We’re soft-launching Keene and After — the new alumni social networking site. We started today by sending out 113 invites to the Class of 1988 and watching closely what happened. So far we have a signup rate of about three percent — which is a little depressing. Since these emails represent alumni that for the most part have volunteered their addresses I was hoping for a higher initial rate — somewhere around 5 or 6%. We’re going to try to vary the message, the delivery, and other factors and see if we can get the rate up. We get higher click-throughs on things like Newsline (12-15%) off that same list, and I think a lot of the differential is trust — when people are asked to “Sign up” for something they leave — whereas reading something like Newsline is low-commitment.

If anybody is reading this post who is an alumnus who hasn’t got an invite, there’s no need to fret. Just shoot us an email at webmaster@keene.edu and we’ll send out an invite right away. The slow-launch is so we can watch the site carefully as it grows and make course corrections, but if you want on *now* we’re glad to have you…

More as our saga as it continues over the next couple of weeks.

Update (May 14): We hit 5% this morning (6 signups). More interestingly, we had two signups through friend invites, which is indicative of how important that viral invite element is: 25% of the users who signed up yesterday were not on the email list. This is one reason why the invite lets people know we won’t use the information to solicit them, or the people they invite. That’s just so incredibly important.