A directory your alumni will search, and you can vouch for
Six search fields, a page for every batch year, and privacy each member sets for their own record. Nobody appears until someone on your side approves them.
Included in the one licence. No per-record fee, no seat count, no tier you grow into.
The parts alumni use, and the parts you use
A directory is only worth building if members search it twice. These are the pieces that decide whether they come back.
Search the way alumni ask
Name, batch year, city, country, profession and employer, alone or combined. Who from 2004 is in Dubai is one query, not a call to your office.
A page for every batch year
Year groups are a field, not a folder you maintain. Class reps get one link to share, and the 1998 page still works long after the 1998 messaging group goes quiet.
Privacy each member sets
Members choose what the public sees, what logged-in members see and what stays hidden. Admins always see the full record, so you never guess on anyone's behalf.
Verified people only
Registrations wait in a queue until an admin approves them. Nobody lands in your directory because they found the signup page.
How verification worksProfiles members keep current
Once approved, alumni edit their own record. City and employer age badly when only staff can touch them. Here the person who moved updates it.
On, off, or members only
The directory is a module with a switch. Turn it off, or keep it behind the login so nothing is searchable from outside.
Admin panelWhat the first month with a directory actually looks like
Installing it takes an afternoon. Getting alumni into it is the real work, and it follows the same shape almost everywhere.
You begin with a spreadsheet of 1,400 rows. Three hundred of the addresses bounce and nobody has touched the employer column since 2019. That is a normal starting point, not a failure.
- Switch off every module except the directory and news. Two working sections beat five half-built ones.
- Keep the directory behind the login while it is thin. Alumni forgive an empty directory they logged in to see. They do not forgive a public one.
- Email the addresses that still work and ask people to register. Registration is the data entry, and each person types their own city, employer and profession.
- Work the approval queue daily for a fortnight. Members who wait three days assume the site is abandoned.
- Once a few hundred records are in, decide what the public sees. Most associations settle on name and batch year in public, the rest behind the login.
Decisions the software makes for you
- Unapproved registrations are invisible. Not in search, not on a batch page, not in the member count.
- The search axes are fixed at those six fields, so you never sit down to design a taxonomy. They answer almost every question an alumnus actually has.
- Batch year is structural, so year pages and event RSVPs group people the same way without you tagging anyone.
- Visibility travels with the member, not the page. Someone who hides their employer hides it everywhere at once.
Where the directory stops
AlumDeck knows what your alumni tell it and nothing else. No enrichment service fills in job titles, nothing syncs from social networks, and no process notices that someone changed employer. If members do not update their records, the records go stale. The difference from a spreadsheet is that the person with the correct information can fix it at midnight without asking you.
What you get, what members control, what is missing
In the directory
- Search on six fields, combined
- Batch and class year pages
- Member profiles with photos
- Admin view of every record
- Unlimited members and admins
Members decide
- What the public can see
- What other members can see
- What stays admin only
- Their city, employer and profession
- Whether to appear at all
Not in the box
- Enrichment from third parties
- Social network syncing
- Fuzzy matching on misspellings
- Automatic duplicate merging
- A hosted version. Self-hosted only
Questions people send about the directory
Can the public see our alumni?
Only if you decide they can, and only the fields each member agreed to show. You can also keep the whole directory behind the login, which is what most schools do for the first year.
Admins always see complete records, because you need the full picture to verify someone.
How many alumni records can it hold?
There is no limit in the software. The ceiling is your hosting, and ordinary shared hosting handles tens of thousands of members without complaint.
You are never billed per record. Your 5,001st alumnus costs the same as your first. See pricing.
We have 3,000 legacy records on paper. Now what?
The intended route is that alumni register themselves and you approve them, because that also gets you a current address and their consent to be listed.
To load history in bulk, it is an ordinary MySQL database on your own server and any developer can write the import. Nothing is encoded.
Can a member remove themselves later?
Yes. They can hide fields, hide the profile, or ask you to delete the record. Because the database is yours, that is a real deletion, not a vendor support ticket.
The directory is not the expensive tier
The directory, verification, events, giving, mentoring and news arrive in the same $49 licence, because there is no higher tier to sell you.
Not sure it fits? Email hello@alumdeck.com and describe your records. A person will reply.