Alumni Toolbox
SaaS tools to help connect with alumni
Based on some initial feedback from a demo/review from a referral, I was motivated to add a couple extra smallish features - a visual dashboard of recent activity (with a couple of charts) and a set of charts for the survey responses. These were at the back of my mind earlier, and having some verbal confirmation from someone that these were, indeed, expected bits was the extra push needed to add those in. No, this didn't specifically lead to a new paying customer, so it may not have been perfect validation, but felt low-effort enough to do vs not doing (more progress than reading another blog post on XYZ, for example).
Had a phone call with an organization which was a referral from existing user. They're just in discovery phase right now, but seemed to be pleased with the focus and basic ability. They'd initially thought I had just configured the tool I was demoing for the earlier user, and shifted tone a bit when I'd indicated I'd built it. I got some useful feedback which confirmed some earlier hunches, and will be adding some of that to the backload/roadmap for January.
First 6000 users went well, and the first client/customer is taking the data, updating their internal systems, and doing some analysis as to how this worked and what features they would like to see next. The goal seems to be replacing some of their other systems with one more unified system (mine!) to address multiple data needs.
One piece I'm planning to add before end of year is a basic 'survey creation' system. Nothing too fancy, but the first iteration of this MVP was... mostly hardcoded questions. Which... for the purpose (and for future purposes) makes sense as a standard baseline of demographic info, but the ability to have customized surveys came up a couple times in conversation, and I'd like to do a small POC for them to see if we want to go further for early 2021. Feedback was they want to use this for more work in near future.
I've got a first version of this tool up - we've got a demographic survey up that can be sent to users (email) with unique keys to allow their alum to update their info and answer some questions without needing to create an account or any log in process, but also tie the data back to their internal data systems.
The first 200 users had very issues, and decent feedback. School is planning to use it for the entire 6000 by end of October.
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Alumni Toolbox looks interesting. May I know the survey tool used here? How are you managing the data flow and updates? Is it through automation looks like Zapier?
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Hey Wilson, thanks!.. This is all custom-built stuff at this point. The first customer has some internal tools that have some API functionality - we may do integration with that, but the first iteration is upload/download Excel files. Direct API integration with a couple of their internal tools may be Q1 or Q2, depending on their needs (or... needs of next users).
There's an odd balance to figure out - I know there's dozens of survey tools out there - they do too - but couldn't find anything that was easy to get data in and out of that could also allow them to tie the data back to their multiple internal systems. It's not to say it wasn't possible, but there's a cost to investigation and training that ... they'd apparently already spent some time on trying, and they weren't happy with the ROI at that point.
But, the more I get in to this space, the more I'll learn.
blocksurvey.io looks interesting too :) Congrats and good luck! I did a '48 hr hackathon thing' years ago and... probably should have continued to push on it (had some legal issues with the original hackathon team).
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Thanks for sharing, Kimsal. Custom solutions always beat general purpose / off the shelf products for sure. I could see that :-)
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And yet... the aim here is to grow this in to a more general purpose tool for others to use for the same problemspace! Talking with a referral this week - we'll see how that goes!
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Former colleague had reached out about the need for some tools to help manage data collection from existing alumni network. They actually use/license 4 different products for managing their alumni (> 6000 former students), but none of the tools they have actually do some of the things they needed to do. To the extent things are possible to achieve at all, requires more training/time than their staff actually has.
What's perhaps more interesting is that this colleague has hit this same problem at previous positions at other schools, and seems to think other schools (roughly of his size) are facing similar challenges. Planning on jumping in to this to see how we can solve some of these problems in the next little bit and see where this goes.
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