Using Airtable for Alumni/Student Networking

If you’re looking for a platform where your alumni can communicate with each other, send messages to each other, post photos/videos, etc., Airtable is not really the app for that sort of thing. For something like that, you would want to look into community building software like Mighty Networks.

However, if you’re looking for a tool for your internal team to keep track internally of all of your alumni and students, then Airtable is well suited for that.

You can even turn to 3rd-party portal software to allow your alumni & students to maintain their own profile in your Airtable system.

The most popular 3rd-party portals that are currently available for Airtable are:
Fillout, Noloco, JetAdmin, Softr, Pory, Glide, and MiniExtensions.

I would highly recommend looking into Fillout for this, because Fillout is 100% free, and it allows your alumni & students to update their own records directly from a form.

I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:

• Using Fillout to update an existing Airtable record & create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
• Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Mhmm not exactly the use case maybe. But we did build multiple systems for school management.
We also built specific systems for networking.
These were mostly shool facing rather than student facing, although some of these systems do have a portal (in this case built in Bubble, but I would strongly suggest to get that done with Softr instead).

Might be reiventing the wheel. I don’t know what specific features you’d need, but I’m pretty sure that you can put something together for sure if you really want to use Airtable. Otherwise, you can follow Scott’s suggestion above.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel

We maintain an active student profiles database in Airtable with many moving parts. We use interfaces to both current and prospective students for marketing purposes. When we started working on this, our goal has been to incorporate alumni, which is now possible with this working list. Like Mike mentioned, this serves as a backend system, a more robust platform like Mighty Networks may provide better student-facing experience. I’m interested in what you’re planning to build so I’m going to reach out.

Thanks,
Jerilee

Yes, we do this. We have a robust network of alumni volunteers who support student career development in various ways (we’re a university career center so we’re focused on student-alumni connections, not alum-to-alum).

1. Alumni data is stored in an Airtable CRM, so we know who they are, what their job is, their bio, etc. - this is all self-provided via forms. We supplement with their official degree data from campus. We have about 7000 alumni in our list.
2. We store their volunteer history, so we know which events and programs etc. they’ve completed, as well as if people cancel, no-show, etc. Since 2017 we have had over 4000 completed volunteer engagements.
3. We have additional synced bases that allow alumni to sign up for specific events and opportunities - our program planning calendar also lives in Airtable. Confirmation emails and reminders all happen via Airtable automations.
4. Finally, we have a Career Conversations program where students can see a gallery view of alumni who have opted in and request a 1-1 connection with them (also via form). We do all the tracking of these conversations in Airtable and communicate to students and alumni via automation, and we ask them to report back to us after (also via form).

Pros: we know who is doing what, we can track individual student and alumni connections, the automated emails save a ton of time, connections to other Airtable bases like our events calendar = one source of truth.

Cons: alumni and students do not have AT accounts (only our staff do), so we’re engaging with them all via email and Airtable form. This works fine, for the most part, but they can’t log in and view their own profile, for example. Our campus will not support Airtable due to accessibility concerns.

Marissa I’m happy to share more if you want to setup a call or something - I’ll send you an email.