Alumni Engagement: What Should Indian Institutions Be Doing Differently?

Indian institutions want global rankings, stronger placements, international partnerships, better research visibility, and more credible brands.

But when it comes to alumni, most institutions still default to:

• an annual reunion
• a newsletter
• a donation drive during convocation season

This episode of Jetri Dialogs reframes alumni relations and asks a sharper question:

What does it take to build alumni programs that go beyond token reunions and actually drive value both ways?

To discuss this further, we brought together three leaders who have studied and built alumni engagement at scale:

• Dr Ashwin Mahalingam, Dean of Alumni and Corporate Relations, IIT Madras
• Dr Gretchen Dobson, Global Engagement Specialist , author and longtime practitioner of international alumni engagement
• Paresh Masade, Founder & CEO, Vaave (alumni engagement ecosystem powering 1,200+ institutions across 28 countries)

Alumni engagement does not start at graduation

One of the strongest points came from Dr Mahalingam during the opening remarks:

“Alumni engagement actually begins when people are still students. I think what you want them to do when they are students is develop some kind of an attachment to that alma mater in the software.“

He framed IIT Madras’ alumni strategy using the “Three Ts” model: time, talent, and treasure.

And importantly, he explained the order:

“We feel when people give time, they will be incentivized to give talent. When they give time and talent, they will also be incentivized to sort of give treasure to build up endowments and things like this.”

He also emphasized “friend-raising” before fundraising: the job is first to get alumni excited to come back and then match contributions to each person’s interests.

Dr Dobson answered with six reasons institutions engage alumni globally:

1. Branding: alumni extend the institution’s brand
2. Reputational management: in good times and bad, alumni help shape how the institution is seen
3. Recruitment: alumni are “arms of recruitment,” especially visible during COVID when travel stopped but alumni remained locally present
4. Employability: not just getting a job, but keeping a job and building lifetime skills 
5. Fundraising: yes, but not the only reason
6. Public diplomacy / soft power: alumni open doors in government, trade, development, and international relations, often before institutions even realize who’s in the room

She also added one more “T” to Dr Mahalingam’s model: Technology

Masade brought a ground-level reality check from his experience of working with 1,200+ institutions:

“So, one thing is that every institution knows the importance of alumni. The challenge is that they don't know what to do with them.”

He said most campuses default to reunions because it’s the easiest activity to conceptualize. But reunions are episodic and don’t build a reason to return.

He offered a simple, useful framework he teaches in his alumni leadership programs:

BEHA: Build → Engage → Help → Ask

Most institutions jump straight to Ask. His counter-question to leadership teams is:

“What are the things that institutions would like to put in, even before thinking about asking something?”

Structure determines seriousness

The next one was a governance question that often goes unaddressed: Where do alumni relations sit inside the institution?

Dr Mahalingam explained IIT Madras’ shift:
Twenty years ago, alumni affairs was a side responsibility assigned to a faculty member with no dedicated mandate. Today, Alumni & Corporate Relations is a Deanship; reviewed weekly at the highest level. Time allocation shifted from roughly 10% oversight to nearly full-time leadership attention.

His takeaway was structural:

“I think it's very important that this becomes something that fits within the existing administrative structure. As opposed to being a satellite function that, you know, out of sight is out of mind in many, many ways, right?”

Alumni office and alumni association are not the same thing

A recurring confusion in Indian institutions is assuming that having an alumni association is sufficient.

Dr Mahalingam clarified the distinction:

• The Alumni Association primarily supports alumni helping alumni.
• The Institutional Alumni Office supports alumni helping the institution and the institution helping alumni.

Dr Mahalingam shared two concrete models IIT Madras uses:

1. The Alumni Charitable Trust governance layer‍

Originally set up to enable tax-effective giving (especially from the US), it became a governance structure staffed entirely by alumni. They commit to meeting quarterly, reviewing processes and procedures, shaping overall strategy, and exercising board-style oversight over alumni giving and governance.

2. Embedding alumni in departmental peer reviews

Every five years, IIT Madras departments undergo peer review. In this cycle, IIT Madras tried to ensure each committee includes at least one alumni member (academic or industry practitioner) who visits labs, meets with students and faculty, offers independent insights, and co-authors a formal report that was ultimately submitted to senior governance for review and action.

In India, alumni engagement begins with placements

When asked what engagement mechanisms are actually working on campuses, Masade stated that the first lever in India is employability. So the most common alumni programs revolve around mentorship, resume reviews, nterview preparation, and project guidance.

He shared two high-signal examples:

1. Alumni-led interview preparation & resume reviews

He described running this even for a Tier-2 college in a remote town where student scores jumped dramatically over a few iterations, showing measurable outcomes.

