How to work with Alumni

Alumni are part of our community. Here some principles & ways to reach out to them.

Every oikee graduates, and thus becomes an alumni. Being a community & network, these people don’t just drop out but have the unique opportunity to stay connected & evolve together with oikos. They are a great source of inspiration & develop networks that can support us in our own work. The same counts in the other direction.

Here some principles & hints for addressing & including alumni.

PRINCIPLES for our work with Alumni:

These principles have been derived out of year-long experience. We give our best to practice them in our everyday work & count on you to consider them in your work, as well. We consider alumni as a part of the community, in appreciation of the value they bring We are responsible that all alumni have quick & easy access to oI information & are invited to our events We work on warm databases: Alumni relationships work through relationships, direct links & cohorts enable us to connect to the network, NOT cold/old data We support any alumni activity, independent of who initiates it. We don’t organize alumni events ourselves, and provide platforms for alumni to mingle with the community (eg. ICC, community events) We learn from our mistakes & don’t repeat the same thing over & over

How to reach out to Alumni?

Alumni are seen as an integrated part of our community, therefore everything that counts for our community in general is also relevant for alumni. Nevertheless, reaching out to alumni can be even harder than reaching our active oikees. Here some hints & ways for us to communicate to the alumni community:

• Social Media Channels & Groups - main access point to alumni at the moment. Managed by oikos International. Managers can be added through comms team. Some Chapters have their own alumni channels on social media. We don’t have an overview here. You can just go & post in the channels yourself, or ask the communications team to post from the official channels

  • Linkedin

  • Facebook

• Warm Database - We realized that keeping a database with contacts doesn't serve us due to high fluctuation & ongoing change, & workload to manage/facilitate. What works better for us is to work with living relationships & the ‘warm data’ that exists within cohorts & cross-chapter connections. Social media like linkedin or instagram can help to remain connected & move relationships forward. Ask the team or your friends to reach out directly to people, and let the ripple effect do its magic :) Sources of warm data are:

  • Our own relationships (Boards & oI team in general)

  • Relationships of our oikos friends

  • Cohorts (LEAP, Camp, Academy etc. - see great list of everything)

  • Houses

  • Onsite gatherings in general are great to foster these ties

  • There is a list of alumni spiderhumans, the most engaged alumni with the widest network to our knowledge. Always worth reaching out to them!

• Quarterly Updates - The communication team produces a quarterly overview that can be accessed here in the toolbox. It can be shared on all social media channels & linked in all initiatives.

• Newsletter - published on a monthly basis, registration through our website. Useful to point alumni towards, as well. Contact the communications team for more

At the moment, we are not actively supporting the chapters in their alumni relationshipping. This will hopefully change soon. Stay tuned!

In case you have further questions or curiosities around alumni, it is always worth to contact the alumni themselves. The (past presidents also have a good sense of the network itself as they are actively working with them.

Contact in the team: Sophie Charrois, Niklas Ziemann