How to Improve Alumni Response Rates for Treatment Centers

One of the biggest challenges many treatment centers face is alumni engagement and response rates. Even if you have an alumni program in place with plenty of resources, it can still be difficult to get your alumni to respond to follow-ups and surveys.

Response rates are a critical part of keeping track of how effective your treatment center programs are and the success rate for your alumni. Here is everything you need to know about why your alumni outreach methods aren’t effective and how you can improve them to get the response rates you need.

Why Are You Getting Low Alumni Response Rates?

Encouraging recovery center engagement can feel like a challenge, especially if you already have outreach methods in place but aren’t getting the response rates you want. There are many reasons why this may be happening, and it is often dependent on your overall strategy since there is an art to increasing responses from your alumni. 

Here are some common reasons why alumni may not be responding:

• Timing: Timing is a very important part of an alumni contact strategy as initiating contact too early or too late may not get you the response you are wanting. This also includes the frequency you use when contacting alumni and sending follow-up messages.

• Approach: How you approach contacting your alumni will often impact whether or not they respond. You need to provide value and give them a reason to engage; otherwise, they may ignore all of your outreach strategies.

• Technical difficulties: If you’re alumni tracking strategies involve digital contact methods, which they should, you may have some technical difficulties. There may be technical issues with how you are contacting alumni or it may be overly difficult for them to engage or respond.

• Poor experience: Alumni may also not be responding to your follow-ups because they aren’t having a positive experience with your messages or surveys. This may be due to it not being personalized enough or if it is a survey, they may not like the questions.

Other things you may want to consider are things that may not be entirely in your control, which is why you will need to manage your expectations. Your alumni may be busy or they may just not be interested in engaging with your treatment center follow-ups. The best thing you can do is put your strategies into place, optimize them to the best of your ability, and measure how successful they are on average.

How to Improve Alumni Response Rates

Having a strong alumni presence is invaluable when it comes to measuring the success of your programs by evaluating the success of each individual alumni. Without alumni contact strategies and response rates, it can be challenging to track the success rate of your alumni since they may go no-contact after completing their treatment program. Not only does this make it difficult to know what programs can be improved, but it can also make it difficult to track and report on other areas of your treatment center.

The good news is that there are response rate optimization strategies you can put into place to improve survey responses and alumni engagement. Not all of these alumni follow-up best practices will be suitable for your strategy, so you may need to go through trial and error to see what works best for your alumni network.

Understand Timing

Understanding when to reach out to your alumni is crucial for getting the response rates you want. You do not want to contact your alumni too soon as this can feel desperate and intrusive but you also don’t want to wait too long either. 

Other aspects of timing include the time of the year you are sending alumni surveys. Is it the busy season for the types of alumni you are contacting, or do the surveys fall on any major holidays?

You should also allow a week for the alumni to respond, as they may be busy or haven’t seen your message yet. How frequently you reach out will also depend on your contact schedule and the resources you have available. It is often better to reach out a few times a month, as this can help you avoid contact fatigue.

Use a Multi-Channel Strategy

Different alumni prefer different outreach methods, which is why you should take advantage of multi-channel strategies to reach all of your alumni to improve alumni response rates. More traditional contact methods include phone calls, text, and emails and it is usually best practice to use all three options.

Emails provide more flexibility as alumni can respond when they are able to, while you will need to be a bit more cautious with phone calls and text messages. It is best to get permission to send text messages or call your alumni directly so that they are more likely to respond. You should also take advantage of digital communication methods through online platforms that can provide a more flexible and casual way of keeping in touch with alumni.

It is a good idea to ask your alumni what contact method they prefer, as this will result in them being more likely to respond when you reach out to them.

Simplify the Process

When you send follow-ups or surveys to your alumni, you need to make it as simple as possible to respond. If people run into any technical issues or difficulties responding, they are much more likely to simply not bother.

Having multiple response options allows alumni to choose the method that they prefer, which can improve the chances of them responding. Your surveys should also have clear and concise questions that can be answered in just a few words so that it won’t take your alumni very long to fill them out. Also, make sure that the question wording is not overly complex and that the surveys have a flow that is logical and easy to follow.

