Help with Alumni Contacts
 

hey i am the current alumni chair at the zeta theta chapter at PC, weve fallen way out of touch with our alumni and was wondering if anyone had advice reestbalishing connections. We have tried using the school's database, but that didnt help. I have the phonebook offered by nationals but it looks like some of those are inaccurate(mostly with recent graduates who posted their parents address or school address)
We do have an alumni chapter.

But any advice would be great

Pardon the crash, but I wanted to throw a few ideas your way.

Do you have contact information for any alums? In my organization, the alumni members may not keep in constant contact with collegians, but they do keep in touch with each other. See if the alumni members that you do have contact information for keep in touch with others (ask them for, say, their pledge brothers' information).

Does your alumni chapter maintain a membership database? You may be able to get some information there.

You may consider hosting some kind of alumni appreciation dinner or barbecue. With some of the organizations I've come in contact with (including my own), older members will come around if they have a reason to.

Hope this helps. I'm sure your brothers will chime in with additional responses.

Another great tool is Facebook. You set it up and people will come out of the woodwork. I've already seen it with both Andy and my chapters.

True, FB and MySpace are pretty good for locating younger alums. You may also want to check out LinkedIn (professional networking site) for older ones.

Log into the members only portion of the website and access the membership database. I find that stuff tends to be fairly reliable. If you're worried about the cost of sending something out, use postcards as they're a bit cheaper.

Sigma Nu Alumni Database
 

Call the headquarters in Lexington at 540-463-1869 and speak to Todd Denson who is responsible for alumni programs. He has been on staff for over 18 years and can help you a lot. The fraternity will generally send you a CSV download of you chapter members and all data if you are a chapter officer. I would be happy to discuss as well, so just send me an email at wbg-redleg@cox.net.

Here's what I did:
- Contacted headquarters, and they sent me a excel spreadsheet with every initiated member and any/all information they had on them.
- Started a Facebook group and spread the word. People see it, and others see it on their site. We then added pictures from college and tagged people. That is a visual, and others saw and joined.
- Use the Facebook group as a tool to get member email addresses to update my excel document.
- Started a newsletter, and used the excel document to pull all emails I had. Sent it out and this helped update the list (remove emails that are no longer good). This got the word out even more and more brothers asked to join when it spread by word of mouth.

One thing that I have see some chapters do (can't remember who specifically), was post a list of "lost brothers" on their website. I don't know how effective it was, but if you already have a website it shouldn't be hard to do. Trying to get my chapter to do this whenever we get a new website.