Thing about being alumni is that eventually you get the feeling that the only reason why the school ever wants to see you is to get more “donations”… As if you have not already paid for your education upfront. Alumni portals are ancient, and the news are irrelevant, whilst the highly-praised alumni network often forgets to update their profiles for … decades.
With the seed loan of 50,000 Euro from Imprimatur Capital Latvian startup Asteria Education aims to change that, and switch the relationships between the universities and alumni from push to pull. Here is how they are planning to do it.
The main focus of Alumniplus.co is to maintain the alumni contacts and career information up date (by connecting to LinkedIn and other social networks). Ultimately it aims to help universities raise more donations: Asteria team has come together as a result of a challenge by Stockholm School of Economics in Riga to triple the alumni giving rates. Currently the startup, cofounded by Raimonds Kulbergs works with universities in Sweden, Germany, United Kingdom and Latvia.
Aside from better UX, simplified registration and automatic data feed of alumni professional information, the startup deals with alumni issues such as general news noise that is not always relevant, and help segment alumni network based on interest, age, type of studies and specialisation and even interests based on the alumni activity on the platform.
According to Gediminas Uzkuraitis of Asteria Education, the startup will use the loan as well as revenue from existing clients to further develop the product. It is also working on a solution for alumni fundraising with two European universities.
