The challenge: a deeply connected community spread across too many systems
Before centralizing on Hivebrite, USNA was dealing with fragmentation. Different alumni groups had landed on different tools: Facebook pages for some parent clubs, LinkedIn groups for some chapters. The pieces worked for individual groups, but not for the community as a whole.
“It was working for them, but it wasn’t working for the community. It wasn’t working for all of us. And so we realized that we needed to do something different, something that would bring them all together into one space while still giving them a good bit of control over their space,” explains Isaac Phillips, Director, Online Engagement & SIGs, U.S. Naval Academy
Operationally, the model also had to work at scale. This is a large, distributed network with hundreds of volunteer-led groups. Local leaders needed flexibility; national needed visibility, standards, and a secure way to manage alumni data.
Streamlining and enhancing member experience
With myUSNA, their community platform built on Hivebrite, the Academy created a single environment where alumni can find relevant groups, events, updates, and support without starting from scratch every time they move.
Instead of asking graduates to track down local communities on separate platforms, myUSNA connects them based on where they live.
A big part of what made Hivebrite the right fit was what it gave volunteer leaders:
“With the absolutely massive toolbox that Hivebrite has, we felt good giving it to our volunteer leaders and saying, hey, here, this is for you. Now run with it,” explains Isaac.
The group structure covers chapters, class groups, parent clubs, and shared-interest communities. Every member has a home within the wider network. But the platform also pulls people out of their silos. Members can step out of their class or chapter and into the full community feed, giving them, as Isaac puts it, “this nicer, grander sense of connection.”
How they use the community today
National sets expectations; local leaders run their own groups, organize events, and keep people connected. The ~440 admins across the network are supported through a dedicated experience inside the platform: guides, office hours, town halls, and peer discussion among admins themselves.
One capability that changed how USNA reaches its community: targeted news sharing. Before Hivebrite, getting the right information to the right groups meant relying on a daily email or the magazine, with no way to confirm who actually saw it. Now the team can push news to all parent communities at once, or to specific groups, with a direct call to action. Isaac calls this decentralizing command: “Having the ability to decentralize command and to give our admins control to send that email off — that really helped us out.”
Events work the same way, created once and shared across local groups simultaneously, with member pricing built in. The team also guides local leaders on format: networking events tend to perform better for recent graduates; more social formats work well for older alumni.
The impact: a community that shows up when it matters
Each year, 1,100 students move into alumni status. Local leaders prepare in advance with welcoming messages and outreach, and recent graduates are starting to show up.
But not everything shows up in the data.
An alumnus needed a heart transplant and transportation from North Carolina to Michigan for the surgery. They posted in their chapter asking for help with the journey. Their chapter admin turned the request into a news post.
“They thought, well, hey, maybe we’ll get like a small little train going along from North Carolina to Michigan. And instead of that, when they shared the news, someone somewhere along one of those stops decided to step in and say, hey, let’s not go through this trouble. I’ve got a car that you can use.”
“It was heartwarming to see that they were able to get the resources they needed because it was so easy for our leaders to share the message. They just were able to get it out and our community was active enough to see it, to pick up on it, and to really just step in where it mattered.”
The platform has also changed how USNA’s own leadership thinks about community. The board of trustees now uses myUSNA to check the health of chapters and classes. “For our own board to say, hey, this is where our community really lies — this is how we check on the pulse of our community — I feel like it was a hallmark for us.”
myUSNA has moved from being a website where people sign up for events to being, in Isaac’s words, “the center of our community.”
Why USNA build its community on Hivebrite
Hivebrite gives USNA one place to organize 69,000 alumni across classes, chapters, and life stages, at a scale and with a level of local control that no collection of social platforms could replicate.
“MyUSNA has allowed us really to bring our full community into one space and no longer to be isolated in different areas on the internet.”
Isaac Phillips III, Director, Online Engagement & SIGs, U.S. Naval Academy
