One alumni directory, not a legacy CRM
A private research university modernized alumni relations and donor management in Airtable, replacing a legacy CRM platform to manage alumni contacts, career tracking, and engagement history. University engagement teams now work from a secure, interface-driven directory with single sign-on, unlimited viewer access, and a clean separation between private staff notes and public alumni profiles.
The problem
A legacy CRM platform carried real cost and complexity for what the university needed: contact data, career tracking, and engagement history for alumni that was scattered across legacy databases and other data silos.
Older alumni populations needed a low-friction way to update their own information, and the university needed secure external access to a directory without paying for additional seats for every viewer.
What they built
University Engagement built an alumni and donor directory in Airtable that consolidates contact information, donor relationship tracking, and career and placement records, feeding a searchable alumni directory with public-facing views.
The directory uses single sign-on for secure access, syncs from other bases to stay current, and gives staff unlimited viewer seats so the whole alumni population can be reached without licensing every viewer. Public alumni profiles stay separate from private internal notes, and prefilled update forms make it easy for graduating fellows and alumni to keep their own records current.
The outcome
The university retired the cost and complexity of its legacy CRM in favor of a directory it controls directly, with centralized governance through an admin panel.
Engagement teams get a compliant, unlimited-viewer directory that separates public and private data, giving them a scalable way to manage alumni relationships and donor stewardship without the licensing constraints of the previous system.
Inside the solution
Alumni and Constituent Relationship Management
Sales & CRM
- Alumni directory with searchable interfaces
- Donor relationship tracking
- Career and placement tracking
- Event attendance and cohort linking
- Prefilled update forms for graduating fellows
- Public-facing directory views
- Legacy CRM cost and complexity
- Scattered contact data across legacy databases and other data silos
- Manual data updates for older alumni populations
- Need for secure external access without per-seat licensing costs
- Compliant data handling for alumni and donor records
- Cost reduction versus a legacy CRM
- Unlimited viewers for broad alumni access
- Centralized governance through an admin panel
- University Engagement
- Alumni Relations
- Single sign-on
- Synced bases
- Legacy CRM replacement
Alumni and constituent relationship management
Run your whole alumni and donor operation from one secure directory: searchable public alumni profiles kept strictly separate from private staff notes, plus donor stewardship, career and placement tracking, event attendance, and cohort linking. Automations alert advancement on every new gift, apply approved prefilled-form updates straight to alumni records, and send a weekly digest of unacknowledged gifts, while AI fields draft public bios, stewardship briefings, and update-request summaries.
From a legacy CRM to a secure alumni directory
Copy the templates
Split public and private views
Open unlimited viewer access
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
The legacy CRM carried cost and complexity that outpaced what the university needed for alumni contact management, donor tracking, and engagement history, so the university consolidated those workflows into a directory it controls directly.
The directory maintains distinct views: a public-facing profile that alumni and outside visitors can see, and a private layer of staff notes that never appears in the public interface.
Unlimited viewer access lets the entire alumni population browse and update their own directory entries without the university licensing a paid seat for each person.
Prefilled update forms, originally built for graduating fellows, give alumni a low-friction way to confirm or correct their own contact and career details.
Single sign-on secures access to the directory, and an admin panel gives University Engagement centralized governance over who can see and edit which records.