Graduway Alternative
Your Alumni Network Infrastructure
Should Belong to Your Institution
Socio Connect is a custom alumni network platform development agency and a fully owned alternative to Graduway for universities and professional schools that want to control their alumni data and community infrastructure permanently — with no annual platform fees after launch.
The Graduway Situation
Graduway is a white-label alumni engagement platform used by hundreds of universities worldwide. It delivers a functional alumni directory and mentorship matching tool — and it does so at a significant ongoing cost that your institution pays indefinitely without ever owning the underlying platform.
Your alumni data — decades of contact records, engagement histories, giving patterns, career updates — lives in a system your institution doesn't control. If Graduway raises prices, changes its model, or is acquired, your institution has limited options.
A Different Investment Model
A Socio Connect alumni platform is built once and owned permanently. The investment is larger upfront. The economics become more favourable every year you own it.
By year four or five, the owned platform has cost less in total. More importantly: you own an institutional asset that grows in value as your alumni database grows.
Graduway — 5-Year Cost
$180,000+
- ×$36,000/year — mid-range contract
- ×Nothing owned at the end of year 5
- ×Alumni data on a vendor's servers
- ×Subject to price increases and acquisition risk
Socio Connect — One-Time Investment
$120K–$180K
- Owned outright at launch — no ongoing platform fees
- Alumni data in your institution's database
- No vendor pricing risk or acquisition exposure
- Optional stewardship from $12,000/year
By year three to four, ownership has cost less in total — and your institution has an asset that grows in value with every alumni record added.
Built for University Alumni Programmes
Key capabilities for university alumni builds:
School and college hubs
Separate community spaces by school, department, or college — each with its own leadership and events
Class cohort communities
Year-specific groups with reunion planning tools and class-year identity
Geographic chapter network
City and regional chapters with local leadership and national visibility
Mentorship matching
Student-to-alumni and alumni-to-alumni connections built into the platform
Career board
Job postings by alumni, visible to alumni and students — a high-engagement retention driver
CRM integration
Salesforce, Blackbaud, or iModules synchronisation — engagement data feeds your advancement team
Event management
Homecoming, reunions, chapter events, virtual programming — all within your owned platform
Giving integration
Optional connection to your annual fund platform — engagement to philanthropic pipeline
One platform. One database. Every community mapped to your institution's actual structure.
Frequently Asked Questions
Let's build an alumni platform your institution owns permanently.
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