without burning out your staff.
But what exactly does it do, who is it for, and how does it fit into a broader engagement strategy? This guide breaks it all down, from core features and real-world outcomes to how the alumni engagement platform works alongside the rest of Gravyty’s suite of products.
What is Graduway?
Graduway is a dedicated alumni engagement and mentoring platform from Gravyty, designed to help higher education institutions, K-12 schools, and nonprofits build thriving, always-on digital communities for their alumni, students, and constituents.
Unlike general social networks or basic alumni directories, Graduway gives institutions a fully branded, secure virtual hub where alumni can connect with each other, access career resources, participate in mentoring programs, attend events, and give back.
Trusted by more than 2,750 institutions worldwide — including Oregon State University, Ohio University, and William & Mary— Graduway powers alumni networks that keep graduates connected long after commencement day.
20k+ active members
in the first two years implemented at Chi Omega
Who is Graduway for?
Graduway is built for a wide range of institutions and organizations that need to maintain meaningful, scalable relationships with their alumni communities:
- Higher education institutions (universities, colleges, and community colleges) looking to increase alumni engagement, drive philanthropic giving, and support career outcomes for students and graduates
- K-12 schools seeking to leverage alumni as mentors, volunteers, and donors
- Nonprofits that need to build and sustain member or constituent communities
- Alumni relations and advancement teams who want a dedicated platform that integrates seamlessly with their CRM and fundraising tools
Whether your team is a department of one or a full advancement division, Graduway is designed to be low-maintenance after launch. Most institutions only spend a few hours per week on content updates and moderation once automated workflows are in place.
Core features of Graduway
Fully branded alumni community
Graduway gives your institution a customizable, white-labeled portal that reflects your brand identity. Alumni log in to a space that feels like yours, not a third-party app. You control the homepage layout, featured content, calls to action, and member experience from top to bottom.
Structured and flash mentoring
One of Graduway’s most powerful features is its mentoring module. Institutions can run both formal mentoring programs (with smart auto-matching, application forms, milestones, and structured flows) and flash mentoring, where alumni offer just-in-time career advice to students and peers.
The platform’s matching algorithm weighs profile attributes and application answers to surface the most compatible pairings, and admins can choose to auto-match, manually match, or let mentees browse and request connections themselves. Automated milestones and notifications keep relationships moving forward without requiring constant staff intervention.
185 completed mentorships
at Oregon State University using Graduway
Alumni directory
Graduway includes a searchable, self-service alumni directory where members can update their own contact information, professional details, and areas of expertise. This keeps your database fresh and reduces the burden on staff to manually chase down updated records, while also feeding enriched data back into your CRM through native integrations.
Affinity and Premium Groups
Institutions can create topic-specific groups within the platform for class years, departments, professional industries, geographic chapters, and more. Premium Groups take this further by offering a platform-within-a-platform experience, giving subgroups their own dedicated feed, events calendar, jobs board, and resources section while still contributing data to the broader institutional network.
Jobs and internships board
The jobs board lets alumni post openings at their companies and gives students and recent graduates a trusted, exclusive place to find opportunities. The board integrates with Handshake and Symplicity for institutions already using those platforms, and supports RSS feed imports to keep listings current without manual uploads.
Personalized video messaging
Integrated video messaging (powered by Gravyty’s Gratavid) enables advancement teams to send personal, video messages to welcome new members, recognize milestones, thank donors, or re-engage alumni. Video messages consistently outperform text-based communications in response and engagement rates.
Embedded Analytics and Reporting
The platform’s analytics dashboard gives advancement teams visibility into network growth, active users, mentoring relationship volume, event attendance, and more. Data can be benchmarked against CASE metrics and used to inform ongoing engagement strategy.
How Graduway supports fundraising
Alumni engagement and alumni giving aren’t separate strategies, they’re part of the same continuum. Graduway is built with that philosophy in mind.
The platform includes an embedded donations widget that allows community members to give directly within the Graduway feed, without being redirected to a separate giving portal. For institutions using Gravyty’s Advance digital fundraising platform, embed codes connect the two seamlessly.
93% of alumni donors
on Graduway platforms actively engage in their virtual alumni network
When Graduway is paired with Gravyty’s broader ecosystem (including Advance for digital fundraising campaigns and Gratavid for personalized donor outreach) institutions build an integrated pipeline that moves alumni from engaged community members to consistent donors.
Graduway integrations
Graduway integrates with the systems advancement teams already rely on:
- Raiser’s Edge NXT – Alumni profile, mentoring, and professional data flows one-way into RE:NXT, enriching CRM records without overwriting core advancement data
- Salesforce – Full field and object mapping with optional API extensions for flexible data exchange
- Gratavid – Four trigger-based video automations (new user, group join, mentoring relationship start, and event registration)
- Open API – For institutions with custom integration needs
Graduway vs. other alumni platforms
It’s common to compare Graduway to tools like LinkedIn Groups, Almabase, or Hivebrite. The core distinction is this: Graduway is purpose-built for institution-managed alumni engagement, giving your team control over the data, the experience, and the outcomes.
For example, LinkedIn Groups offer reach but no data ownership, no branding control, and no integration with your CRM or giving tools. Almabase and Hivebrite focus more narrowly on community features, without the depth of mentoring infrastructure, fundraising integration, or career tools that Graduway provides.
What does implementation look like?
Graduway’s standard implementation timeline is 10 weeks from kickoff to launch. The process includes platform build and branding configuration, admin training, a soft launch to priority users, and a full network activation.
After launch, a dedicated Customer Success Manager supports ongoing strategy through monthly check-ins, quarterly success reviews, and access to the broader Gravyty training community and resource library.
Ready to learn more?
Graduway is built for institutions that want more than a static alumni directory. It’s a full engagement platform that connects alumni to each other, to career opportunities, to mentors, and to your mission.
To see it in action, request a demo today.
