How The John Cooper School drove nearly 40% of their entire alumni base to their engagement platform
Key stats
37%
Alumni
37% of all alumni registered on alumni platform
17%
Increase
17% increase in registered users YoY
59%
Alumni
59% of alumni in network willing to be a mentor
About The John Cooper School
The John Cooper School is an independent, non-sectarian, co-educational, college preparatory day school for grades pre-kindergarten through 12 located in The Woodlands, TX. Founded in 1988, the School’s mission is to provide a challenging education in a caring environment to a diverse group of select students, enabling them to become critical and creative thinkers, effective communicators, responsible citizens and leaders, and lifelong learners.
The challenge: Drive early and long-term engagement with accurate alumni data and valuable resources
Engagement leaders at The John Cooper School faced a challenge familiar to most K-12 private schools: driving high student and alumni platform adoption and participation. This was made all the more challenging with constant digital distractions, as well as higher education institutions vying for their shared alumnus’ attention.
A key engagement goal for John Cooper was to provide real-world value to current students and alums, including career guidance and networking. They also sought accurate, up-to-date contact information for alumni to make it easier to stay connected over the course of their lifetime.
The solution: Use a comprehensive platform as a single source of truth for alumni data and a one-stop-shop for engagement
The John Cooper School turned to Gravyty’s alumni engagement platform. Starting with a small pilot group of alums, the engagement team invited the most recent alumni class and alumni board to join the platform, and saw promising engagement results. From there, they rolled out the platform to the rest of their alumni base ahead of homecoming in September. In the last three years, they have tested and optimized their strategy to drive more student and alumni engagement.
Kalli Lovejoy,
Assistant Director, Alumni Engagement, The John Cooper School
One successful tactic has been a registration push to students early into their senior year at John Cooper. By highlighting the incredible value of the platform for providing college application guidance, connecting with fellow alumni, and networking with alums who have found success in their field of interest, their alumni base has embraced the platform with open arms.
With a searchable directory that can be easily updated by users, the engagement leaders at John Cooper have also found it much easier to stay in touch with alumni throughout their lives as data is always real-time and up to date.
The outcome: Drove nearly 40% of all alumni to register and engage through a virtual network, nurturing lifelong relationships
By engaging seniors early in their final year at John Cooper, the engagement team has seen incredible adoption and participation with 37% of their entire alumni base registered on the platform.
Students and alumni alike have found value in the network. For example, one alumnus taps into the network to find interns to work at her digital marketing company. Additionally, many parents of alumni who make up a vibrant community of business owners use the platform to post open positions through the platform’s job directory.
The engagement team has also facilitated closer-knit relationships with exclusive affinity groups for things like sports teams and academic clubs. And the team has no plans of slowing down – they plan to roll out more robust engagement metrics to track performance over time, and implement even more valuable programming.
Solution spotlight
Gravyty’s alumni and community engagement platform enables schools to create a thriving community of alumni with a tailored network platform, mentoring tools, exclusive groups, job and internship boards and personalized multi-channel messaging at scale. Automated mentor matching, job and internship boards, milestones and badges, video messaging and custom survey tools help alums build lasting connections and find career success. Learn more here.
