Long, practical guides for people doing this the first time
Starting an alumni association, getting a portal online, and running the thing once it exists. Written for a teacher, a registrar or a volunteer with a full-time job already, not for a project team.
Two guides are finished. The rest of the list below is honest about what is not written yet.
Guides you can read now
Both are long. Both assume you have no budget, no development office and no time, because that is the situation most alumni programmes start in.
How to start an alumni association
A founding committee that will actually meet, aims you can write on one page, a constitution that survives its first disagreement, the first member list, and how to fund year one without asking for donations on day one.
Non-technical - about 12 minutes
Install alumni management software on cPanel
Creating the database, uploading the files, working through the six installer screens, your first admin login, and the handful of errors that stop most people on shared hosting.
Technical - no terminal required
Guides on the list
These are the ones people ask for most often. They are listed without links because the pages do not exist yet, and a link to nothing is worse than an admission.
Setting up an alumni portal
What to configure in the first week: batch years, directory fields, which modules to switch off at the start, and what the homepage should say before you have any content.
Building your first member list
Getting names out of old registers, spreadsheets and a WhatsApp group into something searchable, and what to do about the records that are half wrong.
Verifying members without offending them
How to check that a registration is really an alumnus of your institution, what to ask for, and how to handle the person whose year is missing from the records.
Running your first reunion
Dates, capacity, RSVPs, the catering count, and how to make sure the evening leaves you with a member list rather than a pile of photographs.
Your first fundraising campaign
What to raise money for, how to describe it, and how to record who gave so that next year's ask is not sent to the wrong people.
Backups and handover
What to back up, how often, and how to hand a website over to next year's committee without losing the only person who knows the password.
Other pages that answer a whole question
Not guides exactly, but the same shape: one situation, worked through end to end.
- Alumni fundraising websites - what a giving day needs from a website, and what AlumDeck does and does not do about payments.
- Class reunion websites - a dedicated event page, RSVP tracking with capacity, and a batch-year directory that outlives the reunion.
- Documentation - the technical reference, including what the server needs and how updates are applied.
- Changelog - what is in the current release, written plainly.
Who writes these
The same people who build AlumDeck. That is a bias worth knowing about: we think self-hosting is usually the right call for a small institution, and these guides reflect it. Where a hosted platform or a plain spreadsheet is the better answer, we say so in the guide rather than steering you quietly.
If a guide is wrong
Tell us. These pages get corrected rather than defended, and the correction is worth more to the next reader than our pride is.
The software these guides are written around
AlumDeck is a complete alumni portal you install on your own hosting: directory, events, giving, mentoring, news and a full admin panel, for $49 once.
You can read every guide without buying anything. Most of the advice in them applies whatever software you end up using.