ALUMNI SIGNAL INTELLIGENCE FOR ADVANCEMENT TEAMS
Show up for your alumni before you ever need them.
Every week your graduates hit a moment worth a hello — a promotion, a move, a new title. Spark Plug catches them from public signal, drafts the note in your voice, and routes it to the right person, so the relationship is there long before the ask.
“Maria — saw you’re leading ops in Denver now. Congratulations. We just started a Denver alumni chapter and I thought of you. No agenda — I’d just love to point you to your people out there.”
No alumni list required. No CRM integration, no IT build. Drafts arrive by email or workspace.
WHY THIS IS WORTH DOING WELL
Eighty-six percent of graduates say their institution doesn’t really know them, and only 14% feel you understand where their life and career have gone. That’s not a generosity problem — it’s a relationship that quietly went quiet.
And connection is the whole story. When alumni feel close to their institution, they’re far more likely to give back, volunteer, and show up — not because any one of them is worth more, but because people invest in the places that truly know them.
Alumni don’t drift because they stop caring. They drift because they stop feeling seen.
Source: 2026 National Alumni Survey — 82,252 respondents across 31 colleges and universities
THE PROBLEM
Somewhere along the way, "engagement" turned into "ask."
Your calendar decides when alumni hear from you — the fund drive, the reunion push, the year-end appeal. Their lives decide when they’re actually open to reconnecting. Those two calendars almost never line up, so the message that could have landed as warmth arrives as a solicitation, and one more graduate quietly drifts.
More email won’t fix it. Alumni are more generous than ever — just not, by default, to you. What’s broken isn’t their giving. It’s that they don’t feel seen. You can’t scale “seen” by sending more; you scale it by showing up at the right moment, as a human, with nothing attached. That’s a timing-and-attention problem — and the one thing a two- or three-person shop never has enough of.
HOW IT WORKS
Three moving parts. Zero IT tickets.
Spark Plug runs entirely on public signal — so nothing touches your CRM, and nothing waits on your IT team.
Work arrives by email or your workspace — export every signal, response, and result to CSV anytime. No CRM integration. No IT build. No new tool to learn.
PROOF
One well-timed hello. By week thirteen, a real relationship.
The gap between known and invisible even has a free, open metric now — the Net Known Score — so any team can measure it, whether or not they ever work with us.
TWO WAYS TO WORK
See your alumni clearly — or have Spark Plug run the whole thing.
Every engagement starts with a free Proof Scan on your own graduates. When you’re ready to go further, there are two ways in — pick based on how much you want off your team’s plate.
STRAIGHT ANSWERS
The questions every advancement team asks.
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No — and that’s the point. No list, no data-sharing agreement, no IT.Spark Plug works entirely from public professional signal, so nothing sensitive ever leaves your institution.
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Public profiles show where people studied and when. Spark Plug matches on your institution and class years, then watches for the moments worth a hello. The free Proof Scan is how you check the accuracy on your own graduates, at zero risk.
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It would be, if the note felt like it. Every message is specific, human-approved, and carries no ask — the kind a former professor sends when they see your good news. Spark Plug uses only what alumni make public, and reaches out to celebrate, never to extract.
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Screening tells you who’s rich. Spark Plug tells you who’s reachable right now — and hands your team the hello. One fills a prospect list; the other fills your calendar with reconnected graduates.
WHO’S BEHIND THIS
I led alumni engagement and annual giving at Ohio University, the University of Oregon, Western Governors, and Ohio State. I know the pressure to hit the number, and I know the quiet cost of letting "engagement" collapse into "ask."
I also know what happens when you get it right — when someone hears from their school at exactly the moment it matters, and remembers they belong to something. I built Spark Plug to make that possible for teams who don't have twenty people to do it by hand.
I'm not a charismatic closer. I'm a practitioner who builds systems. This is the system.
Erin Essak Kopp
Founder, Spark Plug
I spent twenty years inside advancement. Spark Plug is what I wish I'd had.
START FREE
See the moments you’re missing.
Proof Scan
A free report built from your own alumni — named examples of real career moves, each with a recommended play and drafted outreach. Yours to keep, whether or not you ever work with Spark Plug.
The Cost of Waiting
Enter your living-alumni count and see what twelve months of unanswered career signals is costing you in recoverable lifetime giving. Every assumption is adjustable, and every default errs low.