Universities & Alumni Networks
Your Alumni Network Should
Belong to Your University
Socio Connect builds custom alumni network platforms for universities, professional schools, and educational foundations — a fully owned alternative to Hivebrite, Graduway, and Almabase for institutions that need to control their alumni data and community infrastructure permanently.
The Problem with Renting Your Alumni Relationship
Your university's alumni relationship is one of its most valuable long-term assets. It drives annual fund performance, endowment growth, and institutional reputation. It took decades to build.
But for most universities, that relationship is currently housed in a platform owned by a third-party vendor. Hivebrite. Graduway. A decade-old custom build held together by institutional memory and a developer who left three years ago.
The consequence: your alumni data is a vendor's asset, not yours. Your community infrastructure is a contract, not an investment. And every year, you pay to rent a system that is increasingly misaligned with what modern alumni actually want from their university.
What Modern Alumni Engagement Requires
Alumni engagement has changed. The annual gala and the quarterly newsletter are no longer the primary touchpoints. Modern alumni expect:
Most SaaS alumni platforms were designed for the old model. They are built around directories and event registration — not around the rich, ongoing relationship modern alumni expect.
Built for University Complexity
University alumni networks aren't uniform. A major research university has hundreds of thousands of alumni across dozens of schools, colleges, and programs — each with distinct cultures, distinct career paths, and distinct affinity. Socio Connect platforms are built with multi-hub architecture that maps directly to how your institution is organised:
School & college hubs
Law alumni, Engineering alumni, Business alumni — each with their own community space, leadership, and events
Graduation class cohorts
Class of 2015, Class of 2020 — each cohort with its own identity, communications, and reunion infrastructure
Geographic chapters
New York alumni, London alumni, Chicago alumni — local leadership, local events, national visibility
Affinity groups
Athletics alumni, first-generation alumni, international alumni — communities built around shared experience
Student-to-alumni bridge
Mentorship matching and career connection tools that keep your alumni meaningfully engaged with the next generation
One platform. One database. Every community mapped to your institution's actual structure.
Data That Belongs to Your Institution
Alumni data is foundational to advancement strategy. It informs major gift cultivation, annual fund segmentation, event programming, and stewardship communications.
That data should live in a system your university controls — not in a vendor's database where access is contingent on contract renewal, where terms of service can change, and where your decades of relationship data could be at risk in an acquisition or shutdown.
With Socio Connect, your alumni data is in a database your university owns, fully integrated with your existing CRM (Salesforce, Blackbaud Raiser's Edge, etc.), and exportable in full at any time.
Your database
Alumni data on infrastructure your institution controls
CRM-integrated
Connects to Salesforce, Blackbaud, or your existing advancement stack
Full export
All data exportable in standard formats at any time — no lock-in
Frequently Asked Questions
Let's build an alumni network your institution owns.
Strategy calls are the first step. We'll review your current platform, your alumni engagement goals, and scope what a custom build would look like for your institution.
Apply for a Strategy Call