Rede Alumni : uma estratégia responsável ao serviço do desenvolvimento do turismo local

Abstract

Comunicação apresentada no VI International Tourism Congress, ESTM, Peniche, 2013.Organizations including higher education institutions need to enhance the relationships with their stakeholders, especially with their alumni, in order to promote a set of long term mutual competitive advantages. In this way, organizational sustainability is gaining new ground and plays a fundamental role as a way of attaining a broad goal in terms of sustainable development. Higher education institutions should develop relationship and transparency strategies of corporate actions in order to create trust and also to leverage synergies by using alumni networks. This can be achieved through Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), especially the web, and the most recent and globalized platforms like Facebook and Linkedin as privileged channels for communicating with alumni. In addition, the development of actions that try to promote an approach and the engagement of alumni among different initiatives not only inside the institution, but also in terms of local and/or regional context, could create added value and contribute to local tourism development. The present study aims to analyze the development of the network of a higher education institution, namely, the IPLeiri@lumni Network, assessing the platform design, the measures taken by the institution to renew the relationship with their alumni, and the resulting advantages from the paths taken by some alumni as a way of identifying the potential added value for the development of local tourism of the region