2.  Alumni as project guides

In India, students often do final projects that aren’t industry-ready; sometimes projects are even “bought.” Alumni guidance can change project selection and execution quality.

Global alumni engagement requires clarity before ambition

When asked about what Indian institutions should check before engaging international alumni and what they should avoid, Dr Dobson responded with a strategic lens. Before organizing overseas events or launching global campaigns, institutions must ask:

• Is global engagement embedded in our mission?
• Are we recruiting internationally?
• Are faculty academically active abroad?
• Do we have real partnerships?
• Can we clearly articulate our international value proposition?
  

Her recommendation was simple:

“Don't be broad, because you'll lose your message. You might lose diffused energy and effort. Focus on a few quick, focused wins.”

She suggested:

• identify top 3 alumni geographies outside your home country
• concentrate effort there
• build a campaign/story over time rather than one-off events every five years

Failure matters. So does iteration.

When asked about initiatives that didn’t work, Dr Mahalingam was candid.

He admitted IIT Madras used to approach alumni largely through “asks.” Alumni wouldn’t refuse, but contributions stayed small because engagement wasn’t built.

“What people want to do is contribute to a journey, to an aspirational journey.”

This realisation led to some course correction:

• stop making every alumni interaction a fundraising meeting
• shift to conversations, updates, relationship-building
• add “marketing” to a previously “sales-focused” function

Dr Mahalingam described another operational failure:

IIT Madras hired 4–5 people to embed within departments to build departmental alumni engagement. It didn’t work because most departments were not ready. There was no physical space, no structured alumni data, and no culture of hosting alumni-facing events. The result was money spent without meaningful outcomes.

They tried for a couple of years, then pulled the plug.

His takeaway:

“The U.S., in some sense, has figured out how to do it for the American mentality and culture. I think India, it's a little bit different, and I don't think we figured it out yet, which means you've got to be ready to experiment and iterate, right? Try a bunch of things. Obviously, some things are not going to work, and just learn from it and move on, but the idea should not be not to try, is my opinion.”

Some strategies travel. Some don’t.

When asked what alumni engagement models translate globally, Dr Dobson highlighted cultural differences.

She pointed out that the US alumni model is deeply rooted in sports culture, clubs and student activities, fraternities and residential rites of passage, and lifelong kinship structures formed during those formative campus years.

That model doesn’t cleanly map to other countries. But here is what works:

• career and life support (internships, guidance, interview prep)
• peer-to-peer advising (“guide by the side”)
• lifelong learning / continuing education offerings
• micro-credentials, short courses, certificates
• connecting alumni through institutional partnerships (academic partnerships → alumni partnerships)

Engaging alumni who moved on

An audience member asked: How do you re-engage alumni who graduated decades ago?

This question addressed a common Indian reality. People graduate from one institution, then go abroad, do another degree, and now identify more strongly with other institutions.

Dr Mahalingam’s solution to this problem was straightforward:
There’s no substitute for going and meeting them.

• give advance notice
• show up in their neighborhood
• if they can’t meet, set up a call
• the goal is establishing first contact and rebuilding familiarity

Dr Dobson added another tactic: Co-host with a respected peer in that city.

When a respected alumnus co-hosts an event, curiosity and credibility increase attendance and engagement. She also advised building an “inner circle” of founding members in each geography – people you consult for advice on organizing, timing, and audience.

Gen Z alumni require campus integration

Another audience question focused on Gen Z engagement.

Masade's response returned to an earlier theme: You cannot start at graduation. Gen Z engagement must begin on campus by weaving alumni into student life:

• career journeys
• networking
• alumni pathways into companies (Google, etc.)
• global study/work aspirations
• house/hostel/community identity touchpoints

Final takeaways

As the session closed, each panelist offered a distilled insight.

Dr Mahalingam: Engagement is the name of the game.
Once alumni are engaged, everything else follows.

Masade: Move from engagement to activation.
Focus on lifelong career support.

Dr Dobson: It cannot be about alumni without alumni.
Involve graduating students and hire recent alumni. Let them help shape messaging and outreach.

Across all three perspectives, a clear framework emerges:

1. Start early: alumni engagement begins on campus
2. Build before you ask: BEHA—Build, Engage, Help, Ask
3. Design for value both ways: career support, mentorship, community infrastructure
4. Make it structural: don’t keep alumni as a side function
5. Go where alumni are: travel, peer hosts, founding chapters
6. Focus first: pick 2–3 wins and execute well (don’t go broad too soon)
7. Use technology deliberately: as the operating system of engagement
8. Experiment and cut fast: try things, learn, pull plugs when departments/structures aren’t ready

If Indian institutions want to globalize and professionalize, alumni can’t exist only in reunions.They’re a strategic stakeholder base and one of the few that can simultaneously strengthen placements, recruitment, reputation, community, and long-term institutional resilience.

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