Alumni Engagement

Building lifelong relationships with your biggest supporters: alumni

Why Alumni Engagement
Alumni of nonprofit Jewish camp care passionately about their camp experience and have deep feelings of nostalgia for their experience as campers and/or staff at camp. They are also the most likely people to step up for camp by sharing their love for camps via word of mouth; sending their children to camp; volunteering their time to support camp, including on the board or a committee; and supporting camp financially.

Establishing and maintaining a life-long connections with alumni takes time, attention, and intentional effort to provide alumni with what they need and want from camp.
Staying Connected
Staying connected to your camp alumni requires two important things:
  1. Contact information for your alumni as they move through different stages of life as well as different mailing addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers must be kept up to date. This allows your camp to stay in touch with alumni, keep them connected to your community, and let them know when there are opportunities for them to engage with and/or help camp.
  2. Camp must have a plan for how to communicate with your alumni who are in your lists. What do they want to hear from camp? Via what media? It is important to develop year-round communications plans that incorporate alumni as a key audience, considering what will be most relevant and timely for them throughout the year, and throughout their own life cycles.
Staying Relevant
What do your alumni want or need from camp at different stages of their life? Effective alumni engagement requires that camps provide relevant offerings – content, events, or other opportunities – that meet the needs of alumni throughout their lives.

Whether they are young alumni looking for community or mentorship; alumni starting families; or older alumni looking for connection and meaning, camps need to understand what their alumni need and how they can provide it. Doing this well can ensure that camp stays relevant in the minds of alumni throughout their lives.
 
Samples
You can learn a lot from other Jewish camps, and there are many more resources, tips, and tools from other camps on our Knowledge Center. If you don’t see that you are looking for here, please try using the search function in the Knowledge Center where many, many more resources are housed. 
 
These samples from other camps are among the most popular samples on alumni engagement in our Knowledge Center. If you can’t find what you are looking for, please try the Knowledge Center or contact us.
 
JCamp 180 is committed to helping your organization apply best practices to your camp’s alumni engagement efforts. We’ve hand-picked the resources below to get you started. For our full set of resources on this topic, click the “More Alumni Engagement Resources” button at the bottom of the page to go to the main Knowledge Center page. You can either further refine your search using keywords or scroll through all the resources.