What is it? Manchester Day of Action is a global alumni volunteer activism campaign, aligned with our Social Responsibility strategic goal. When? During the month of June, 2019

Who is the audience? Our global alumni network; primarily outside of the UK, though UK will also be invited to join.

Why? The aim of this campaign is to raise the profile of the University’s Social Responsibility goal among our global alumni network. It will also directly engage alumni in volunteering activity which benefits their local community. In this way we are combining ‘alma mater’ pride felt by alumni with networking and fellowship (by bringing them together) and cooperative activism. This would be under the banner of the University’s SR goal. The unifying theme of these SR projects would be drawn from the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and we will ask our organising volunteers to consider which SDG their project will be aligned with.

There is potential internal and external engagement value to be gained. By reporting on the combined effort of the University’s global alumni community after the campaign, we can tell a compelling story about the positive, socially responsible impact of our graduates. This story would be useful to engage not only colleagues internally but also media outlets regionally.

How? We are inviting all of our volunteers, who run our international alumni groups and who took part in the Manchester Day pilot in 2018, to firstly identify a suitable local community or charity project which a group of alumni can support on a given day in June. We will then promote that project to alumni in the surrounding areas, in order to recruit a team of alumni to support that project. We will provide branded apparel (caps, t-shirts, badges) allowing alumni to demonstrate their affiliation to the University. We’ll ask organising volunteers to capture visual content (video and images) so we can tell the story afterwards through our communications channels. We’ll also report metrics on numbers of projects, numbers of participants and the number of volunteering hours accrued.

Background Manchester Day of Action builds on a pilot campaign run in June 2018. This was based on the date of the civic celebration of ‘Manchester Day’, led by Manchester City Council, which fell on Sunday 15 June, 2018. We messaged all of our international alumni group volunteers and invited them to organise their own ‘Manchester Day’ celebration. We fixed details of global ‘Manchester Day’ gatherings to our alumni worldwide. We sent organising volunteers branded decorations such as bunting and banners. We asked them to take pictures and videos and created a visual montage of all the events which took place afterwards, which was shared on our social media channels.

Every continent apart from Oceania took part; there were 17 cities where an alumni gathering was hosted. It was organised by a total of 39 alumni volunteers and 309 alumni were engaged face to face by these events. We had long-established alumni groups take part as well as brand new alumni volunteers and groups emerge.

The conclusion of this pilot was that there was sufficient appetite for a global alumni activity focused around a central, unifying theme.

This programme has been run for many years in US Universities such as BostonU and was piloted for the first time in the UK in March 2018 by KCL.

How to register?

Please register to show interest in participating or organizing a regional event: please email <alumni@mbs-worldwide.ac.cn> with subject “Manchester Day“ and include your “year of Intake and programme studied at University of Manchester, WeChat number” and we will contact you shortly.