Published in June 2021 (with revison in November 2022)

LinkedIn – make the most of the platform to engage your Alumni – Past Pupils.

Is your school LinkedIn profile set-up and optimised to best reflect what the school can offer and primed to help support your Alumni for their onward journey?

The Marketing Advisers (MA) collaborate together with a London based Sixth Form Academy school and an Independent school in Berkshire, to answer your key questions with a Q&A. Make sure your school profile is set up correctly and with the educational “Alumni tab” switched ON!

Before we get started here are the summarised points of what you really need to know…

The 3 simple steps to enable a free tool within LinkedIn to build and connect your past-pupil alumni community…

1. Set up – the correct type of LinkedIn ‘profile’ that best represents your school (do you need a Main page and a Group member page?).

2. Enable – the ‘Alumni tab’ feature on the Main page (to activate visit the LinkedIn customer support page – see below).

3. Engage – connect to your Alumni by reaching out through engaging content and hosting discussions, for example. Update your past-pupils, via your internal communication, to ensure that their LinkedIn profile is correctly tagged to the appropriate school profile page.

Let’s now dig deeper with the Q&A… (View the PDF overview here)

1. What are the benefits of utilising an existing business network (LinkedIn) for schools?

Welcome to LinkedIn. The online B2B social/business networking platform that you’ll know about but we are asking whether all schools are maximising the benefits of it?

It makes perfectly good sense for schools, regardless of type, to leverage a platform that is already widely used by millions of people across the world and extensively by the education sector (LinkedIn quote their user figures at a staggering 738 million users with 90,000 schools listed (LinkedIn stats).

“Maximise where past pupils are already registered and active, rather than trying to bring them into an in-house platform to manage”

As part of your next strategic review of Alumni engagement, ensure you make the most of LinkedIn and its Alumni features to help bring your past pupils together.

Mike Morrissey, Head of Marketing at Claires Court Independent school in Berkshire, comments about the benefits of utilising the platform: ‘Be present and active where people are already registered and networking. It’s more straightforward to harness and improve an existing profile within a known platform, than trying to bring people to an in-house system (with another username or data set to manage in-house and possibly doing the same job). LinkedIn is really easy to use, effective and you can link to individual profiles, generate discussions, create smaller group chat and the search/filtering capability of your Alumni group is probably the icing on the cake’.

2. Why should schools embrace LinkedIn?

For those past pupils that want to remain connected to the school and their contemporaries, LinkedIn offers a first-class facility, within a business setting, to remain connected. Read about how your Alumni are your essential business influencers. 

“LinkedIn can put your school on the local map and position its uniqueness to the wider world”

LinkedIn really can put your school on the local map and position its uniqueness to the world. Being a highly visible platform, it is important to get your LinkedIn profile ‘right’ to best reflect your school and the development work that takes place.

Make your Alumni feel proud and happy to be part of your community, so make sure you really showcase your school/profile and to do it justice on the platform.

3. What type of LinkedIn profile page do schools actually need (and how many profiles)?

Make sure you have a school profile page which accurately reflects your organisation. For schools, this would be the obvious category ‘Schools – Primary / Secondary’.

“Many schools have their profile set to ‘Educational Management’ which might not reflect your organisation or indeed automatically activate the Alumni features for the school profile”

In most cases if the Alumni feature (see Q4 below) is activated on the main school LinkedIn profile page, then this can perform the job of the day-to-day posting activity. Then a dedicated ‘by invitation’ LinkedIn Group might be useful for any internal ‘member only’ discussions.  

4. What is the LinkedIn Alumni ‘tab’ and what functionality can it offer the school and past pupils?

The Alumni ‘tab’ is an additional feature which is only available on the profiles of educational institutions.

“The LinkedIn Alumni functionality offers a powerful search across your linked-in past pupils”

Once your past pupils are correctly linked on your school page (via their education part of their profile), the alumni tab functionality enables a powerful search across past pupils through a variety of search criteria, such as: School leaving date, industry sector and profession/job type.

See the LinkedIn overview page of the Alumni tab, which gives a brief description – click here

5. How do I activate the Alumni tab for my school or merge page profiles into one?

For those schools or educational institutions that do not already have the Alumni tab activated, then you will need to request the page profile change by making direct contact with with LinkedIn customer support (see below how to do this).

Lucy Frederick, Registrar and Sixth Form Manager, of the West London Free School Sixth Form, comments: ‘The LinkedIn Alumni feature for schools and education institutions is a real revelation… We have revised our profile through the support page, it took LinkedIn a few days to confirm back, and now we are starting our journey to engage our past pupils through the platform’. 

You can activate and also request to combine Profile Pages for a school (if required) via this LinkedIn request form – click here.

6. How can your past pupils benefit from the ‘Alumni Tab’ functionality and the insights?

The LinkedIn information will benefit them too as they will be able to search and find people from their school and then view the high-level insights available using the filtering functionality to drill down. Also, the platform encourages cross pollination networking into other groups and specialist networks for jobs, skills and training.

 “Gain access to the high-level insights when searching for past pupils within the school profile”

For those schools that already have a fully functioning ‘school’ profile, very well done, you might now be asking how you can get your school Alumni more active & engaged?

An answer here is to use the LinkedIn platform in harmony with your existing in-house database and communication tools.

“Encourage your Alumni (and 6th form) to have a completed profile, with the school tagged within the educational section of their profile. Let your Alumni become your essential business influencers”

Good luck with your LinkedIn activity!

As always, if you have any questions… particularly on the subject of ‘LinkedIn or engaging your Alumni’ please make contact. Should you require any support  – please do contact us for a chat.