Alumni

Closer ties for a powerful, worldwide network

More than 36,000 Wisconsin School of Business alumni live and work around the world. Our alumni relations and development efforts focus on three major areas:

• Drawing on the talents of our alumni to help recruit, employ, and mentor students and contribute to our instructional mission.
• Continuing to enhance the already-strong esprit de corps among our alumni.
• Creating opportunities for alumni to support their alma mater through annual giving and major gifts.

The past year was unprecedented in terms of the outpouring of support shown by Wisconsin Business Alumni. The groundbreaking Wisconsin Naming Gift, in which 13 alumni joined together to preserve the school’s name as the Wisconsin School of Business for the next 20 years, was a unique demonstration of our Wisconsin Business Alumni community.

In response to the naming gift, we heard from hundreds of alumni all over the world, telling us how proud they were to be from Wisconsin. In the wake of the naming gift announcement, one of our naming partners offered a $1 million match to challenge all alumni to join the partnership by doing their part. Thousands of alumni stepped forward in the last two months of the year, making gifts totaling $1,072,000.

This generous support inspired many others, including students at the school. Demonstrating the value they place on their experience at the Wisconsin School of Business, both the undergraduate and MBA classes of 2008 led highly successful commencement campaigns. In its first year, the undergraduate commencement campaign achieved 24 percent participation and pledged more than $11,000 to the school. Now in its fourth year, the MBA commencement campaign achieved 96 percent participation and raised more than $150,000. A majority of MBA graduates made multi-year commitments. These newly minted alumni made a strong statement about their commitment to the Wisconsin School of Business.

We continue our efforts to make the business school more relevant and top-of-mind to our alumni by expanding networking events, programming, recruiting opportunities, in-person meetings, and geographic and company-based giving campaigns.

To help alumni take advantage of our large alumni base and provide opportunities to expand their network, we launched a new and much-improved online alumni directory and expanded its use as a social networking tool for alumni. We continue to reach out in other ways to the world of “Facebook” and “LinkedIn” to explore new opportunities for our alumni to stay connected with us — and with each other.

We will continue these and other initiatives to build on the unprecedented momentum of the last year to create a greater sense of community and a strong culture of giving among alumni of the Wisconsin School of Business both in terms of their involvement and their financial support.