How to work with your alumni to recruit students

Photo by Harm Weustink on Unsplash

At the Higher Education Conference - Fixes to Foresight: What’s Next for Student Recruitment? we spoke to a panel of HE marketing leaders. The conversation was thick and fast and we received so many questions from the audience that we weren’t able to answer them all. Since then we’ve followed up with our panel to cover all the outstanding questions and delve deeper into some of the topics we covered. 

Alumni can make valuable contributions to the student recruitment process. They help bring the experience of university and courses to life. Their role and the way universities collaborate with them varies across institutions. We asked HE leaders about the involvement of alumni in the recruitment process at their universities, and if they think there’s room to do more.

Alumni bring clout

“The power of alumni is even greater than current students, in a way,” Simon Pride, head of recruitment and marketing at Arts University Bournemouth explains. “If you have an open day and you put students in there, it’s brilliant. If you put alumni in there, it's amazing!” 

Emma Leech, director of marketing and communications at Nottingham Trent University (NTU) explains how valuable NTU considers senior student and alumni contributions. She says, “we’re already working with alumni in some subject areas. Increased alumni engagement is a critical part of our strategic recruitment mix.” 

How universities work with alumni

Head of student recruitment and market development at the University of Suffolk (UoS), Karen Hinton, explains how UoS work with alumni. She says, “ whilst we're growing nationally and internationally, our students have traditionally been quite local and regional. I think because of that, they do play a part in talking about their experience to others. 

“For us, alumni engagement is more effective for mature students than young students. We see more engagement from mature students.”

At Arts University Bournemouth, the pandemic has had an impact on their engagement with alumni. Simon says, “I think the fact that we had to do everything online has opened up our eyes to getting alumni in front of prospective students. We’ve certainly done that quite a bit for international markets.

“Now we can do things online, it is much easier to have alumni attend events and engage because they don’t have to come down from London or travel from abroad or wherever they are.”

Engagement challenges and solutions

Marketing and recruitment officer at De Montfort University, Daniel Nyirenda, shares some of the challenges universities face to connect alumni and with prospective students. He says, “when I see things happening with alumni, it feels like students aren't very engaged with it.

“You get a very small pool of students who want to engage with alumni. It seems to need to be a big name for students to be motivated to participate. For example, if Mark Zuckerberg went to De Montfort University, then you would see an influx of students wanting to engage with the alumni. I think this is a challenge for most universities.”

How can engagement be improved? Daniel suggests, “perhaps we need to find ways to include alumni in the curriculum somehow, such as guest talks. I'm sure some universities will do this, but it has to be in the curriculum. 

“It shouldn't be like a side thing that you're doing with ‘hey, look, we've got this guest coming, do you want to join?’ No, it should be within the actual course and part of the structure.” 

Alumni are powerful

Alumni can be an incredibly powerful resource for student recruitment. As universities have questioned and adapted the way they operate in many ways, alumni engagement has been an area of fresh consideration for some. 

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