Alumni management software helps a college or university keep in touch with its former students, who are called alumni. It keeps an up-to-date directory of alumni, runs reunions and mentoring programmes, and raises donations from them. It is also called alumni engagement software or an alumni portal.
The hard part is keeping the records current. When students graduate, the student information system (SIS) has their address and phone number at that time. Ten years later, most of those details are out of date, because alumni have moved cities and changed jobs. So the software asks alumni to update their own profiles. It also lets volunteers from each batch invite the classmates they are still in touch with.
Here is a typical case. A 60-year-old engineering college in Thiruvananthapuram has about 30,000 living alumni, and the software holds current details for 11,000 of them. For the 25-year reunion of the 2001 batch, the alumni office opens registration in the alumni portal. The software sends invitations to the 380 graduates of that batch whom it can reach. 142 of them register, and the software records their meal choices and the number of family members coming. For large events, registration is often handled by an event management platform connected to the alumni system.
At the reunion, the batch announces a gift: a scholarship fund of ₹40 lakh for students from families with low incomes. The software creates a donation page for the fund. Each alumnus who gives, for example ₹25,000, receives an online receipt. Because the college is run by a registered charitable trust, the receipt lets the donor claim an income tax deduction. The software shows the fund's total each day, and which batches have given the most. Each gift is also recorded in donor management software, or in the alumni system's own donor module.
The software also runs mentoring. A final-year student who wants to work in chip design can search the directory for alumni who work in that field, and ask one of them for a 30-minute call. Alumni can also post jobs and internships for current students, which adds to the college's campus placements.
Alumni giving is far larger in the United States than in India. Some American universities receive a large part of their income from former students, and much of this software was first built for them. Many Indian colleges are now setting up alumni offices of their own. In both countries, the software is a kind of customer relationship management (CRM) system, with alumni in the place of customers.