Category Archives: Alumni Channel News

Alumni Channel in the Local News

Alumni called home

Lee Procida | The Sun

The Lenape School District recently kicked off an extensive effort to reach out to its alumni and maintain closer connections with the thousands of graduates from its four schools.

This Alumni Ambassador Project includes trying to track down the 13,000 students with diplomas from Cherokee High School since 1978. But Joe Laufer, the district’s director of alumni fairs, views this ambitious goal as invaluable for the several district schools. It’s rare for public schools to do what we’re doing,” he said. So we feel we’re on the cutting edge of maintaining a viable alumni association.”

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Paterson Catholic joins Alumni Channel for their Online Alumni Community

Today, Michele Neves, assistant principal of Paterson Catholic High School in Paterson, New Jersey, made a commitment to begin implementation of the Alumni Channel for their online alumni community. PC is the first school on the Alumni Channel new design platform.

Paterson Catholic High School is a private four year Catholic high school located in Passaic County, New Jersey serving students from 9th through 12th grade. It is under the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Paterson.

New Functionality

I recently attended two conferences on young alumni relations where we learned a great amount of information on how to connect to different generations of alumni. We also listened to several organizations who told us about their needs in online communities. Through these and other discussions the Alumni Channel is going be looking into some of these ideas in 2008:

  • Event management (rsvp, participant lists, payment)
  • Photo galleries
  • Enhanced e-mail tracking (sent and opened statistics)
  • Additional contact information data points
  • Segmented reporting and e-mail blasts
  • Online networking and mentoring
  • More detailed reports
  • Segmentation by affinity groups / student organizations
  • Featured members

25,000 Alumni Now with The Alumni Channel

Today our twenty-four membership sites collectively got to 25,000 registered alumni!  We’re looking forward to more growth as we launch into different sectors outside of public schools (Catholic schools, independent schools, etc.).  We’re also looking to update our look-and-feel and add new options such as support of photo galleries, surveys, and additional demographic data.

Why should a school pay for an Alumni Channel web site? Couldn’t we just go with Classmates.com — it’s free?

Often we are asked why an organization should go with Alumni Channel?  Is it worth it to pay?  Couldn’t we just build it ourself?  How about one of those free services like Reunion.com, Classmates.com or AlumniArchive.net?

Here’s an excerpt of a reply given to one such school in November 2007 . . .

We are a small, approachable company.  We began working with schools in 1998 with our first site for Cherokee High School in Marlton, NJ.  In 2006 we started working the business full-time and have added over 20 more organizations and now have over 24,700 members in our database. We currently host the alumni sites of seven Burlington County schools and fourteen within New Jersey. “Mercer County Technical Schools” and “High Technology High School” are our clients too.

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Commerce Bank’s Affinity Membership Program

If your non-profit organization becomes a member of Commerce Bank’s Affinity Membership Program, then Commerce Bank will donate to you an amount of money based on a percentage of the average balance of Alumni and Friends with Commerce Bank Affinity Program accounts.

Open an account at Commerce Bank and they’ll make a contribution to your organization. Commerce will make an annual donation based on the average balance in all members’ accounts. Checking, Savings, Money Market, CD, and Retirement accounts are all included in the program.

If your members are already a Commerce Customer, have them visit any Commerce store and ask to have their balances included as part of your organization’s Affinity Membership Program.

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