Under 30 minutes, mostly typing. Create your account, choose your subdomain (yourschool.alumnly.com), upload your logo, set brand colours and your platform name.
Move from empty platform to a real-feeling community — most schools set up one event, few photos, news, and write a short welcome landing page.
The bulk-data moment. Download import template, complete, and upload the Excel (name, email, graduation year), automatic de-duplication, confirm and import. Even 4,000 alumni takes minutes.
Add a link on your school website, post on social media, and watch the first registrations arrive.
Name, email and graduation year at minimum. No list? Start fresh and let alumni self-register.
SVG preferred; high-res PNG is fine. Auto-positioned in the alumni-facing header.
Primary, secondary, accent — from your existing brand guide. Matched across site and app.
Something like oldscholars.alumnly.com. Custom-domain later if you want.
Credit card for after the 30-day trial. Stripe if you’re collecting event payments and donations.
Block out a morning, Slack on do-not-disturb. Mostly typing and reviewing.
Alumnly customers report their own setup and first-result times, set against the documented 3.5-hour benchmark.
Connecting Alumnly to your Student Information System for ongoing auto-sync — needs IT credentials and mapping validation.
Commissioned imagery and hero illustrations, if you want premium visual treatment beyond the templates.
The first admin is live in 4 hours; training three to five more takes a session or two (onboarding included).
Mentoring hubs, partner directories, scholarship applications — each needs design and content time.
Loading 50 years of yearbooks, newsletters or historical photos is its own project.
Segmentation, editorial calendar and year-on-year campaigns are community-building, not setup.
Platform live, first invitations sent, first registrations within 15 minutes, first event drafted.
Most of your list invited; 10–30% registered (industry baseline); first event published; engagement scoring begins.
30–50% registered; first community highlight email sent; first event held (or fundraiser on Growth); patterns emerging.
60–80% of the active list engaged; repeat attendance forming; first fundraising target hit (Growth+); embed widgets live.
The setup is the smaller story. The bigger one is the ~38 hours a month you reclaim — over a school year, roughly six full working weeks back, spent on relationships instead of spreadsheets.
The four-hour clock starts the moment you create your account. Schools across Australia and New Zealand have done it — some in under an hour. Your turn is one click away.