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When Tarry Kang, Director of Development, Library & Centers at California State University, Northridge, shared the challenges she was facing while fundraising for a CSUN program, the LiveAlumni team was eager to help.
Bridge To The Future Program
CSUN's Bridge To The Future program offers a tuition-free college education and provides mentorship and guidance for students every step of the way. "This is a program that provides a four-year, tuition-free scholarship at CSUN for this particular High School. Once they are accepted to the program, they receive an education tuition-free, and also receive mentorship, and a lot of great other things."
The Goal: Identifying Prospects from a Specific Community
Tarry needed to identify prospects in the Latinx community who would be both interested and able to support the cause. "I've been trying to reach out to Latinx organizations, but I have been having difficulty finding a way to search for that particular group of alumni." Ethnicity can be extremely challenging to determine within a data set. However, with LiveAlumni's help, Tarry was able to identify a list of close to a thousand alumni that met her criteria. Vanessa Carbonell, Director of Sales and Customer Services at LiveAlumni, explained that although ethnicity is not a data point available inside LiveAlumni, there is always a way to sort through the LiveAlumni data to meet our clients' needs. "We get a lot of challenging requests to identify students and/or alumni that belong to different communities or have specific interests that can be hard to pinpoint. But throughout the years, we have found unique ways to identify these cohorts even if they aren't necessarily adding this information to their LinkedIn profiles, in an obvious way. We pride ourselves on always finding a way to sort through the data and identify some really great profiles!" said Carbonell. By grouping all CSUN alumni by specific criteria, Carbonell and King we able to produce a list of close to a thousand potential donors from the Latinx community, in around 30 minutes.
Reaching Out To Identified Prospects
"This is great. It never would have occurred to me to do that!" said King, who also shared the templates she uses to reach out to these alumni on LinkedIn. "I usually use LinkedIn [to reach out to these alumni] and then, if we have an email address, I use an email to follow up to try and get them both ways. But I find that most people respond really well to LinkedIn. Better than email."
LiveAlumni users who are trying to do something similar can access Tarry King's templates inside the LiveAlumni Helpdesk under Outreach Templates.
Need help with a project like this?
All LiveAlumni subscriptions include access to our unmatched customer support - which includes unlimited users, training, custom report building, and more, at no extra cost. Just email us at support@livealumni.com with your request and we'll be happy to help.
"The CSUN Bridge to the Future Program recognizes and acknowledges the Sesevitam, the first people of this ancestral and unceded territory of Sesevenga that is now occupied by our institution. We honor their elders, past and present, and the Sesevitam descendants who are citizens of the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians. The Bridge to the Future Program recognizes that the Sesevitam are still here and we are committed to lifting up their stories, culture, and community."
Image Source: https://www.csun.edu/bridge-to-the-future A special thanks to Tarry Kang for sharing her experience and templates with the LiveAlumni Community!