Wavelength’s Multinetwork- How to Make Alumni Networks Actually Work
Originally posted by Chris G., CEO and Founder of Wavelength
Connecting with people on social media takes time, effort, and in some cases, luck. Adding another social media platform to the mix doesn’t do anyone any favors, so we didn’t. Instead, we made Wavelength all about the data — and making the data do the hard work on behalf of the organizations that need it (rather than asking the organizations to invest time and effort they don’t have).
This is what we mean: Rather than pulling information about users from LinkedIn or from Facebook, we’re using our technology to plug into public data sources -both legally and securely — to collect publicly available information about any user that joins the Wavelength network. With something as simple as a user’s email address, Wavelength can create a rich user profile, complete with accurate information about location, job history, group affiliations, and beyond. Better yet, we can do this at scale. Still have questions? Read our data policies.
This becomes beneficial not only to the user — who exerts minimum effort to create a profile and access the networks of their known affiliations — but to the very networks they’ve been part of.
On day one, an organization can get 60–70% of its alumni on the platform with enriched data.
It requires no internal promotion, no hand-holding, no complicated onboarding. The information has always been there, Wavelength just made it easy and convenient for you to get.
We then provide one user-friendly space for managing data, sending emails, searching networks, collecting donations, and much more.
And unlike Facebook or Linkedin which sells a User’s data for a quick buck, we don’t. We give users control over what data is shared with whom.
While Wavelength may sound optimal for large public universities that have amassed hundreds of thousands of alumni over the years, the benefits of our platform extend from large universities to small affinity groups.
This is how we thought about it on a smaller scale: When a user changes jobs, for example, they’re not going out of their way to update their college alumni database, fraternity or sorority alumni groups, volunteer groups, and beyond.
Expanding on what we mentioned earlier, what couldbe useful information becomes lost to anyone who’s not connected. So Wavelength changed that with something we call Multinetwork.
Multinetwork works in a way that no other directory can. It aggregates networks, allowing users to search all of their networks and then ranks search results by what’s most relevant to that user.
If they’re associated with a fraternity, for example, they have access to any other user associated with that fraternity, rather than limiting them to whether or not they directly know every other user in the network. Similarly, if that same user is part of a volunteer organization, they have access to that entire network as well, multiplying their reach with every group they associate with.
Let’s say that user experiences a life change, like a career switch or a cross-country move. All they have to do is update their oneprofile on Wavelength, and Wavelength takes care of keeping their affiliated organizations up-to-date, requiring no additional effort on behalf of the user or the organizations. If that same person decides they want to make a few donations to the organizations they care about — rather than seeking out the donations pages across all of those organizations, they can come to Wavelength and do it all in one secure place.
From the start, our mission has always been to make it easy to reach the right people in ways that are meaningful and helpful to all — organizations and individuals alike.
We built Wavelength ethically so that users control their data from day one. We’re not about the likes or the friend requests or the clickbait content. We do data, search, email, and donations, and we do them well. Check out Wavelength.