BTS: Alumni Initiative & Alumnight

What’s the Overall Vision for ASU’s Alumni Initiative?

ASU’s alumni initiative hopes to bring our community together and closer than ever by establishing genuine connections. We wish to honor the achievements of our alumni while coming together to see how much ASU has grown as a whole. With reference to this year, 2021’s Asian Night theme, Planting Seeds, we hope to celebrate the lasting legacies and show how ASU continues to grow from the seeds planted by the students & people who came before us, while also planting seeds of our own. 

ASU hopes to host annual events like this one to foster engagement between general body members, current e-board members, and alums in non-transactional means. As we learn the history of ASU, we also hope to provide professional and social networking opportunities as we both broaden and strengthen our community as a whole.

Behind the Scenes: Alumnight with ASU

The mentions of holding an event regarding alumni and networking had circulated since the end of the 2021 Fall semester. But as school picked up and finals neared, the ideas were put on hold until the beginning of winter break. 

December 29, 2021, marked the first meeting for ASU’s new alumni initiative between ASU’s digital marketing chair, Catherine Tai, and ASU’s alumni (past senior advisor, president, & intern) who recently graduated in 2020, Mike Messina. It might sound weird for a digital marketing chair to end up in charge of creating an event, let alone a whole new initiative; but it all started from talking about alumni networking and the use of ASU’s LinkedIn. 

After just the first meeting, a layout for the first event in ASU’s alumni initiative was created and there was a lot of work that still needed to be done. Setting Alumnight with ASU to be held on January 9th, gave us only 10 days to plan and execute the whole event. There were many things to get done: from putting a team together to outreaching to as many alumni as possible. 

So how did we do it?

To start the new year strong, on the first of January, ASU’s secretary, Alura Tom sent out a mass email to ASU’s list servers calling for alumni, introducing and inviting them to the event. Attached was an RSVP form in order to gauge how many alums would be able to make it. Throughout the 10 days, Alura would continue to diligently send out reminders and emails about Alumnight. 

To continue with outreach, an outreach master list was created and a rough plan was curated for outreach. The first step was finding more alumni. Our way of finding more alumni was by going through ASU and all 7 subgroups’ Instagrams. Although this method only went back as far as 2014, it was a start, especially for our first event. After compiling all the Instagrams we could find, we now had to private message over 200 alumni. 

Additionally, Alumnight with ASU hoped to foster alumni-member, alumni-alumni, and member-member relations. Therefore, in hopes of gathering more general body members to come to Alumnight, a graphic had to be made as soon as possible as well. Luckily, one of ASU’s publicity chairs, Jessica Sung helped create a graphic despite the short time crunch. The graphic was posted on our social media platforms on January 4, 2022. 

With the remaining days leading up to the event, we continued with outreach as well as prepared the technicalities and “run of the show.” This included coordinating with ASU’s president, Vanessa Wu on using breakout rooms for zoom as well as presentations. 

At the end of the day, although it took a lot of hard work it turned out so well! Alumnight with ASU was a successful first event filled with nostalgia, anticipation, and good talks. Fostering genuine connections is super important and we can’t wait to see what the future of ASU’s alumni initiative holds.