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360Alumni
February 21, 2025
If you’re reading this, you already understand the value of an alumni platform. Your website may be offering great content and your social media channels are facilitating interaction between you and your alumni, but you’ve hit some technical barriers to growth. You want to expand and grow your engagement with your network. You want to offer real value to your community and form meaningful relationships between your alumni, your students, and your organization.
You may have explored alumni platforms such as 360Alumni but are tasked with presenting every option for creating an alumni network. A comprehensive network solution like 360Alumni is the easy choice, but you’ve heard it’s possible to build your own. It sounds appealing since you’ll be in control - no compromises, no limits - a totally bespoke outcome.
For some organizations, building your own alumni engagement website could well be the ideal solution, but it’s best to conduct a complete evaluation of the options first to understand what is possible with out of the box solutions. This can inform your list of must-have alumni engagement features, and help you develop your roadmap of nice-to-have features. Building your own community from scratch can be a huge undertaking, so whichever path you choose, it’s smart to go in with open eyes.
When building your own alumni website, there is a high risk that a good deal of time and money will be wasted learning from first-timer mistakes. A great community solution provider, such as 360Alumni, will share learnings and best practices based on years of experience with hundreds of clients. We provide support and resources, and often opportunities to consult other clients to ensure your journey to launch and beyond is smooth and successful.
If you lack a team with the technical proficiency, you’ll need to find and hire designers, developers, an architect and database integration specialist - preferably all of whom have built community programs before. When working with a solution provider you outsource that responsibility to a company whose success depends on hiring, training and retaining the right experts.
You have deep knowledge of alumni engagement, and software architecture, design, development and security is exciting to some, but is this a domain your leadership needs to expand into to achieve its mission? To build and maintain a great user experience and a reliable software product, one must know software industry best practices, governance, data compliance, and the innovations coming down the line.
Initial costs to build a solution will be in the tens of thousands. This includes application and database design, front- and back-end development, hosting, QA testing, and integrations with your current systems. These are increasingly specialized skills that require a diverse team of experts to get right. Once launched, maintenance costs can be ball parked at a minimum of 20%, but expansion of the initial scope or remediation of oversights made can make the final cost several times higher than the original estimate. At 360Alumni we’ve been building the most comprehensive engagement platform on the market for more than a decade. Besides gathering and implementing feedback from community managers and users to continually optimize the experience, we’ve made mistakes and learned from them - so you don’t have to!
A technical specialist within your organization will need to manage the project, which takes their time away from other tasks. While sharing IT resources with other departments, your site development could be placed on hold if emergencies arise.
If you know you need a comprehensive solution for alumni engagement with anything more than a static online directory, it will always be more expensive to build your own solution than it is to partner with 360Alumni.
As one of our clients who explored building their own platform said, “It wasn’t just the software complexity, but who to call when something breaks or who will help if we can’t get this or that working, etc.”
This is one of the reasons why a staggering 70% of software projects fail. That means you have a 1 in 3 chance of failing totally and it’s 50:50 if you’ll not see costs spiral out of control. Those are not good odds when the alternative solutions offer so much with zero risk.
Deciding whether to build your own alumni platform, or buy one, may seem difficult at first. 360Alumni is at the ready to help you make an informed decision. Let us explain the specific pros to our platform and how we can help you get everything you need. You never know, we might offer everything you need and more, without the hassle and risk of a build-your-own solution.
To understand the features we offer to see if they align with your requirements, feel free to schedule a demo.
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For more information on related topics, be sure to connect with us!
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