Connecting with your college and alumni community

An adviser once told me that my idea was “cute”; a potential investor told me to consider going back to school. However, despite the self-doubt, sleepless nights and empty wallet, I’ve never looked back.

I’m Jayne, and I’m the chief executive and co-founder of a company called KonnectAgain which is disrupting the alumni relations market. We have built a tailored content and networking platform that leverages data to bring Amazon-style personalisation to alumni relations.

KonnectAgain began after a personal challenge to leverage my university’s alumni network after graduation. KonnectAgain provides alumni offices with powerful alumni relations software to connect their graduates to each other and to the institution through smart, data-driven and relevant alumni engagement.

I feel that to be apart of an alumni community is something incredibly valuable and everyone, in my eyes, should have the ability to access their alumni community in a way that is easy, fast and efficient.

Unfortunately, at the moment, it is still a challenge to communicate and connect with my own UCC alumni community as it requires lengthy forms to fill in, long periods of waiting to be even verified and then, after all of this, still not having the ability to even filter and personalise my alumni search to ensure that I can communicate with alumni who are relevant to me and my life.

I felt that my only contact with my both my institution and alumni community was either receiving a graduate magazine that was delivered to my parents’ house or else becoming a member on the LinkedIn, group with thousands of other members, which felt totally disconnected. I wanted to fix this and so KonnectAgain was born. My co-founder Helen Flynn and I are massively excited about this market opportunity as not only is alumni relations relevant in the education market, but there is a growing need for alumni engagement in the corporate and technology sector.

Alumni are now seen to be a valuable asset for any industry as they can be your potential cheerleaders, clients in the future or your own personal HR agents, so keeping up good relations is pretty essential.

Many top investors and industry leaders are highlighting this urgent need, such as Chris Yeh who co-authored of The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, along with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who recently said: "Treat your former employees like alumni. They're a huge resource to refer people and businesses."

KonnectAgain now has a team of eight, with our technology team located in the new Dogptach Labs in the IFSC and our sales and marketing team based in our San Francisco office. I have been massively fortunate to date on the journey I’ve had with KonnectAgain in terms of people I have met, great customers gained and learning what its like to be a female founder first hand. Both myself and Helen have definitely experienced the advantages of being female founders.

Of course, we have also experienced the other side of the spectrum, receiving comments such as: “I’ve never come across a female CTO before”.

Unfortunately even some investors behaved in a manner that was massively inappropriate. I know other female founders who have experienced similar situations but I think it is important to not let these things become something bigger, as it will end up distracting you from running your business and, at the end of the day, that is the most important thing.

I have always been interested in hearing other founders’ challenges, accomplishments, drivers to keep going and if they could pass any lessons on to me going forward. Asking these questions and learning from the answers have led to my own successes both within and outside KonnectAgain.

Over the past couple of months, I have wanted to take this a step further to share experiences with more people, so I started my first blog, Wasallyellow.com.

I wanted other female founders to share their experiences, both good and bad, with others in an effort to both encourage any potential female founders to go forward with their ideas and to comfort already established female founders with experiences that others can relate with. This might make certain situations feel more normal than they are originally perceived as, for example, pitching for funding, and to highlight the normality of investors saying No, instead of continuing the perception that funding is easy to get.

Jayne Ronayne is the chief executive officer and co-founder of KonnectAgain, which aims to change the alumni relations market