Other more technical aspects of simplifying this process you need to keep in mind is how mobile-friendly your surveys and follow-ups are. Not all of these outreach methods are suitable for various devices so you need to use mobile-friendly solutions so that they can be viewed and filled out from any device.

Build Relationships

One of the many things that can result in low response rates is a lack of personal connection and relationships. Alumni want to feel as though you are speaking directly to them, not as though they are simply a name on a contact list. Simple personalization strategies such as addressing them by name and tailoring your message to reflect their experience can achieve that personal connection.

You can also foster greater trust and build on those alumni relationships by recognizing and celebrating their achievements and creating a solid network that goes beyond your contact list.

Create Incentives

Alumni are much more likely to respond to follow-ups and surveys if you present them with a reason why they should do this. After all, people are busy, and your alumni may need a little motivation to get them to participate beyond simply sending surveys and messages.

Some incentives include providing free resources that they may not otherwise have access to or you can also highlight the benefits of participation by letting your alumni know that their feedback directly impacts your treatment center and other people who may join the treatment programs. Creating a sense of urgency around responses can also help push alumni to respond when they get a follow-up. The best way to do this is to set a deadline for survey completion to encourage alumni to respond as soon as they receive it.

Train Staff

Having data optimization strategies in place is just one aspect of improving alumni response rates for treatment centers. Another aspect you need to consider is training your staff to ensure everybody understands the best practices for outreach and is using the right strategies and systems.

Any staff members who handle outreach or follow-ups need to be up-to-date with the strategies you have in place regarding timing and outreach methods. It can be helpful to have established communication templates that everybody knows to use so that the process is streamlined and all of your alumni receive the same types of communication. You should also have team coordination strategies in place to ensure outreach goes smoothly and everybody knows what their specific job is.

Another aspect of your response rate strategy that you need to consider is how response rates will be documented. There are various documentation methods that can be used, but the easiest way of doing this is by using an alumni data tool that can collect everything in one place. Some outcomes tracking tools handle things like automated follow-ups and standardized data collection and can help you create instant accreditation reports around this information.

Measure and Improve Strategies

An area where many treatment centers end up falling short is failing to keep track of their engagement and response rates. It’s impossible to understand whether or not your response rates are improving without properly tracking the responses that are coming in on a continual basis. Not only does this help you to understand when a strategy is working, it can help you to identify strategies that aren’t as successful.

If you are just starting to use alumni tracking strategies or are giving your original strategy a makeover, you need to track response rates to see what approach is the best. For instance, you may not just be looking at response rates in general; you may be looking at how many alumni respond continually or the types of responses you get. By tracking your progress, you will be able to identify what approach is more suitable for your goals.

Common Alumni Response Rate Mistakes to Avoid

Now that you know about some strategies that can help you improve your response rates, what common mistakes should you avoid? Here are some common pitfalls to avoid when it comes to contacting your alumni so that you get the best possible results:

• Over-contacting: One of the worst things you can do when reaching out to your alumni is doing this too frequently. Not only will this negatively impact your response rates, but it also leaves the wrong impression and can result in contact fatigue.

• Wrong timing: You also need to be mindful of when you are contacting your alumni so that you can do so in a considerate and mindful way. Avoid busy times of the year, such as holidays, and stick to traditional business days for the best results. You should also allow at least a week for a response before sending another follow-up so that your alumni do not feel rushed.

• Generic approach: It will be hard to get responses if your alumni feel as though your follow-ups and surveys are not catered to them. Every form of communication needs to be personalized to some extent for the individual and should promote a positive emotion in them.

• Lack of organization: If your staff isn’t trained or you aren’t using automated systems for communications, your outreach isn’t going to be organized. This could result in data being lost, incorrect contact information being collected, and follow-ups being sent sporadically.

Conclusion

Even if your treatment center is struggling to get response rates from your alumni, that doesn’t necessarily mean your strategy isn’t working entirely. You can improve your alumni response rates with a few best practices and follow-up strategies that also help your alumni feel more included and valued.

One of the best ways to track response rates and automate some of your outcomes systems is with an alumni data tool. Contact us today at I Am Sober to join our waitlist so that you don’t have to worry about manually setting up things like follow-ups, data collection and more.