Alum email addresses for life: investment or waste of time?

April 29th, 2005 Karine Joly 2 Comments

Alum email addresses are now considered as very hot commodities by your university/college alum association and advancement office.

Email is a cost-effective, efficient and easy way to develop and nurture mutually beneficial relationships with alums.

So, how do you get these email addresses?

There are 2 different options to harvest these valuable addresses:

  • you can ask your graduating seniors to give you their personal email addresses before they kiss their alma mater good bye;
  • you can offer your graduates to keep their edu email addresses forever and ever.

In a recent post “Cutting off your graduates email addresses!” on the vendor blog Wired Communities, Don Philabaum makes the case for the email-address-for-life option:

“It’s no surprise that while students are on campus they get attached to their email addresses. While students have alternate Yahoo, Hotmail and other addresses they use during their college years, many campuses create a system that requires them to use their campus email address to participate in tools that provide class lectures online, networking opportunities to study with fellow classmates etc.

So if colleges are forcing students to use the assigned email address while they are on campus, why do they so blithely cut their email address off when they leave?”

Good point.

It definitely makes sense for students who didn’t use email a lot before going to college.

While most of younger graduates/students haven’t fully adopted their edu email addresses and kept using the email accounts they grew up with, will they be interested in the opportunity to keep their underused edu email addresses?

The question is really about the value of university/college email addresses for alums – not for alum associations or advancement offices.

2 Responses

  1. Random Wanderer says:

    My school’s policy is to give you at least a year to wean yourself off your email address. When you deal with 5000 new students a year, it doesn’t take long before they run out of John Smith-like email addresses to assign. So, addresses are recycled to minimize the number of people who are given j99smith@ addresses (or in extreme cases, jas123@). As always, when the choice is share or force everyone but the lucky first-comers to do without, good email names are shared across the years.

  2. chris says:

    For the past four years our alumni association has allowed current students and alumni to sign up for an email alias that links them to our institution. The student or alumni can use it on resumes to show their affiliation with the university, but, because it is an alias, the student must forward all incoming email to an actual email account. One less inbox to check.

    Students like using their university email to give their business cards some heft, but they rarely check that account.

    What will happen to all of the perpetual email addresses if institutions move to a online networking platform to stay in contact with students?

Got a question or comment?