Five festive ways to engage your alumni

The festive period is always a busy time for events and your wider community. Regardless of your current alumni network status, it’s a brilliant time to engage your former students and get them back in to support your students and your school. After all, it's the season of good will!

Shannon Walker, Alumni Programme Manager at Future First, has put together five festive ways for any state school or college to engage with alumni from now until the end of term.

Give your alumni a range of entry points into supporting the school, from invitations to get involved in fun events as well as more formal asks to speak to pupils and share their experiences. As the festive season approaches and things begin to wind down towards the end of term, Future First members can simply log into the Future First Hub and email alumni to invite or ask them to take part in some of the following:

• Invite to festive events

  A really easy win is to invite your alumni to any events that are in the school calendar such as performances, carol concerts, and community events. This is a good opportunity for alumni to return to school and enjoy a bit of festive nostalgia, but also enables you to make a list of alumni who are particularly engaged and who may be interested in supporting other events later in the year. For Future First members: there are a number of template invite emails you can utilise on the Future First Toolkit.

• Host a festive reunion

  Organise a Christmas lunch or afternoon tea specifically for alumni in order to help them understand the valuable role they can play next year. Pitch this as a festive reunion but be sure to schedule time to let the alumni know about significant upcoming events such as National Careers Week, National Apprenticeship Week, and work experience, and discuss who and how they could provide support. Pencil in follow-up discussions to ensure the plans come to fruition!

• Use their volunteering day to help with festive fun

  Ask your alumni to lend an extra pair of hands to end-of-term events such as trips to pantomimes, craft fairs, cake sales, and more. This is a great entry point into volunteering their time to support the school in an exciting and undaunting way which can make them feel more comfortable with volunteering their time again in the future. You could suggest they use their volunteering day (if they get one from their current employer) this way.

• Link their career to the curriculum (hitting Gatsby Benchmark 4)

  This is an area that many schools have identified as a priority this year, but due to curriculum demands and exams, it can be difficult to find time for alumni to come and speak to your pupils. Why not use the time when things are winding down at the end of the term to deepen pupils’ understanding of why they are studying different subjects and how they can be useful in their futures? Across a morning/afternoon, you could have a few alumni with different jobs speak to classes about how they’ve used different subjects since leaving school, e.g. to boost their job applications/interviews; to give them skills that they use in their current jobs; to give them a strong foundation of subject knowledge that they’ve been able to develop further in their studies and careers.

  Additionally, you could identify a group of pupils who need support with motivation in a particular subject and identify alumni with relevant experience to speak about how they use that subject in their jobs. This can be particularly impactful if the jobs align with the pupils’ interests, or challenge their preconceptions around which subjects are useful for certain jobs e.g. how a builder uses Maths for measurements and English for written communication with customers.

• Invite recent leavers back during their holiday time (hitting Gatsby Benchmark 7)

   Most universities will have broken up for Christmas before schools do, creating a perfect opportunity to fill those last couple of weeks of term with meaningful encounters with university students who can talk about their course, their experience of moving away from home, university life, and more. As timetables may be more flexible at the end of the term you could have your alumni speak in lessons, or assemblies or organise drop-in sessions where students who are interested in the alumni’s specific course/university can go and ask questions to find out more. This is particularly effective with former students who only left in recent years.

  We’d love to see any festive alumni events going on in your school or college, so please share some pictures on social media and tag us at @FutureFirstorg. Happy Holidays to all who celebrate!