From Fresher’s Week to Forever: How Digital Alumni Cards Keep Graduates Connected
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From Fresher’s Week to Forever: How Digital Alumni Cards Keep Graduates Connected
A new academic year dawns and universities are preparing to welcome a fresh cohort of students. Here at PassEntry, we believe this might the perfect time to enable former students to tap into the friendships made during their time at university with a digital alumni wallet pass.
Of the students surveyed by one university [Leeds Beckett] more than half said they met their best friend for life at university. Academic learning was, of course, the biggest takeaway but friendship and romance came a close second. What is interesting is that over time the importance of these connections grows, not fades.
Alumni associations are powerful marketing tools. The further away people get from their student days, the fonder those memories of their university days seem to become. More than a decade after they left, 65% of those questioned still referred to their university days as the best time of their life.
Push notifications to digital alumni cards in the Apple Wallet and Google Wallet can tap directly into what former students say they miss most.
From Royal Mail to Real-Time: Moving Alumni Cards into Digital Wallets
Relying on physical alumni membership cards makes no sense in a digital age. If your university posts the cards, then it is probably by 2nd Class Royal Mail. This can take up to a month by the time the paperwork is complete, the card is printed and dispatched. That timespan increases if the alumni live overseas. If you have different campuses in different geographical locations, you can consider the issues scaled and multiplied for your alumni teams.
Every student with a smart phone already has a digital wallet. Make life easy for yourself and issue a membership card that lives in that Apple or Google Wallet.
There is a demographic ripple on the surface of our otherwise smooth pond, which is that older alumni may still like to have an actual card in their physical wallet and that’s fine – you can post them one too, on request. It’s digital-by-default, but it doesn’t have to be digital-only. That choice is yours.
A Physical Alumni membership card
Takes a long time to print and distribute
Static
Expensive to issue
Easily lost or forgotten
A Digital Alumni wallet pass
Immediately Live
Dynamic
Inexpensive to produce and issue at scale
Always accessible in the Apple Wallet or Google Wallet
More environmentally friendly than a physical membership card
Don’t just take our word for it. Research by Brandmovers on mobile wallet loyalty, points out that wallet pass notifications appear immediately on the lock screen of the Apple or Android phone, achieving near-perfect delivery rates which means that they are seen. This compares favourably to emails that are easy to miss, filter out or simply scroll past and ignore.
For an alumni office competing for attention, that’s the difference between a message that reaches people and one that disappears quietly within an Inbox.
How to turn an Unused Membership Card into a High-Performing Marketing Channel
The plastic membership card is all but obsolete. A physical membership card is frozen in time. Benefits changes, discount partners come and go, expiry dates shift and every one of those changes mean that you need to re-print and re-post a card to someone who may have moved house, city, country or continent since they graduated. Digital wallet passes solve these problems, completely. Content can be updated in real-time; discount codes, event listings and new benefits can be sent instantly as push notifications to the Apple or Android lock-screen. That’s before we talk about the administrative hours that will be saved by moving from physical to digital membership cards.
Nothing that we’ve talked about in this post asks anything extra of your alumni. Every graduate who uses an iPhone or Android phone already has the Apple Wallet or Google Wallet installed. Switch from a physical to a digital membership pass to convert a plastic card that sits untouched in a drawer or physical wallet into a high-performing marketing channel for your alumni office.
Graduation doesn’t have to be the moment when your university loses touch with your alumni. Don’t allow a relationship that has been built over many years to be destroyed when their student email account is deactivated. You will never know how many reunions, networking evenings or fundraising campaigns they may engage with or contribute to if you don’t keep your former students updated about them.
An alumni pass is much more than a digital ID card. It can also double up as:
Proof of Alumni Status for library access, gym membership or campus facilities
A Discount Card for local partners, bookshops or alumni-only retail opportunities
An Event Ticket, scanned on entry to reunions, talks or graduation ceremonies
A Loyalty Mechanism, tracking engagement and rewarding donors or active volunteers.
Why Branded Digital Alumni Cards Pay Off When You Need Alumni Support
A well-designed digital pass that includes your crest, colours and individual faculty-branding keeps your university’s name in the front of your students’ minds long after graduation. It’s a small but not insignificant reminder that will pay dividends if you ever want to reach out with a request for their time, knowledge or funding.
Follow the lead set by Oxford University and Monash University and talk to us at PassEntry today to learn more about how we can help you to implement a digital alumni membership scheme that can be live within weeks not months, and deliver outstanding results for your university.
Brandmovers Article: https://blog.brandmovers.com/mobile-wallet-loyalty-apple-wallet-google-wallet-and-the-de
ath-of-the-physical-loyalty-card
Leeds Beckett Survey: https://www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/news/0815-university-years-confirmed-as-the-best-time-of-our-lives/
