Contacting alumni

This guide outlines best practices when contacting alumni.

The Advancement Office holds contact details for 80% of the University’s alumni, and we are able to contact more than half of them by email.

If you would like to contact alumni on behalf of your department to publicise a course, foster a partnership between the University and industry, gather feedback and opinions, or for any other reason, we can help you.

Why we contact alumni on your behalf

The records we hold of alumni are subject to the Data Protection Act. While we can share information within the University, we prefer to contact alumni on your behalf for a number of reasons:

• to ensure the confidential use of data
• to keep a record of all contact made with any particular alumnus
• to keep any updated contact information on our central database
• to coordinate any mass communications (combine any emails sent to the same group, and ensure no section of alumni is receiving too many emails)
• to ensure any email sent is as directly targeted as possible – we are wary of ‘spamming’ our alumni and want to keep e-communications opt-outs to a minimum

What you need to do

Once you have decided with whom you want to communicate, complete our contact request form, including the email text, if necessary.

This tells us what you wish to do and what you hope to achieve as a result of the communication. It also ensures we have all the necessary information to send the communication, as well as enabling us to schedule it effectively alongside our other communications.

If you have any other questions, please send them to advancement@bath.ac.uk

Writing the email

When writing the email that you'd like us to send, please:

• be succinct
• explain what you would like the alumnus to do clearly; if you are asking for help, (for example, a speaker to address current students), make this clear in the first paragraph of the email
• only include necessary information; your reader will switch off if it’s not immediately clear what's wanted of them
• make sure extra information can be linked to for a reader to access if they're interested; our emailing software does not allow attachments, but we are able to upload PDFs, Word documents or Excel files for readers to download
• make sure any content you supply us is up-to-date
• add an informative subject line; data shows that the more specific and targeted the email subject is, the more likely an alumnus or alumna is to read it (for example, 'Bath graduates: help needed from recent Pharmacy graduates')

Who should receive your email

Some things to consider when deciding who you'd like to receive your email:

• if you wish to reach out to a group or segment of alumni, please provide details (for example, BSc Physics postgraduate alumni from 2005 to 2011)
• if you already know the details of your intended audience, please provide a list
• please limit your intended audience to those who are most likely to be interested in the email you are sending
• once an alumnus or alumna unsubscribes from our communications, which is usually a result of too frequent, irrelevant emails, we lose them
• Ii you only wish to contact a select few individuals – those who work for a particular company, for example – please consider whether a phone call would better achieve your aims

What to expect from us

We ask for a minimum of two weeks between agreeing the request and the email send date.

We will run a query of our records and let you know how many alumni we are able to contact by email.

Once we have received the request form submission, we may edit the text to fit in with the guidelines above. Additionally, we might add a line explaining why they have been sent this email, and encouraging alumni to update their details if it's no longer relevant.

We will send you a draft of the completed email for sign-off before sending the final copy when it fits in with our communications schedule.

Replies will come into the Advancement Office inbox, which we will then forward. This is to ensure that we receive any updates.

Your direct email will also be included so that alumni may reply directly if they wish.

What we expect from you

Please be patient. We get many requests to contact alumni and have to schedule this carefully into our own communications.

Please provide feedback. Let us know whether the communication was successful and the response you received from alumni. It helps us to improve our service.

If an event invite was sent, please return an attendee list to the Advancement Office so that we can retain this information for engagement records.