How Vaave Transformed Alumni Engagement with CometChat’s Real-Time Chat

Staying connected with alumni is a challenge that many educational institutions and organizations face. While social media platforms offer some level of engagement, they lack the exclusivity, structure, and tailored networking opportunities that institutions need to build a thriving alumni community.

This is where Vaave steps in. Vaave is a comprehensive alumni networking platform designed to help institutions strengthen alumni relations by fostering meaningful engagement. It provides a dedicated space where alumni can reconnect, network, and collaborate while ensuring data privacy and exclusivity. Institutions can leverage Vaave to showcase the success stories of their alumni, facilitate mentorship programs, and create a vibrant community that benefits both past and present members.

By providing powerful tools for communication, event management, fundraising, and engagement analytics, Vaave enables organizations to not just stay in touch with their alumni but actively strengthen their relationships, helping institutions build long-term value through their alumni networks.

As an alumni engagement platform, Vaave’s primary goal is to help institutions build meaningful connections among their alumni. While the platform successfully facilitated alumni networking with feeds and job boards, the lack of a real-time communication system limited user engagement. Institutions needed a way to keep active alumni participation, and Vaave sought a chat solution that would enhance interaction while providing valuable engagement insights.

One of the key challenges was ensuring that alumni from different institutions were only able to interact within their exclusive communities and prevent cross-communication between universities. 

Additionally, Vaave wanted to track alumni interactions more effectively. They needed analytics on chat activity—such as which groups were the most active and what types of conversations were happening—to help institutions measure engagement levels and strategize community-building efforts. However, they lacked a structured way to collect and analyze this data.

Vaave explored multiple chat solutions before choosing CometChat to introduce live chat functionality. A key deciding factor was CometChat’s multi-tenancy support, which allowed Vaave to maintain separate alumni networks for different institutions while ensuring data security.

Here’s how Vaave integrated CometChat into their web and mobile apps:

1. Institution-Specific Group Chats 

Vaave needed a way to prevent cross-communication between universities while still enabling vibrant discussions within each institution’s alumni network. CometChat’s structured group chat system ensured that:

2. Simplifying Networking with Smart Alumni Discovery

Previously, alumni struggled to find relevant groups or peers to connect with. With CometChat, Vaave introduced a "Start a Chat" feature, allowing users to:

To enhance speed and performance, Vaave worked closely with CometChat to optimize API calls, reducing the complexity of fetching user and group data.

3. Elevating Search with Universal Message Lookup

Another critical pain point Vaave encountered was message search.

Alumni frequently reconnect to reminisce about college memories, discuss career opportunities, or share professional advice. If someone needed to find an old conversation about a job opening or a mentorship opportunity, they had to manually scroll through multiple chats.

With CometChat, Vaave implemented a universal search feature, allowing users to type a keyword and instantly see matching messages from any conversation they were part of. This enhanced discoverability, making it much easier for alumni to stay informed and engaged.

4. Keeping Conversations Active with Real-Time Mentions & Notifications

To encourage ongoing engagement, Vaave enhanced group conversations with mentions:

With CometChat, Vaave successfully introduced a structured and interactive communication channel for alumni. The integration not only made networking more seamless but also provided institutions with valuable insights into alumni engagement. While the journey of refining and enhancing these interactions continues, the addition of chat has already played a crucial role in fostering stronger connections within alumni communities.