Please could you share your opinion on the best approach for membership of our alumni online community. At present, graduates must visit the website to join the online community, then they can choose what personal information they wish to publish on the community e.g. email address.
The other alternative that has been mentioned in the office is to sign-up graduates on their behalf, publish their info on the community, then allow the graduates to login and edit their publishing preferences. This might require us to send out a communication to graduates asking for their permission to do this?
Many thanks
Say
We get our alumni to sign up, rather than signing them up... if you sign them up then you need to think of a second measure of how to determine if they're actually interested in being on your website (you've got the issue even when alumni sign themselves up but at least they've indicaited an initial willingness to log in) and you've got all sorts of challenges abuot securely getting usernames and passwords out to them.
There's also the issue of the increase in licence costs when you hit 20K users on NetCommunity - which means that in effect you're paying for something you're not *really* using. I don't know what software you're using but there's no harm in creating a directory of all your alumni that you publish on your website with public information (name, year of graduation etc) so that you don't have to have all your alumni signed up as registered users.
That said, I am interested in looking into whether we can "transfer" users from a student portal to an alumni portal as they leave... so they'd still have the same username and password, and maybe even use the same URL to enter the portal. But I think that's something (for me at least) for the future!
Richard