Northeastern University's Alumni Network is Growing

May 2005

A rising number of active Alumni Affinity Group volunteers is sharing information with their colleagues via "microsites." The Alumni Relations department assists these groups in designing, building, and editing these small web sites.

But as the number of affinity groups and their needs increased, the few members of the Alumni Relations e-communications staff were unable keep up with the volunteers' requests for sites and maintenance. Giving complete responsibility to the alumni volunteers wasn't possible because they were working on different platforms, and the volunteers' proficiency in web design and development was varied.

Alumni Relations presented this issue to the EdTech Center. Together the teams developed specifications for a new, more efficient system for the management of these microsites. This included a template in compliance with NU branding and marketing to serve as a standard for all of the affinity group sites, and a tool that volunteers could use remotely, on a daily basis, to add and edit content in these templates. The EdTech Center staff then designed and built the template, and integrated a custom built content management system (CMS). http://www.alumni.neu.edu/