Looking for a Graduway alternative
built for K-12 schools?
The short answer: if your school is an independent K-12 or prep school, Studiously is the stronger fit — it's architected for exactly your alumni size, your SIS and CRM stack, and the student-mentorship use case Graduway doesn't prioritize. Graduway is a capable platform, but it was designed for universities, and the differences show up in practical ways for schools with 1,000–10,000 alumni and a two- or three-person advancement team.
Side by side
What matters to K-12 advancement teams
Six criteria that distinguish alumni platforms for independent schools. Studiously's capabilities trace directly to its K-12-first architecture; Graduway's positioning reflects its higher-education origins.
| Criteria |
Studiously
Built K-12-first
|
Graduway
Higher-ed-first
|
|---|---|---|
|
K-12 / independent-school fit
Architecture, scale, and workflow match
|
Designed for
1,000–10,000 alumni |
Higher-ed-first |
|
Student-alumni mentorship
First-class use case, not an add-on
|
Core use case;
searchable directory |
Engagement-first |
|
Native Raiser's Edge NXT sync
Bidirectional — imports and writes back
|
Bidirectional;
writes enriched data back |
Higher-ed focused |
|
Native Veracross sync
Connects to K-12 SIS directly
|
Native K-12
SIS integration |
Not offered |
|
FERPA-aware for minors
Student data kept private from alumni
|
Student identity
never exposed |
Higher-ed model |
|
Right-sized for lean advancement
Fits a 1–3 person office without hand-holding
|
Live in 14 days;
founders on support |
Enterprise-scale |
Fair assessment
Where Graduway fits — and where it doesn't for K-12
Graduway, now part of Gravyty, is a well-established alumni engagement platform with a substantial customer base and a broad feature set. For universities and large higher-education institutions, it covers a lot of ground: alumni community building, mentorship matching, engagement tracking, and fundraising integration. If your school has a university-scale alumni operation with dedicated staff to drive platform adoption, Graduway deserves serious consideration.
Where independent K-12 schools run into friction is structural, not incidental. Graduway's model requires alumni to create accounts, build profiles, and log into a separate platform to participate — a dynamic that works reasonably well at universities where alumni are accustomed to institutional networks, but that consistently falls flat at prep schools. Alumni who graduated from a school of 400 students per class don't check a separate platform to see if anyone reached out. They check their email.
Several advancement directors at independent schools have described the same pattern with Graduway: strong initial enthusiasm, a push to get alumni to register, profiles created, and then silence. The platform fills up with dormant accounts while the advancement team ends up back in spreadsheets, manually brokering connections.
“We used Graduway in the past and it fell completely flat. It was another platform for alumni to login to. We were seeing almost everybody that created a profile never come back again.”
“We used it for years. After everything, fifteen hundred of our five thousand alumni ever created a profile. You spend all your energy tracking sign-ups instead of tracking actual relationships.”
What Studiously delivers
What you get with Studiously
Studiously was built from the ground up for independent K-12 and prep schools — not adapted from a university product. Every design decision reflects the reality of a small advancement team, a familiar alumni community, and a student body that genuinely needs career mentorship.
- Opt-out directory from day one. Every alumnus in your database is included by default — not just the ones who signed up. Studiously enriches each record with current employer, title, college, and location, so students can search a full, live directory on day one rather than waiting months for sign-up campaigns to build critical mass.
- Alumni reply from their own email inbox. When a student reaches out, the message arrives in the alumnus's everyday email as a school-branded message. The alumnus hits reply — no account required, no platform to log into, no new behavior to learn. Only your students and current staff use the Studiously platform directly.
- Native, bidirectional Raiser's Edge NXT integration. Studiously imports your constituents through the Blackbaud SKY API and writes enriched career data — employer, title, LinkedIn URL, college, location — back into RE NXT custom fields automatically. Your CRM becomes a continuously improving database rather than a static snapshot, giving your full advancement team better data for every campaign.
- Native Veracross integration. For schools running Veracross as their student information system, Studiously connects directly — no middleware, no manual uploads. Current enrollment and alumni data stays in sync without extra work from your team.
- Built with K-12 privacy expectations. Student identities and contact information are never exposed to alumni. All correspondence routes privately through Studiously's email system. The alumni directory shows only career information that is already publicly visible — no sensitive student or family data is surfaced.
- Live in 14 days, with founders on support. From first data sync to a fully live alumni directory takes approximately two weeks. And when you have a question, you're talking to the founders directly — not a support ticket queue you share with a thousand universities.
Common questions
Frequently asked
Yes, for independent K-12 and prep schools. Studiously is architected K-12-first with native Raiser's Edge NXT and Veracross integration, an opt-out alumni directory so every alumnus is reachable from day one, and student-alumni mentorship as a primary use case. Graduway was built for universities; independent schools that have evaluated both typically find Studiously's model — where alumni reply from their own email without creating an account — fits how their alumni actually behave.
Studiously has a native, bidirectional Raiser's Edge NXT integration via the Blackbaud SKY API: it imports constituents to build a searchable alumni directory and writes enriched career data — employer, title, LinkedIn URL, college, location — back into RE NXT custom fields with no manual exports. Graduway's integrations are primarily oriented toward its higher-education customer base.
Graduway (now part of Gravyty) was designed for universities and higher-education institutions. Some independent schools have used it, but the platform's model — opt-in alumni networking, profile-based engagement — fits institutions with large alumni populations and dedicated alumni relations staff better than the typical independent school with 1,000–10,000 alumni and a lean advancement team.
No. When a student reaches out, the message lands directly in the alumnus's email inbox as a school-branded email. The alumnus simply hits reply — no account creation, no password, no app download. Unlike Graduway and most alumni platforms, Studiously never requires alumni to log into a separate platform to respond. Only the school's students and staff log into Studiously directly.
Studiously is designed with K-12 privacy expectations in mind. Student identities and contact information are never exposed to alumni; all communication routes privately through Studiously's email system, so alumni never see a student's personal email or contact details. The alumni directory shows only career information that is already publicly available — employer, title, college attended, and general location.
See Studiously
built for your school
We'll show you how schools like yours are connecting students and alumni — without asking anyone to change their habits. Schedule a 30-minute demo tailored to your school's advancement goals.
Founding customer pricing is available for a limited number of schools.