Alumni communities are evolving. Once upon a time, an alumni community was primarily a source of institutional fundraising and nostalgic events.
No more. The alumni relations world is evolving as more and more colleges and universities recognize the need to build alumni capital – long-term, mutually-valuable relationships that benefit both institutions and alumni.
With the changes in alumni communities have come software to help navigate those changes. One of the options you may have heard of is Graduway. It gives you an alumni management tool that brings together membership, engagement, and community-building.
But Graduway is not the only option, or even the best option, to run an alumni community. In this article, we’ll introduce you to 4 awesome Graduway alternatives. Each of them give you different and better ways to serve your alumni, with things like branded, custom community apps, membership tracking, and event functionality.
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1. Mighty Pro
Ranked #1 community platform by G2
If you’re looking for an alternative to Graduway, start with Mighty Pro. It's a powerful cultural software platform that brings together content, courses, community, and commerce with a beautiful custom app. Its all-in-one community engine works for membership, forums, live streaming, and live events – all totally under your own brand. You can create independent subgroups for regional chapters or different interests or add resources. And if you’re looking for a way to generate revenue from your alumni network, whether gifts or membership-based, you can sell courses, events, community, subgroups, or any combination of these you want.
We’re living in a new era of alumni networking, with more and more alumni expecting to maintain long-term relationships with their institutions. With Mighty Pro, you can create an alumni network that truly gives back, offering courses and events that can create value for your members. With branded live streaming, you can send live video to your members and/or create a cohort course. You can also create asynchronous courses with the LMS if you choose.
When it comes to gathering your alumni for events, Mighty Pro has a full set of options baked in. We mentioned the live streaming above, but you can also create events with the 1-click Zoom integration. Members can join event communities, RSVP, ask questions, and you can message all members.
Finally, Mighty Pro helps you build a beautiful branded app under your own college or university brand – that’s what your alumni will see in the App Store or Google Play Store. You simply bring the vision and your brand, and we’ll meet with you and do the building. We’ll work to get something you love, help you with the launch, and hold regular touchpoints with you afterward to make sure you’re reaching your members and help you get the most out of your alumni community.
Mighty Pro is the platform that built Rice University’s Higher Led community and Cambridge University’s Cambridge Connect community.
If you want to see what you can do with Mighty Pro, schedule a call with us!
2. Hivebrite
Solid alumni management platform
Hivebrite is another Graduway alternative with some good member management features. These include native email campaigns that work well and give you some neat options to reach your members. So, for example, you can run fundraising campaigns with Hivebrite’s built-in email software, which is a cool feature for an alumni network to have. It also has a CRM function built into it so that you can keep track of alumni and donors and manage membership options within the community. The CRM integrates with community actions and responds to triggers in the community – for example, it can send annual reminders to update membership.
The place Hivebrite feels a bit outdated is with its content options. It doesn’t do native video, you have to link out to different video hosts like YouTube or Vimeo. It also doesn’t do native live streaming or meetings. As such, it’s not a great solution for virtual alumni events, which are becoming the more common choice these days.
As we’ve mentioned, Hivebrite is an alumni management software. Therefore, it doesn’t work well for things like trying to sell a membership or attract new members – this may or may not be a dealbreaker depending on what you need from it. The other knock against HiveBrite is that the design is extremely dated. But the alumni focus combined with a totally white-label custom app earns Hivebrite its spot on this list of Graduway alternatives.
3. Wild Apricot
Wild Apricot is another Graduway alternative. It was built for non-profit member management, but could work well for an alumni network too. Wild Apricot lets you design websites and landing pages with a drag-and-drop builder, customizing the space your alumni will come to. It includes mobile-friendly themes and custom branding options.
Wild Apricot works best as a member management software that lets you create and manage a member database, including membership applications (if you need them), group memberships, automated renewals, and access for your members to the directory. It can also be used to manage live events, collecting registrations, printing badges, and the features you’d need to run a meeting in person.
Finally, Wild Apricot also gives you the ability to create independent websites and databases for regional chapters of a large national group, which could work for organizing regional meetings of your larger alumni network. Wild Apricot is limited for virtual community and events, but works well for member management and live meetings.
4. Almabase
Almabase is a good Graduway alternative when it comes to alumni engagement and fundraising. It gives a membership management option that lets you track and acquire new donors and manage digital engagement – the connection between community and advancement is a big plus. It has a member database function with a map that lets alumni find users near them. Its community function can bring together alumni for discussions and engagement, and you can divide alumni communities by interests or regional chapters.
It’s also good for event management, giving a Zoom integration and the ability to sell tickets to a virtual or live event. You can segment your audience, make sure the right events reach the right people, and personalize invites and reminders.
There are two big limitations to Almabase. The first is that there aren’t really a lot of options for customization. The second is that there is virtually no option for creating an app, which is a missed opportunity to serve your alumni where they’re at. Fewer and fewer web users are engaging with desktop computers.
Ready to start?
If you’re ready to get started with an awesome branded alumni app, a powerful community and events platform, and subgroups for your regional chapters, come see what Mighty Pro can do for you! It’s the most powerful option out there for a white-label alumni app. Let us build you the alumni platform you’ve been dreaming about, deliver huge value to your alums, and you can focus on other things.
Wanna start dreaming now? With Mighty Co-Host™, Mighty Networks has harnessed the power of AI and Chat GPT to help you start iterating the perfect online community for your alumni.
Type in any idea you have in the box below and Mighty Co-Host™ will generate a community name, brand, landing and sales pages, and so much more!
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