Rebuilding the list nobody kept

Every chapter has decades of alumni who liked it, would help it, and have not been contacted since they left. The reason is structural rather than anybody's fault: the list lives in a spreadsheet handed from one officer to the next every May, and each handover loses rows.

Rebuilding it takes one term and it is worth more than the auction it is being rebuilt for.

Five sources, in order of yield

• Current members. Ask every member for two alumni they know — a big sibling, a family member, someone who comes to homecoming. Eighty members can produce well over a hundred verified contacts in one evening
• The house corporation. The alumni board usually has better records than the chapter and is rarely asked to share them
• Alumni social groups. For most chapters these are more current than any spreadsheet, and the admins are alumni who will help
• The university alumni office. They may hold chapter affiliation and may send on your behalf even where they will not hand over a list. Ask; the worst answer is no
• Your headquarters. Many maintain alumni records centrally and will support a chapter that asks properly

What to collect, and where to put it

Name, graduation year, current email, and one line about who they were in the chapter. That last field is what makes a future ask personal rather than a mailshot.

Put it somewhere that survives an officer transition: a chapter account rather than a personal one, shared with the house corporation if they will co-own it, with permission recorded for contacting each person. A list that lives in the outgoing vice president's inbox is a list you will rebuild again in two years.

The first message after fifteen years

Do not open with an ask. The first message to an alumnus who has not heard from the chapter in fifteen years should be information: here is what the chapter is doing, here is this year's philanthropy, here are the numbers, here is a photograph of the house. Then ask if they want to keep hearing.

The auction ask comes second, to people who said yes to the first message. It converts at a completely different rate and it does not burn the contact you just spent a term finding.

Segment by era, because eras behave differently

A 2019 graduate and a 1985 graduate are not the same audience. Recent alumni have less money and more willingness to share something; older alumni have the reverse. Ask recent graduates to promote and to bring items from their employers, and ask older alumni for the substantial lots and the substantial bids.

Class-specific items are the practical expression of this — a composite reproduction offered to the class it depicts is a lot with a built-in audience. See item ideas that actually sell.

Then keep it

Write into the chapter's officer transition checklist that the alumni list is handed over, in the shared account, with a note on what was sent and when. It is one line in a document and it is the difference between a chapter that compounds its alumni relationships and one that rediscovers them every four years.