Alumni Network Now Open
Category: Creative Events, Random| June 27th, 2008VSAA Alumni Network ready to help you reconnect!
MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal and other social networking sites have been a good source of communication when VSAA students graduate. It’s natural to add friends from school and keep in touch on those sites. But what if we want to do more? What if we want to host an event to get everyone back together? Or talk about a new project we want to start? Or get an update on people’s lives? And what about this whole “alumni association” we heard about a couple years ago?
The reunions for the first graduates have sparked the need to have someone centrally coordinating alumni events. As well, past feedback on what grads want to do with their old VSAA chums range from reunions to art projects. To answer this need, I (Joe Ryder) and others are looking at what it will take to form a non-profit organization, separate from the school, that will fully address the needs of the current and future alumni. Why break up a family like we have just because we lost contact? Our goal is to keep in contact with everyone and welcome new recruits into the alumni family.
We have renamed the project “VSAA Alumni Network”, and the beginning of this is our new Ning social network: http://vsaagrads.ning.com/. The Alumni Network will be the central point for updates, events and questions for the alumni. All grad classes are encouraged to log on, create a profile and keep up to date on what your old friends and new alumni are doing.
You may ask why you would need yet another social profile if all you need is MySpace or Facebook. The answer is that this site is going to include other features you can’t maintain on those other sites, like an event calendar and dedicated announcement sections for reunion events. You can port stuff like your MySpace blog and some of the Facebook widgets over to the Alumni Network (for help, ask Joe). Plus, all the new info coming out on the alumni association and volunteer projects will be posted on this site. Even if you are no longer active in your art, volunteers are always needed with other skills that are useful to completing a large creative project.
Get your profile early and help us create a community of alumni unlike any other school can have! And if you are available to be involved in the non-profit side (conducted mostly over email and periodic meetings), please let Joe know on the Alumni Network site.
