April 22, 2026
Most alumni teams are already sitting on the data they need to drive better engagement. The problem is not a lack of information. It is knowing how to activate what you already have. Mark Inglis, Alumni Relations Development Officer at Cape Breton University, has spent nearly five years doing exactly that. Managing communications with over 25,000 alumni across 80 countries, as the only member of his four-person team dedicated solely to alumni relations, he has learned that relevance drives results, and relevance starts with your data.
In this post
1. The Data You Have Is Enough
You do not need a bigger database or a data team to start segmenting. Most alumni databases already contain graduation year, faculty, program, geographic location, event attendance history, and donor status. For example, a segment like “Engineering graduates from 2015–2020 who attended at least one event” is more than enough to send targeted, relevant communications to a specific group of graduates.
Yet the majority of teams send the same message to their entire list and wonder why engagement is flat.
As Mark Inglis put it during the session: “If you’re not leveraging that data to communicate properly with your alumni, you’re sitting on a gold mine and ignoring it.”
The shift is not about collecting more data. It is about activating what you already have. In fact, research from CASE in partnership with CCAE shows that roughly three-quarters of alumni are contactable through at least one channel. The challenge is rarely access to data, it is using that data effectively.
2. Three Ways CBU Puts Data to Work
CBU’s approach is not theoretical. Here are three concrete examples of how Mark’s team has used their alumni data to drive real outcomes.
Sports Reunions
When CBU hosted national basketball and soccer tournaments, Mark’s team used their database to identify alumni who had actually played on those teams by name, program, and graduation year. The targeted outreach brought back alumni who had not engaged with the university in decades. Several became donors. All of them became advocates. None of that would have happened with a generic event invite sent to the full list.
Recruitment Support
With enrollment pressures affecting post-secondary institutions across Canada, CBU’s recruitment team asked alumni relations to help surface program-specific alumni stories. Mark’s team could pull every graduate from a targeted program and reach out personally by name, referencing their year and field of study, to ask about their career since graduation.
The message felt authentic because it was genuinely about them. That authenticity drove responses.
The Alumni Survey
In 2022, CBU sent a survey to just over 18,000 alumni with a 36% open rate. Impressive on its own, but the standout number was the response rate: over 10% of recipients completed the survey. That is a remarkably high completion rate for alumni communications.
Every recipient received a unique tracking link, allowing CBU to match responses to individual alumni profiles. The data they collected was significant, including the finding that 99.1% of CBU nursing graduates were employed in their field within six months of graduation.
3. The Pre-Header Trick Worth Stealing
Including the recipient’s first name in the pre-header is a simple tactic that often improves open rates.
The pre-header is the short line of preview text that appears in an inbox before someone opens a message. Most teams either leave it blank or let it default to the opening line of the email body. Mark’s team started personalizing it with the recipient’s name and saw consistently strong open rates as a result.
The psychology is straightforward: seeing your own name signals that the message is meant for you specifically. It interrupts the scroll in a way that a generic subject line often does not.
If your email platform supports merge fields, and most do, this takes minutes to set up and applies to every campaign going forward.
4. Start Somewhere
If your data feels incomplete, do not wait for perfection before you start segmenting. Even a partially populated database gives you enough to run a more targeted campaign than a full-list broadcast.
Pick one segment. Run one targeted campaign. See what happens. The engagement you generate will create new data points, and those data points will make your next campaign sharper.
The alumni who are not opening your emails are not disengaged from your institution. They are receiving m
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This post is based on insights shared by Mark Inglis during an Envoke Insider Session. Mark is the Alumni Relations Development Officer at Cape Breton University, where he manages outreach to over 25,000 alumni across 80 countries. Watch the full session here.
About the Author
Zoltan Wagner is a Product Manager at Envoke with over 15 years of experience in product development, specializing in email marketing technology and leading iterative improvements that enhance platform usability and performance.