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You just renewed your contract with 360Alumni… let’s start your new term strong!
First of all - hooray! Here at 360Alumni we are thrilled to continue our partnership with you and your organization. Please be sure you sent your signed renewal contract to our Client Success team and paid the renewal invoice by the designated due date.
Now, renewing your organization’s contract provides an excellent opportunity to review, reflect upon, and plan for another term of engaging and connecting with your community.
8 Steps to Take After Your Contract Renewal with 360Alumni
We’ve outlined 8 steps for you to take as you begin your new term to help you find even greater success in this next chapter with your online community. At a baseline, these action items are critical to revisit every time you renew. However, these steps can also be implemented whenever your team is experiencing transition or if you simply want to re-energize your online community space.
1. Hindsight is 20/20
Schedule time with your team and leadership to review and document what worked and what didn’t in the last contract term. Identify areas that supported success and contributed positively toward your organizational strategy and then discuss areas of opportunity. What parts of the site were highly utilized? Which were underdeveloped? What tools did users and admin use heavily? Which ones have some dust on them? This will set you and your team up nicely to dive into the second action item.
2. Set Goals for Future Success
With your team and organizational leadership, review the goals and priorities for your alumni community. It is essential to have internal alignment going into each new term. Set metric benchmarks whenever applicable to contextualize your team’s progress. Consider what will need specialized support or extra attention in the coming months. Do you have a big gala event coming up this year? A job fair around the bend? A new cohort of grads joining the site? While doing this, consider your communication and marketing schedule. Engage your marketing team as needed to plan the communications required to promote your community site.
3. Record Maintenance
Make sure to review your data strategy and alumni record import schedule. For new records, when will you have new groups of alumni joining? If you’d like to review the steps for preparing your data, this article will help.
It’s critical to take time at least once a year to assess how many of your alumni are reachable and make an action plan to update email addresses and other contact information. This article breaks down the steps to address email list decay.
4. Who’s in Charge
Take a look at who’s an admin on your community site - this can be accessed from the Settings menu. Is everyone listed as an administrator current? Do you have new additions to the team? Reach out to your 360Alumni Client Success manager to schedule training for anyone who is a new admin or needs a refresher.
5. Roles & Responsibilities
Review daily best practices and responsibilities for community site maintenance with your team. Ensure everyone is on the same page about who should be doing what and how frequently. Clarify expectations and commit to checking in regularly to ensure this work is being completed.
6. Refresh your Content
Retire outdated content (job postings, headlines, etc) from your alumni community. We recommend all content on your site stay current and fresh to maintain relevancy and encourage user activity. If a community member visits your space and finds posts that are outdated, they’ll be less likely to return or engage in the future. All posts should be from the last 2 - 3 months (but ideally even fresher than that).
7. (Re)Group on Alumni Group Activity
Review group activity and group leaders for any established groups in your site. When was the last time you connected with the group admin? Are you overdue for communication with key stakeholders?
8. Reconnect with Us
Maintaining your organization’s online community is an ongoing process. It's especially important to review how you’re doing after you've renewed your contract so you can continue to engage and energize your alumni community.
Our Client Success Team at 360Alumni can offer valuable coaching, assessment, strategic planning, training, and overall support. Let us know at support@360alumni.com how we can assist you as we complete your renewal and you plan for another successful term as part of the 360Alumni family!
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