Challenge
The Pratt Institute is a global leader in design and applied practices of the arts. The Pratt Insitute Design Management Program consulted with us with the opportunity to augment their student-alumni network. With an extensive and impressive collective of alumni in highly covetable positions at exceptional corporations, the Design Management faculty were looking for strategies to build, strengthen, and nurture relationships between students and alumni.
Approach
A research survey was conducted with the entire Design Management program and alumni network to better assess the best approaches for strengthening relations and communications between current and past students. Based on our research findings, we learned that one of the primary motivators for student-alumni relations was networking and job placement. Students wanted to be able to leverage the relationships and networks cultivated through the Design Management program. With this knowledge, a marketing framework was created driven by this main objective.
Solution
A strategic marketing plan and framework was delivered to the Pratt Institute Design Management faculty that considered both internal and external strategies. While it was important to create tactics for stronger student-alumni networking, we took a deeper look at the causes of weak networking and learned that bigger challenges obstructed these goals. Not only did the program lack a unified networking platform, but not all alumni lived geographically within proximity. The program currently hosts a network of alumni from over 35 different countries.
“The Pratt Institue Design Management Program currently represents an alumni network of over 35 different countries.”
A stronger networking program for Pratt Insitute required a multitude of strategies that considered all communication and relationship channels. An internal framework was created for campus departments to be better equipped to manage student-alumni relationships and external brand communications strategies were created to strengthen the program’s credibility and position in the collegiate design market.
Some of the many strategies idealized for the program included: an online networking platform designed specifically for the Pratt community, an incubator program structured like a case study competition inviting alumni with the opportunity to serve as panel judges and moderators, and public sponsored conferences where alumni have the opportunity to simultaneously recruit talent and promote their current enterprises.
