When I became the president of my alma mater’s alumni club in Toronto, I reviewed other University of Michigan alumni club websites around the world. Currently UM alumni club websites are plain-looking, cookie-cutter sites that don’t feature the flavours and feel of each community nor do they let each club easily fundraise and collect detailed information about their members. I started the UM Alumni Club of Toronto (UMACT) in 2011 and quickly experienced the pain alumni leaders have when they start clubs — no money and a list of zero members to work with. 6 years later the club is has over 500 on our mailing list, and we’re aiming to have 1000 members in our membership list by end of 2018. We hope to have at least 50% of Canadian UM alums on our mailing list with the help of our technology platform.
Each alumni club has an obligation to communicate with their members through a well-maintained membership list on a well-designed online fundraising platform. We chose WordPress to build our platform and were pleasantly surprised by the flexibility and power of the platform. The UMACT had the privilege of hosting two LSA Opportunity Hub/Global Internship interns, Reis Becker and Olivia Varnado. Reis and Olivia built the UMACT fundraising and communications platform over the summer with a bit of guidance and direction from Alex Sirota, director at NewPath Consulting.
The benefits of the resulting platform are truly amazing:
- built with free open source technology called WordPress, the website and platform can can be hosted for just a few dollars per month, secured with SSL to encrypt all website communication
- the administrative backend is fully translated and available in over 60 languages right out of the box (over 160 more languages are available in partial translation), and the website can have multiple languages supported should the need arise
- the website can be run under your own host and domain name, completely maintained by your club, avoiding potential firewall issues encountered in countries like China
- the website can adopt a custom and personalized look and feel, while still using the Michigan alumni club branding, by leveraging the extensive theme library of over 10,000 custom and professional themes which are fully compatible with mobile devices
- the platform can be extended in a multitude of ways using the plugin repository of over free and commercial 40,000 extensions to WordPress
The features we’ve implemented:
- The homepage can be used to feature any UMACT photos and events, as well as a call to action to create a UMACT member profile.
- Visitors can view UM alumni member profiles under the ‘Member directory‘ page, where approved UMACT members can display their photos and information. Contact information is protected and can only be viewed by other approved UMACT members.
- Members can choose to hide their profile but still allow the club to maintain their information. Each member has a username/password to update their information directly with the club.
- The ‘Connect‘ page lists our social media platforms and contains a contact form which can be used to contact UMACT directly via email.
- The ‘Blog‘ page will feature newsletters as they are published and other news. These can be pushed to social media channels automatically. We are exploring ways to push automatic notifications to WeChat and other app platforms.
- The ‘Events‘ page displays all upcoming club events and supports online registration forms.
- The ‘Donate & Shop‘ page can be used to make online donations to UMACT, and features merchandise like t-shirts and other UM memorabilia. WordPress has a full ecommerce system with support for inventory, backorders, and supports multiple currencies.
- Each member can be assigned a role (like ‘board members’) to enable select access to pages exclusively for board members. When you login as a board member you get access just to the pages and file you need.
Here is a list of free plugins we used to build our UM alumni club fundraising and communications platform. All these plugins can be extended with commercial ‘add-ons.’
- Ultimate Member – membership
management, member directories, integration for protected access to sections of site and dynamic menus - Mail Poet – email marketing, supports template and dynamic content from the WordPress database (automatic event calendar in emails for example, or latest posts)
- WooCommerce (for ecommerce) – can be used to sell just about anything including keeping inventory, and you can have special items available only for members
- The Event Calendar – event calendar management, categorization of events, premium ticketing features
- Ninja Forms – custom forms to enable surveys, event registrations and other data collection functions
- Duplicate Posts – A very handy feature is being able to “clone” any page, post, product, event, venue or really any other “post type” in WordPress. This makes it easy to create template content that can be modified quickly. (Editor: Added this plugin on Feb 7 2018)
If you’d like to know more about how we accomplished all this for free this summer with the help of a couple of UM LSA interns please get in touch and I’d be happy to share our efforts. We even have administrative documentation you can use and adapt/translate for your needs as website administrators. I look forward to talking with you soon.
