Webinars
What if your PeopleGrove platform could act as a live dashboard for community insight? See how a top private institution is using PeopleGrove’s Engagement Hub as a powerful mechanism for understanding alumni and student needs, motivations, and behaviors.
In this recent PeopleGrove webinar, Assistant VP of Strategic Initiatives Sarah Myksin sat down with Steve Blum, Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives at a leading private university’s alumni association, to explore how that institution is leveraging alumni engagement tools to uncover actionable insights and strengthen institutional strategy.
As Myksin outlined, alumni engagement is facing serious headwinds—participation rates have dropped from over 20% to under 7%, and in-person event attendance is down 40% since 2019. With changing demographics and increased competition, it’s no longer sufficient to assume what alumni want. Institutions need timely, data-informed strategies to stay relevant and connected.
Blum offered a detailed look into the university’s journey with its PeopleGrove-powered engagement hub, “Cross Campus.” Launched in 2020, just before the pandemic, Cross Campus now hosts over 30,000 users—including 2,500 alumni mentors and thousands of students. The initiative began as a mentorship tool but quickly revealed itself as a powerful engine for understanding alumni sentiment and behavior.
Through structured mentorship programs—including alumni mentoring students and alumni mentoring alumni—the institution collects both quantitative and qualitative data. Two open-ended questions proved especially valuable: “Why do you want to be a mentor/mentee?” and “What else should your partner know about you?” Answers to these revealed motivations, anxieties, and even personal narratives that have helped identify the most engaged volunteers and better support student-alumni connections.
Blum emphasized that Cross Campus has become a “filing cabinet” of alumni sentiment—a dynamic, time-stamped repository of insight. Beyond anecdotes, the platform yields broader engagement trends. For example, Cross Campus skews younger, more diverse, and more global than the institution’s general alumni population, helping the university reach digital natives and underrepresented voices.
Moreover, alumni active on Cross Campus show higher philanthropic participation and engagement scores, even when platform usage is excluded from the metrics. The team uses this data for program refinement, strategic outreach, volunteer discovery, and even prospect research—demonstrating the downstream value of structured engagement platforms.
The key message? When alumni feel heard and connected—especially through platforms that foster community and mentorship—they’re more likely to stay engaged and give back. Institutions that invest in capturing and acting on alumni insights now will be better equipped to meet the needs of tomorrow’s graduates.
…we have an internal engagement score, and we have noticed that in every single school, the engagement score of people who are on the platform is much higher than the overall alumni engagement score. Even when you remove the fact that platform participation itself is part of the score, there’s still about a 20–25% higher level of engagement for those members.
Graduate enrollment has always been a nuanced challenge—but today, the stakes are higher, the audiences more complex, and the paths less linear.
3 min read
CASE Global Reporting Standards are now built into PeopleGrove. It's time to make engagement reporting easier, smarter, and more strategic.
3 min read
Webinars
Together with Cathy Francois, Director of Career Services at the University of Maryland Global Campus, we will discuss how creating a virtual campus drives positive retention, engagement, and post-graduation outcomes for online students.
3 min read
