VAAVE Is Geared To Increase Your Alumni Network On Single Platform

• An alumni engagement platform, VAAVE was founded by Paresh Masade in 2007 

• VAAVE helps institutes and universities to leverage the power of their alumni network. 

Alumni have always been considered to be the brand ambassador of institutes and universities. They are considered to be the first face, representative of the brand equity of institutes. But most of the institutes in India don’t engage alumni because of a lack of resources, information, infrastructure, and strategies to leverage alumni network. According to research, 68% of alumni feel a lack of engagement from their institutes is a significant concern. 43% of institutes use digital or social media to connect with alumni. 

VAAVE is leveraging the technology to help institutes and universities to connect with the alumni in student development for providing higher education support campus placements, internships, projects, and more. Institutes can lunch an exclusive alumni portal like their own LinkedIn on VAAVE. 

The Ideation of VAAVE, An Alumni Engagement Platform

Every start-up has its ideation, vision, and motivation. According to VAAVE founder Paresh Masade, the ideation to start an alumni engagement platform came from challenges that Higher education institutes face, first in terms of quality of students’ intake and employability and second, lack of sufficient technical infrastructure for students’students’ development. Mr. Paresh told that top institutes in India gave more weight to alumni engagement for funding, placements, internships, and the students get lots of exposure to the outside world from the beginning of their courses. 

“There is a massive potential of alumni networking in India. The foreign institutes get lots of endorsements and findings from their alumni network, which helps in students’students’ development. The concept is not although new, but not prominent in India. We realize that the primary challenge of institutes in alumni engagement is lack of trackable database and challenge to give back, not in terms of money but also for institutes’ development”

Mr. Paresh explained another major challenge of Indian higher education is the lack of research and development. Institutes are not research-oriented as they don’t have the infrastructure, and students don’t know which course to pursue or what curriculum they should study, basically the lack of self-determination. 

VAAVE Changing The Landscape Of Alumni Engagement

Mr. Paresh explained that there are two kinds of alumni engagement, one is alumni to alumni engagement, where alumni can leverage the network of other alumni to get jobs, guidance, and all. The second is alumni to student’s engagement, which helps students for their development. So basically, we know that the students usually go for a job. And what we do in the platform is enable this particular information to students via alumni working in that specific organization. Also, alumni can share a lot of experience about What was the recruitment process, what does the company emphasizes, and other guidance.  

So It can be provided as information from the alumni about the company to students and that helps them know the bandwidth for the placements and not only that, there’s a lot of things that can happen with alumni engagement, likewise what’s happening in the industry, or about emerging technologies like blockchain or science or anything. And if alumni are working on these technologies like data science and they can give lectures on practical application. 

The college can assign mentors to students, and it will build a strong bond between the students and alumni. Another aspect can be for fundraising for these projects, specific projects, as well as infrastructure projects or the company’s research projects that are that, can be enabled the students to learn more and make them industry-ready. 

Technology For The Future 

Mr. Paresh told us that at VAAVE, they are working on lots of new technologies as we are working to bring more data and how institutes can leverage the alumni database. 

We are looking forward to how can we enable the online alumni to connect, where you can have video interaction on just one click. 

We are also working on real-time applications of interaction on mobile. 

Success Stories 

Mr. Paresh told us the success story of the National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, as, for the last four years, they have been working on this project. NIT is leveraging the platform for alumni engagement and build of 2 crores of the corpus. And they are looking forward to raising funds from every batch in crores and set the target to reach up to 20 crores. That will happen in the next two to three years 

Another exciting story is like there are institutes that are connected to number 30,000 to 40,000 alumni on a single platform. 

We’reWe’re working with symbiosis university to unite all institutes together to connect with more than one lakhs students on a single platform. 

Another exciting story of a school that was willing to raise money from its alumni membership. So they started charging small membership, people to join. And they were able to generate 4 lakhs plus in just 15 days from adoption of VAAVE. 

Message To Academic Community

Mr. Paresh said that its high time to invest in alumni, and they are the brand ambassadors. They help you in getting admissions. They help in getting placements, and internships project. Alumni have a lot of influence on placements.

Another one is engaging alumni in students’students’ development activities. And in the next few years, lots of top institutes are going to leverage the alumni network.