Data sourced from Dakota Marketplace, the global LP and GP intelligence platform trusted by thousands of investment professionals. Learn More | Book a Demo
Fundraising and raising capital is hard. Dakota makes it easier.
Relevance is what makes outreach land, and a shared alma mater is one of the easiest hooks there is. The challenge is knowing, before you write the email, which of your prospects went to your school or to a school you have a connection to.
In this article, we’ll walk through how the Alumni Network in Dakota Marketplace lets you find contacts by where they went to school, and how to use it to warm up outreach, prep for roadshows, and speed up LP research.
What the Alumni Network Actually Shows You
The Alumni Network lets you find contacts by where they went to school. Search by college or university and see the allocators, consultants, and investment professionals who attended, all in one place. Marketplace has education history tagged to 174,500+ contacts across 7,100+ colleges and universities, with schools like The Wharton School, Harvard Business School, and the University of Michigan among the most represented.
It sits alongside Career History as a second way to find a personal connection, built on a contact’s education rather than their employers. You can also build alumni and education reports with Joe, the AI Report Builder, by describing the school and the type of contact you want.
3 Ways to Use the Alumni Network in Dakota Marketplace
Use It to Warm Up Cold Outreach
A generic pitch is easy to ignore. A note that opens with a shared school is not. Instead of a standard introduction, you can lead with “fellow Hoya” or “Roll Tide” and give the person on the other end a real reason to read on. One new associate ran an alumni search for her own school during onboarding, recognized several contacts right away, and said it might be her favorite function in the platform.
Book a demo to see the Alumni Network for the schools that matter to you.
Use It to Prep for Roadshows
Pairing a metro area with a school shows you who you have a connection to in each city before you travel. If you’re heading to Chicago, you can see which allocators and consultants there share your alma mater, and build your meeting requests around those connections instead of cold calling down a list. It turns a city visit into a set of warmer conversations.
Use It to Speed Up New-Hire Research
New team members don’t have to start with a blank list. Junior team members can build LP lists around their own networks from day one, using the schools they attended. One firm’s team loves reaching out through university connections and filtering by LP type, and their three new junior hires lean on it heavily for LP research. Another new hire, reacting to the alumni network and the hobbies filter, called it “beyond helpful,” which is exactly the reaction that gets a new rep prospecting faster.
Pair It With Career History to Find the Strongest Shared Ground
Schools tell you where someone studied. Career History tells you where they’ve worked. Combining past employers and schools gives you the strongest shared ground with a contact, so your outreach can reference more than one real connection instead of leaning on a single hook. Between the two, you can see a contact’s full path and pick the angle that fits best.
Start With the School You Share
You already have connections to more of your prospects than you think. Search by your own school, pair it with a metro area or LP type, and let a real shared background do some of the work for you before you write the first line.
Book a demo to see the Alumni Network built around your school and your target LPs.
FAQs
What can I search for in the Alumni Network? Search by college or university to see the allocators, consultants, and investment professionals who attended, all in one place.
How many contacts have education history in Dakota Marketplace? 174,500+ contacts across 7,100+ colleges and universities.
Can I build alumni reports with Dakota Joe? Yes. Alumni and education reports can be built with Joe, the AI Report Builder.
How does the Alumni Network relate to Career History? They’re two ways to find a personal connection: the Alumni Network is built on a contact’s education, while Career History is built on their past employers. Using both together surfaces the strongest shared ground.
