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Help Center: Transforming the Alumni Association

The Yale Alumni Association unveiled a comprehensive transformation in December 2018, complete with a new website as well as a new name and visual identity. Read below for more on the efforts.

Welcome to the New Yale Alumni Association

  • A new name – Yale Alumni Association (from Association of Yale Alumni)
  • A new website
  • A new visual identity (i.e., wordmark and logos)
  • A refined mission statement and core values

The primary reasons for the name change are as follows:

  1. We want to put the most important aspects of who we are first (place and people). Our Yale experience is what binds us.
  2. We want to communicate through our name that we are inclusive – we welcome all alumni.
  3. The name change enables us to leverage the brand equity associated with the Yale name and with what most alumni perceive our name to be (and thus how alumni search for us online).

As the “Yale Alumni Association” – and either YAA or “alumni association” on second reference. “Yale Alumni” will be our primary wordmark and will be used as our logo and social media icons, but not in written communications.

The concept of a name change was first discussed more than a decade ago by members of the YAA Board of Governors and staff. And for many years now, both “Yale Alumni Association” and “Association of Yale Alumni” have been used. Four years ago, members of the YAA Board of Governors with expertise in branding and marketing recommended the name change, which accelerated the process. In the last two years, we’ve conducted alumni surveys that have helped crystallize our thinking that this was needed to clarify and strengthen our identity.

No. The alumni online directory will still be accessible via the website – only it will now be easier to find – and YaleMail addresses will remain the same: name@aya.yale.edu.

The new website is fully optimized and with new features that allow for cleaner, more comprehensive search functionality for groups and events, laid out in a cohesive, transparent structure that’s more intuitive for users. Among the upgrades:

  1. The new site will have functions and links throughout that will allow you to go to points of similar interest, so no page will be a dead end.
  2. The new website will have a news feed page to collect news and features written by and for the Yale Alumni Association and also from YaleNews, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Yale’s professional schools, Yale Athletics, and other affiliated groups.
  3. Social media feeds will be incorporated into the website to create a better interplay between the website and the Yale Alumni Association social media channels.
  4. The event calendar will be more robust, making it easier to find events of interest and events near you, and it will be simpler for alumni leaders to submit event information for publication.
  5. The alumni groups section will now be able to search for all groups on one page, rather than having interest groups, regional clubs, Yale College Classes, and Graduate and professional schools information segmented out into different sections. Now, all groups will be housed on one page that is searchable by group type, location, or keyword.

Yes. The new website is responsive, meaning it will conform to your device (desktop, tablet, and mobile).

As part of the new visual identity, we will have new social media icons and banners for the public-facing Yale Alumni Association Facebook page (Yale Alumni Association), and for Twitter and Instagram (both @YaleAlumni). The channels themselves will be largely unchanged in terms of content.

In addition to creating a greater sense of consistency within and among the Yale Alumni Association and our affiliates, the new visual identity (wordmark, logo, and visual identity toolkits) brings us in line with the established Yale structure. That associates us more directly with Yale, thus creating a greater sense of connection, and allows us to draw on the strength of the iconic Yale mark.

As the university, our alumni body, and society at large continue to evolve, it is important to revisit our mission and values, which are foundational to what we do as an organization. The new mission statement provides transparency and establishes a guidepost in terms of who we are and what we want to accomplish as an association.

Our goal is to articulate those values long held by Yale and our alumni association but which we have not expressly defined. As these elements are at the very heart of what we do as an association, we thought it important to outline them for all to see.