Storytelling is a powerful way of capturing aspirational alumni experiences. Alumni who share their journeys since graduation play a crucial role in supporting key strategic priorities, including student recruitment, employability, fundraising, research, and enhancing the University’s reputation. By sharing alumni stories, we can inspire prospective students to consider our university and show current students where their degree can take them. But how do we make sure we’re gathering optimum information and using alumni stories to the best effect? Here at University of Sheffield, we’re piloting a solution to inspire alumni to volunteer their stories whilst motivating staff to capture key information for future use. The key to this has been developing an Alumni Story Bank as a central resource for this content. As speakers we’ll show how we’ve worked with colleagues and teams across the institution to build a more effective process following a one-university approach. This project is aiming to reduce duplication of staff effort, streamlining our communications with alumni, ensuring GDPR compliance, and helping us all to use alumni stories for maximum impact.

From finding their first graduate job to renting for the first time as a working professional, recent graduates can offer relatable and current insights to students about to take the first steps in their own careers. Here at the University of Southampton, we want to harness these insights from the newest members of our alumni community. But how can we build and maintain engagement with a community of young professionals busy building their own careers? In this workshop, we will consider how we can amplify engagement with recent graduates through making volunteering opportunities more appealing and impactful for these young professionals, all the way from sourcing volunteers to stewardship. At the University of Southampton, we are building these bridges through the Graduate Ambassador programme which has created an evolving community of recent graduates who are regularly matched with volunteering activities across the University. We will share that we have learnt by working with these volunteers and where this community can take us next, discussing more widely how we can consider the needs of specific groups of volunteers to maximise our impact.

The University of Westminster’s award-winning mentoring programmes engage hundreds of volunteers from our alumni and supporter community each year. In this session, we share how we scaled our volunteer activity through our mentoring programmes to create a strong, diverse, and committed volunteer base. By focusing on the power of inspirational role models and fostering connections between mentors and mentees from diverse backgrounds, we will highlight strategies for building a pool of reliable and motivated volunteers. Participants will learn how to design mentoring programmes that keep participants engaged, nurture a culture of belonging, and ensure volunteers have the support and resources they need to thrive in their mentoring relationships.