Student and Alumni App Building


App screen of map with shuttle bus location on route in real time.

Getting to classes on the shuttle—and on time—is easy for any newcomer using an interactive map.

We aim at graduates, your school’s greatest asset

When Students feel like they belong, dedication goes up…

Building a customized application for your college or university begins with choosing the essential features your students or alumni will want to have.

Both the features in the app and the implementation methods are critical to winning and keeping users—and winning and keeping users is our mission.

Julintani offers a menu of stock options, with the expertise to build whatever new feature you need to include.

Our options aim at helping your students find essential information to make their lives richer and more organized—

  • Courses, Faculty and staff
  • Locations & directions
  • Transportation
  • Campus News, Sports & Activities
  • Other students and events
  • Campus topics of interest
  • Push notification security alerts
An app screen showing current College news, with headlines and thumbnails.

News and events are important to both students and alumni, engaging their attention and keeping them involved.

…When Alumni feel the love, they get your back, too

Whether it’s this year’s Homecoming or your library building project, alumni should be kept up to date. With your alumni app from Julintani, you aren’t just giving them a shortcut to the news on the website: you are giving yourself a communication channel to shake their hands, and let them know what you need them to do.

Alumni need to stay in touch with news from the Alma Mater, as well as each other:

  • News, sports and campus events
  • Support and fund-raising campaigns
  • Anniversaries and meetups
  • Networking with colleagues, other alums, professors and friends
  • News from their field of study on campus

Why have mobile apps and not just a mobile-friendly web site?

Some people may think that flexible web design makes a single-source solution, so a mobile-friendly web site seems like an attractive solution. The thinking goes, that it’s less painful to maintain a single web site than to have apps running around that might need upkeep. (If ‘upkeep’ is a concern, we address the issue of Android fragmentation here, under the heading “Going Native.”)

But a mobile app from Julintani has three indispensable advantages that mobile-friendly web sites don’t provide:

First: push notification.

Visiting a web site means you’re passively waiting for your visitors. No endowment developer or campus security officer would want to turn down the chance to get an urgent message in front of a sizable constituency. Sure, you can (and should) email blast your list. But that puts you passively in the Inbox, an ever-growing list of “unread messages.” An app is a channel you have all to yourself. And it can give you access to phone numbers and SMS campaign opportunities that a web site won’t.

Imagine being able to send messages like these right to the pockets of your target groups. Wherever they are, at a time of your choosing—not the whim of their bookmarking habits:

    • Amber alerts
    • Event time or venue changes
    • Urgent fund raising objectives
    • Direct appeal messages for support

Second: mobile users prefer it

According to recent studies, 85% of mobile users prefer content delivered in an app, rather than having to access a web site by mobile browser. This preference alone is the main reason we work hard to incorporate your content directly in our app interface. (In what we would call poor service to you, some app development companies just throw a few buttons into the app that send the user to a browser window and load content from other sites—nothing more than fancy hyperlinks.)

If you’re interested in fund-raising, then you’ll appreciate how important it is to make pledge fulfillment fast and painless. Phone-based transactions (like the micro-donations which were so successful in the Obama campaigns) are easier to complete through an app-initiated payment service than trying to enter payment information in the fields of a mobile browser page.

 Third: networking through mobile is just easier

Mobile phones, with their social sharing options at the fingertip, and lists of contacts with phone and email information, have become a key means for alumni and students to stay in touch with each other, not just the institution. It’s only natural, when you think of it, that learning of alma mater news on your phone, you’ll want to share that content with friends, either through a simple social click, or through a phone call or forwarded text. This interconnectedness is a win for institutions in trying to increase media shares and reach.

And through and app, the targeting data that you can receive about location, occupation, career changes, areas of interest—and, yes, even current phone numbers—can be invaluable to campaigns, whether aimed at the student body or at alumni populations.

Graduates are your Fund’s greatest resource

We believe that your alumni app should be as much a “keeper” as that sheepskin on the wall, a part of your graduate’s life—and our aim is to help your Alumni Foundation and development officers make that a reality for your institution. Coupled with your own expertise, and with the latest tools in mobile communication and fundraising technology, your alumni app could do a lot more for you than take up space in phone memory.

Contact us today for a presentation on how Julintani helps turn your students into giving graduates.