Request data from Alumni and development
There are two main sets of data managed by the Alumni and Development office
- Alumni – graduates of UniSA and our antecedent institutions
- Prospective student records via the Savvy program
Contacting your Alumni
The Alumni and Development Office looks after all alumni records for the university. You might wish to contact your alumni for a variety of reasons such as inviting graduates to events, securing a guest speaker, conducting research for a new program or identifying high achievers for marketing purposes.
We can help you do just that.
All you need to do is complete our online data request form specifying the information you need or email us with your question. Our office will respond to your query within 5 working days.
The kinds of information we can search by includes:
- Name
- Date of birth
- Year of graduation
- Program code
- Program description
- Division
- Awards
- Addresses/email addresses
As part of the ‘Alumni reconnect’ campaign, we are endeavouring to gather as much employment information as possible. However, we only have this information for a small segment of the total alumni body at this point in time.
Program Directors and school staff often stay in touch with graduates as they progress in their profession. If you have some success stories from graduates that we can add to our database, please email us, and we’ll update their records accordingly.
Please see below for some helpful tips on what to consider when submitting your request.
Things to consider when requesting alumni data
Historical program codes
Most programs have changed program codes several times. So, if you need to contact alumni from the past 10 years, you will need to provide us with historical program codes. You can find historical program codes by referring to old academic calendars or speaking with your division’s Academic Administration office.
Excluding can be just as important as including
If you are looking to contact alumni to promote a new postgraduate program, you also need to consider who you don’t want to receive the information. For instance, you would not want to promote a new masters program to someone who is a graduate of a similar Master’s program or Doctoral program. You can avoid this potentially damaging situation by including program codes for programs you would like to exclude. The same information about historical codes applies here as well. (Please see above for more information)
Reaching your entire division’s alumni
If you want to contact all alumni from your division, you don’t need to provide us with each specific program code, simply nominate your division.
How far back do you want to go?
Our database holds records from the 1930s so you may want to consider just how far back you want to go when speaking to graduates. It usually comes down to what the purpose of your communication is, e.g. you might only want to reach people who graduated 10+ years ago for a reunion event. This is also a good way of targeting your communication, reducing the wasted costs of postage and printing.
State based, Australian or International?
You can tailor your data request so that you are only contacting people in a specific postcode, state, or country.
Mail vs email?
You may want to consider emailing your alumni as well as, or instead of, mailing them with a physical letter. If so, there are a few factors to consider:
- Only half of our registered alumni have provided us with their email addresses. This limits the number of people you can reach via email.
- To contact alumni via email, you will need to produce a professional ‘ezine’. This is a high quality HTML email that complies with quality and accessibility standards developed by the Marketing Communications team. Simply visit the MDU style guide for instructions on how to proceed.
- ISTS assists us to distribute emails (or ezines) to ensure that the emails are not blocked by spam filters, etc. They can also provide statistics on ‘click-throughs’ from the email. We send the data to ISTS on your behalf once the ezine has been produced.
Organising a mail out
There are a couple of ways to organise a mail-out to alumni.
If your mail-out is small (under 200) you may wish to process it ‘in-house’. If so, the alumni office can mail-merge your letters and format mailing labels for you. We will then email you the files for printing and mailing. Please indicate this in the data request form.
Alternatively, if your mail-out is large, it is probably best to outsource the printing and envelope stuffing to a mail house. We can provide advice on which mail-house would be appropriate. We then send the data on to the mail-house on your behalf. You would be responsible for sending the text for the letters, envelopes, letterhead, brochure inserts as well as proofing the letter samples. Please call Sheila Bailey on 20975 for more information.
Contacting prospective students
The future student database now holds records for almost 10,000 prospective UniSA students. These prospective students have provided UniSA with a list of their discipline preferences, high school, mailing address and year level. If you wish to contact these students, you should first contact the Marketing Coordinator: Prospective Student Contact to discuss your options.
Online forms
- Alumni data request form (staff access only)