Case study

The Fulbright Program creates global community to support alumni and grantees to prosper

The flagship international educational exchange program partnered with Hivebrite to build a passionate, caring, and global community to help members thrive personally and professionally.

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Fulbrighter community story

30,000+

active members

27% active

record high of active members in a single month

180

countries with active members

“Hivebrite’s platform has made parts of my working day 110% easier by empowering Fulbrighters to connect, exchange, and collaborate with each other—something that previously required considerable manual intervention from the team.

We now have a passionate, caring, and centralized community that enables all members to continue to benefit from the Fulbright experience, develop personally and professionally, and essentially become Fulbrighters for life.”

Rob Ellis / Community Manager at Fulbrighter

About Fulbright

The Fulbright Program is a world-renowned cultural exchange program designed to improve intercultural relations, share knowledge across communities, and build intercultural competence between the people of the United States and other countries through the exchange of persons, knowledge, and skills.

Mission

Fulbrighter is the exclusive online networking platform for Fulbright alumni and grantees. It is a space where they can connect, network, engage and collaborate with the global community of Fulbrighters.

Visit the community

The community challenge

Since its launch in 1948, over 400,000 students, researchers, and professionals have benefited from the program.

Fulbright wanted to connect its rich and diverse community of alumni and grantees to help them develop personally and professionally.

Previously, it used spreadsheets and dispersed social media groups to manage and connect its alumni. Without centralized management or proper strategy, Fulbright could not drive meaningful connections and impact at scale.

The Hivebrite solution

The Fulbright Program partnered with Hivebrite to create Fulbrighter, a single collaborative community to connect and engage Fulbright alumni and grantees worldwide.

Hivebrite’s modular nature enabled the Fulbright team to launch the community with only the essential features for its community strategy to avoid overwhelming members. The team activates additional features as the strategy evolves and engagement grows or based on member feedback.

The interactive directory facilitates connecting members and encouraging meaningful relationships. It allows members to quickly and easily search for peers based on criteria such as location, profession, and even if they are interested in meeting for a coffee. The directory’s map gives a visual snapshot of all members’ locations on a global map.

Members can connect and direct message others on a global scale, as well as leverage the collective knowledge and experience of the community by requesting help or advice in the community’s global newsfeed.

The news feed also offers the ideal place for members to post their news and celebrate their achievements with the entire community. Members can also develop their careers by posting or applying for jobs on the community’s virtual jobs board. 

With the growing expansion of virtual events, Fulbrighter has also become a key hub for promoting and managing events that can be attended by global audiences.

The community offers nearly 200 subgroups based on location, identity, and discipline. The subgroups, managed by volunteers, encourage more engagement with personalized exchanges, content, and support.

The outcome

Fulbrighter is home to over 30,000 members from over 180 countries, and from every year of the Fulbright program from 1948 onwards. The community reached a high of 27% active members in a month—a testament to Fulbrighter’s community strategy and the platform’s user-friendliness.

Over 800 events have been promoted in the community in three years, and almost 8,000 live feed posts and comments have been created.

When surveyed, 72% of members stated that they believed the program had successfully built a global community, up from 44% when the platform launched three years ago.