Alumni database (CRM)
Leiden University’s alumni database is managed by the department for Alumni Relations and Fundraising and currently stores information on around 150,000 registered alumni.
How the database is used
The alumni database:
- Records contact details
- Records course details (drawn from uSis)
- Records additional data such as employment information, subsidiary activities, management functions and participation in events and activities.
- Records communication preferences
- Generates recipient lists for alumni mailings.
The system records all communications an alumnus receives to make sure they are properly coordinated.
Member administration for study associations and alumni associations
Managing alumni contact details from a single location has several advantages. With a single shared database, for example, alumni only have to send one change-of-address notification when they move house. This approach also removes the problem of files stored separately in different departments containing outdated contact information, not to mention that processing the changes solely within the alumni office also saves time for the faculty and programme administrators. The alumni file is of course available to everyone at the university who needs regular access to the file or who has frequent contact with alumni. If you would like to know more, or to request an account, please contact database@alumni.leidenuniv.nl.
Request a mailing
Only the department for Alumni Relations and Fundraising can send mailings to alumni from the alumni database. This ensures that we use people’s most up-to-date contact details. It also prevents alumni receiving unnecessarily large volumes of e-mails, thereby also avoiding a situation in which alumni view our communications as spam and unsubscribe from notifications.
If you would like to send an e-mail to a group of alumni, you need to submit a request. Keep the following aspects in mind:
- For small-scale mailings (up to 1,000 recipients), your request must be received no later than two weeks before date you would like to send the information.
- Requests for larger-scale mailings (1,000 recipients or more) must be received at least a month in advance.
- Department representatives will discuss with you the precise date when the mailing will be sent.
- Information about the recipients and the content of the message is provided on a standard application form (in Dutch).
- The department for Alumni Relations and Fundraising is responsible for the layout of the mailing, so you don’t need to provide your own design – just send the text and images. But don’t worry that you won’t have any say in how the mailing looks! You will be able to contribute to the final layout.
The department takes the following aspects into account:
- The number of mailings an alumnus receives within a given timeframe. Experience has shown that sending too many mailings in a short period causes more alumni to unsubscribe, so to prevent this we coordinate the number of mailings alumni receive.
- The standard layout of the mailing is in the university’s house style.
Alumni mailing
You can request a mailing via the online form. The form is only available in Dutch.
Request a mailing