Thunderbird Launches
Digital Community Platform By Tomas Bilbao, Executive Director, Branding and Communications
T-bird Connect will serve as a digital gathering place for the School’s global community Two things have always characterized Thunderbird: our position as the vanguard of global leadership, management, and business education; and the breadth, reach and impressiveness of our alumni network. Over the past year, the School took great steps to reclaim, rebuild and reinvent Thunderbird to be the vanguard of global leadership in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (see page 5). A critical part of those achievements has been restoring alumni unity. As a result of our recent efforts, alumni engagement has increased by 64% year-over-year, and the Thunderbird Global Alumni Network (TGAN) has been hard at work engaging alumni around the world and
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Thunderbird Magazine Spring 2020
working with the School to ensure the voices of all T-birds are heard.
BRINGING TOGETHER 45,000 ALUMNI Having approximately 45,000 alumni across 145 countries does come with some challenges, however. In the 1990s, Thunderbird helped bridge the gaps between alumni by deploying the My Thunderbird App, a cutting-edge digital platform at the time. Over the years, the platform became inflexible and eventually outdated when it was unable to integrate new technologies as they became available. As a result, our global alumni network’s ability to digitally connect with each other and with the School deteriorated over time. But just as the School has been able to recapture its rightful place as the vanguard of global leadership, management and business education with a #1 ranking from the Wall Street Journal, we have also been hard at work developing a new digital platform called T-bird Connect
with the express purpose of organizing, connecting and informing all members of the Thunderbird global family. Thunderbird launched a beta version of T-bird Connect at this year’s Global Alumni Reunion in Tokyo, Japan. This new mobile digital platform is much more than a replacement for the old My Thunderbird App. We engaged Hivebrite, a Paris-based technology company that has built robust digital alumni platforms for Harvard Business School, West Point Military Academy, University of Oxford, Imperial College, the University of Notre Dame and many others. T-bird Connect uses the latest technologies on a platform that can evolve to incorporate innovations while immediately leveraging integration with our website and other social channels. By launching T-bird Connect, a new digital platform for current students, alumni, faculty and staff, Thunderbird is making it easier for T-birds to forge new connections, reach career goals and stay in touch with the School’s global community.
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