Last year, Mira Network developed a career follow-up module in Mira CRM, together with the Hanken School of Economics. Their driving force was to increase their response rate in the annual Finnish career survey, thereby contributing to increased government funding. And that’s exactly what happened – Hanken’s response rate rose by two percent in 2024.
Hanken’s increased response rate should be seen in the light of the national increase of 0.4 percent. About half of Finnish higher education institutions had a higher response rate than in 2023, while the other half had a lower rate.
– We are very pleased with our investment and that we chose to develop this module. Since the response rate has increased, we can already say the investment has paid off. In 2024, 40 percent responded to our survey, compared to 38 percent the year before, says Mira Aarnivuo, Head of Alumni Relations and Fundraising at Hanken.
In addition to moving their mailings into Mira CRM, Hanken also updated their routines and texts ahead of the 2024 survey distribution. They also conducted several tests to see which days and times worked best for sending out surveys.
Clear and Logical
– The workflow in the new module was clear and felt logical. The import function also worked well. At times, we experienced some slowness in the email distributions, but otherwise we had no issues. What initially required some thought was how to handle and make selections to smoothly manage the different respondent groups. But we solved that, says Mira Aarnivuo and continues:
– The biggest improvement was getting access to the email statistics in Mira CRM. It gave us a good overview of our three mailings. We could see, for example, that the first mailing to Swedish-speaking respondents was opened by as many as 76 percent, and 24 percent clicked on the survey link. Nationally, it has been shown that fewer people dare to click on links in mailings. Here we believe we have a certain advantage since the mailings via Mira CRM have a look and a sender that are familiar to the target group.
In Finland, there is currently a general discussion about what universities can do to increase awareness of career follow-ups. There is a general need to raise awareness that the follow-up is carried out annually and that it is important for those who receive it to respond.
Continued Focus on Career Follow-Up
Ahead of the 2025 career follow-up survey, Hanken wants to further improve its response rate.
– We are seeing an increasing number of graduates, which means that each year we need to reach more respondents. This makes the management of these mailings increasingly important, and we will continue to keep a strong focus on our career follow-up, concludes Mira Aarnivuo.
Finnish universities have jointly agreed on ethical guidelines for career follow-up, which, among other things, regulate how many times each recipient may be contacted and through which channels.
Read more about Hanken’s work with their follow-up-survey: https://www.mira.se/2025/08/29/each-alumni-who-answers-can-be-worth-thousands-of-euros-to-us-2/