AAUM breaks silos and drops membership acquisition costs by 50%.

AAUM brings alumni across the globe together while providing personalized experiences at scale.

2 min read

Products Used

Salesforce Platform

Sales Cloud

Marketing Cloud

With Salesforce for Education, AAUM has a 360-degree view of each of its constituents and powers personalized communications to increase participation in its various program offerings.

About the Organization

The Alumni Association of the University of Michigan (AAUM) serves its 700,000+ Michigan alumni, friends, and fans year-round. With a staff of more than 75 people, over 1,000 volunteers, and more than 100 alumni clubs and groups around the world, AAUM continues to keep alumni connected to one another.

The Challenge

Manual engagement tracking and siloed data created inconsistent messaging for alumni.

AAUM knew how it wanted to reach alumni, but outreach cross-collaboration was challenging with manual engagement tracking and siloed department data. No single department or program had the complete picture of what University of Michigan constituents were interested in or how they’d like to engage with the institution.

Each department and program was also challenged with the labor-intensive, manual process of creating personalized email campaigns. Outreach strategies were inconsistent. Different departments often contact the same person without a cohesive message.

How Salesforce Helps

Constituent profiles make every engagement more meaningful.

With Sales Cloud, AAUM has built deeper connections with its constituents at scale. By connecting and integrating university data, alumni, donors, and volunteers are recognized for their contributions. Communications are personalized and relevant based on where they live, their preferred campus, the type of events they like to attend, and more.

Events, feedback, and engagement from members are all now automatically logged in Sales Cloud. AAUM and other departments can directly access constituent data to drive engagement. AAUM can personalize new messaging to thank them for attending and recommend future events.

An alumni portal personalizes opportunities and encourages greater participation.

To enhance alumni participants’ experience, AAUM created a portfolio of alumni products and services ranging from career & education services to volunteering, travel programs, family camps, and many others focused on alumni success and engagement. With Experience Cloud, the alumni team created a personalized portal that lets constituents find and filter engagement opportunities, register for various alumni experiences, complete registration/volunteer forms, update their profiles, earn badges, and much more.

AAUM’s engagement score dashboard, powered by Salesforce Analytics, helps AAUM set participation and retention benchmarks and track outreach and campaign engagement to gather insights. Combining multiple sources of actionable data with constituent demographic data, the dashboard provides a holistic view of alumni engagement by key segments.

Personalized communication journeys increase membership retention rates by 20%.

With Marketing Cloud and automation journeys, AAUM now provides dynamic content via email, social media, and text. This has directly improved both membership acquisition and retention efforts. Additionally, with automated campaigns, AAUM reduced its marketing campaigns budget by 20% on a yearly basis.

AAUM hosts nearly 2,000 events a year, from small regional community events to signature events like homecoming. Each of the events needed a better, scalable way to reach the right audience and automate follow-ups. Marketing Cloud optimized outreach for a bigger impact. If the events program hosts a membership meet-up in Chicago and needs volunteers, the platform will identify individuals based on their personalized constituent profiles and reach out for assistance. Now, AAUM can drive more meaningful connections which ultimately increased alumni membership retention rates by 20%.

Salesforce allows us to be stronger together. The technology-based partnerships we’ve established across our institution allow us to offer products, services, and engagement opportunities to any segment of our constituency. We can band together to share data, tools, and technologies to advance our organization’s mission - this was not possible before we adopted Salesforce.

Andre Zoldan

Senior Director of Technology, AAUM

The Salesforce Difference

AAUM uses Salesforce for Education, built on the Einstein 1 Platform, to create long-lasting connections at scale. Now, the powerful combination of CRM, AI, and trusted data gives staff a single view of every constituent. And that means the alumni association can deliver personalized engagement and build meaningful connections.