Success Story

How a Private University Built Structured Alumni Mentorship at Scale

Discover how a leading private university built alumni mentorship at scale, with 1,800 structured matches each semester using PeopleGrove, resulting in 2,500 active mentors and improved engagement, advancement, and student outcomes.

1,800

Mentorship Matches Per Semester
2,500

Active Alumni "Super Users"

Institution Type

Private University
Academic Programs

Undergraduate & Graduate

The Setting

A Foundation for Institution-Wide Alumni Mentorship

A prestigious private university enrolls nearly 15,000 undergraduate and graduate students across more than a dozen schools and colleges. Its alumni association, representing more than 200,000 alumni worldwide, works to cultivate meaningful connections and lifelong engagement.

The association was charged with designing a mentorship initiative that could unify previously siloed efforts. The goal was ambitious: create a scalable system connecting thousands of students and alumni while strengthening the institution’s sense of community and reinforcing its reputation for excellence.

The Challenge

Scaling Mentorship, Not Just Managing It

“We had piloted a manually managed, hand-matched mentorship program from 2015 to 2019… the program was quite successful, but utterly not scalable.”

Early attempts to formalize mentoring relied on spreadsheets and personal outreach, producing at most 50–100 matches per semester. Each pairing required hours of staff coordination and was limited to small cohorts within individual schools. Leaders sought a comprehensive, technology-enabled solution that could:

Serve all schools and professional programs
Expand access beyond the most extroverted or connected students
Integrate data across alumni systems
Provide measurable insights into engagement and impact

The university needed a partner that could deliver both human connection and enterprise-level scalability.

The Solution

A Centralized Alumni Mentorship Platform

Participation on the PeopleGrove platform quickly surpassed expectations. Within months, 7,500 alumni joined; five years later, membership has grown to nearly 30,000 (22,000 alumni and 7,000 students). A year after launch, structured mentorship was introduced, formally pairing students with appropriate alumni and giving participants clear timelines, prompts, and check-ins.

Each semester, approximately 1,800 student-alumni pairs connect for career exploration, guidance, and support—totaling more than 16,000 pairings to date.

Over 2,500 alumni actively volunteer as mentors, viewing the experience as a meaningful way to “pay it forward.”

Behind the scenes, the platform powers weekly data syncs that update nearly two dozen fields of alumni information—refreshing records far faster than legacy systems. Analytics now inform event targeting, volunteer recruitment, and segmentation by interests, geography, or life stage. Nearly every college or school use the platform as their shared community hub, and membership continues to grow 5 percent annually.

PeopleGrove has provided a new type of community for our students and alumni, allowing us to move from manually pairing 50–100 people each year to 1,800 each semester.

The Results

A Scalable Mentorship Ecosystem Powering Lifelong Engagement

“If we want to continue to get the best students and attract the best faculty and staff, we better have a great reputation… PeopleGrove allows us to continuously improve engagement with alumni in all sorts of ways.”

Quantitative impact

16,000 mentorship pairings since 2021
2,500 active alumni mentors
11% of all alumni community on the platform
34% identified as highly engaged “super users”
54% of alumni participants have donated since joining—more than double the national rate
14 schools actively using the platform

Qualitative outcomes
Students—especially those who are introverted, international, or first-generation—are finding mentors they would never have approached on their own. Alumni describe mentorship as a rewarding, non-monetary way to give back.

The platform has become more than a matching tool: it is now a living network that refreshes data across university systems, fuels personalized engagement, and reinforces institutional pride.

For this university, structured mentorship through PeopleGrove has evolved from an experiment to a model for sustainable community building that keeps students and alumni connected long after graduation.