Western Reserve Academy is a grades 9-PG independent preparatory boarding and day school located in Hudson, Ohio. Reserve has an enrollment of nearly 400 students and a nine person advancement team with a one-woman alumni relations team that is tasked with working with a large and diverse alumni constituent group.

Young alumni engagement. It’s the white whale of so many K-12 alumni and development teams. With GOLD alums  more connected with their college communities than ever and university alumni engagement teams having seemingly endless money to spend on reunions and other events, Western Reserve Academy was faced with a common challenge: how to increase reunion attendance from their younger classes?

One major step they took was expanding their reunion out across a weekend and creating different events specifically geared for young alums. From a “Yoga Wellness Wakeup” to alumni soccer games, and fireworks they built out a serious schedule of events. But simply hosting events doesn’t guarantee they will be attended, and hosting them without communicating them unfortunately guarantees that they won’t be. With email open rates falling year after year, and young alums constantly changing addresses as they establish their footholds in the world of adults, reaching young alums is incredibly difficult.

That’s why Western Reserve Academy partnered with Boost My School, the only K-12 development platform that unifies giving and events on a single tool. And, when they communicated their needs and goals to their dedicated K-12 customer success manager, she was able to help them develop a communication and registration plan guaranteed to increase young alum registrations.

While reaching young alums is difficult, it isn’t impossible. Their emails may go unchecked and their addresses might be out of date, but they check their phone, and they check it often. In fact, text message open rates are greater than 90% and click rates are greater than 10%. So, when Boost was helping WRA craft their outreach strategy, focusing on utilizing text message marketing for their reunion was an easy decision. With text-to-give functionality already built in to their Boost My School dashboard, utilizing this powerful tool simply meant crafting the right messaging.

When writing appeals and marketing alumni events, nothing encourages giving and attendance than knowing that a friend or classmate of theirs will also be attending. Thankfully, whenever you create an event page with Boost My School, every attendee is listed publicly along with their class year and affiliation. So, it’s easy to click on your class year, and see a complete list of everyone you know that is attending. With this in mind, WRA’s team crafted the following message template:

This appeal strategy allowed for young alums to quickly and easily see that their reunion is coming up, check which of their friends are attending, and register. Plus, the only task WRA’s one person alumni team needed to complete was writing the messages and clicking send! All the work of listing the attendees and sending the texts was taken care of by Boost.

After partnering with Boost and utilizing Boost My School’s built-in text-to-give platform to reach out to young alumni, Western Reserve Academy saw immediate benefits. Their text campaign was a hit, with a conversion rate of 17% and open rates above 90% WRA’s community was able to come together more than ever before. In fact, WRA’s 2023 reunion had a 20% increase in attendees compared to the previous year.

Even more exciting. Thanks to work with their dedicated customer success manager and the easy to use Boost platform, WRA was able to make these strides without adding additional tasks and time commitments onto the plate of their development team — an extremely important benefit, as they still needed to manage their lengthy schedule of events during the reunion!