VU Alumni Relations wins Asia-Pacific CASE award for engagement

VU’s Alumni Relations team recently won the Asia-Pacific’s Best Practices in Alumni Relations award at the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) Awards.

The project, ‘Connection, engagement and reputation building: Invigorating alumni and community relations through Facebook Live’ was selected as the Asia-Pacific winner for the 2018 CASE Platinum Category Circle of Excellence Award. VU will represent the Asia-Pacific region at the global awards in June.

Manager Alumni Relations, Michelle Plane was proud to attend the annual ceremony on 19 April to accept the Award.

“With 400 delegates from more than 200 institutions – it was great to see the VU logo in front of that audience. People from other institutions were keen to learn about our program; and it was great to promote VU in this way,” she says.

As with many exceptional innovations, Ms Plane says the award-winning engagement program came from needing to be smart to meet a need.

“Ours is a small team with limited resources, and as such, they had to find a way to connect with large numbers of alumni living in 130 countries. The team started using Facebook Live to broadcast events as a way to engage with other alumni; to promote VU and alumni activities; and to give alumni who are unable to attend the opportunity to still feel part of the community through ‘virtual’ attendance.”

Executive Director of CASE Asia-Pacific, Ms Beng Hwee said the Award recognises VU’s excellent advancement practice.

The VU Alumni Relations project resulted in an exponential lift in engagement with alumni, particularly those living internationally.

During the second half of 2017, the VU Alumni Facebook page went from just a few hundred people clocking a total of four hours of video viewing, to a reach of 118,000 viewers clocking over 4,000 hours of video viewing with this approach. The number of alumni now engaged have grown exponentially, as did engagement with students (enabling us to promote the notion of a lifetime engagement via the VU Alumni Community).

To find out more, like VU’s Alumni Facebook page for news and videos.