Brown releases BrownConnect+ to help students and alums connect, find jobs

On Tuesday, the University announced the launch of BrownConnect+, a digital platform for students and alums to find career opportunities. 

The platform is Brown’s latest bid to improve career development opportunities for University community members. Matthew Donato, associate dean of the College and executive director of Brown’s Center for Career Exploration, told The Herald that BrownConnect+ has been in the works for over two years. 

While preparing for last year’s launch of the new Center for Career Exploration, members of the University’s career advising team discussed ways to develop a replacement for BrownConnect, the previous platform students have used to connect with alumni and find job opportunities. 

The Office of Alumni Relations also hoped to create a more centralized platform to engage alumni and connect them with students and recent graduates, according to Vice President for Alumni Relations Zack Langway.   

BrownConnect+ will integrate a number of existing technologies, including BrownConnect and BRAVO, an alumni communication platform.

While the new platform will provide the same functions as BrownConnect and BRAVO, it will also contain two new features — mentoring and communities — to facilitate career development and engagement, Donato said. 

The new mentoring feature will provide opportunities for students to connect with alumni and family members in the Brown community beyond the occasional conversation or email. These mentoring relationships will be supported by the Center and “customized to the needs and interests” of the students, Donato said. That specific feature will become available next month. 

BrownConnect+ will also allow students to join communities based on personal and professional interests, identities, geographic regions and class years. Langway anticipates that this feature will make these communities — typically led by alumni volunteers — much easier to create, find and stay connected to. 

To create BrownConnect+, the University partnered with Hivebrite, a software vendor that specializes in creating community engagement platforms. “We’re going to benefit from a little bit more modern interface with some bells and whistles that I think students are really going to appreciate,” Donato said. 

Some of these bells and whistles, Donato explained, will enhance how students can search for and reach out to alumni. On BrownConnect+, alumni will be able to “raise their hand” to express that they’re interested in networking with and mentoring students. Alumni will also be able to link their LinkedIn pages to BrownConnect+, which Donato hopes will make their profiles more “robust.”

Students will now be able to directly request to connect to an alum and send emails through the platform, which Donato hopes will eliminate some of the “disconnect” students may have felt when contacting alumni on BrownConnect. 

“We know that networking isn’t a natural or comfortable process for lots of people, and it can take practice to get good at it,” Donato said. “But it is a really important, high-impact practice that we think all students should be good at before they graduate.”