Internal communications for every audience on campus
Faculty, staff, students, and alumni all need different information from your institution, every day. ContactMonkey helps comms teams reach each of them with what matters, sent as branded, tracked emails from Outlook.
Trusted by leading universities worldwide
Sound familiar? Comms shouldn’t be this hard in higher education
“We have no idea if anyone’s actually reading what we send.”
Campus comms teams often have no visibility into who’s opening, clicking, or engaging with what they send, across faculty, staff, students, or external audiences. Without that data, there’s no way to know what’s working.
“Our distribution lists are full of people who graduated two years ago.”
HR- and student-system-synced lists are rigid and often out of date, and building a custom list for one event or department means a manual export or a cleanup pass before anything can go out.
“Faculty, staff, students, alumni. Everyone needs something different.”
Campus comms teams reach far more than one group. Students, faculty, IT, and university leadership internally. Alumni, donors, and community partners externally. Most tools are built to reach a single audience.
“Faculty, students, alumni, and donors are all in different systems.”
Higher ed teams often manage faculty, staff, student, alumni, and donor comms through systems that don’t talk to each other. Reaching all of them shouldn’t mean juggling five disconnected workflows.
“We’re stuck between manual Outlook and switching everything.”
Comms teams don’t want to leave Outlook, but doing everything manually inside it makes it hard to design and measure newsletters, especially compared to what dedicated tools offer.
“We’re a two-person team covering the whole university.”
Internal comms teams are lean and already stretched across departments, campuses, and audiences. Any tool that adds manual work doesn’t get adopted no matter how good it looks in a demo.
Internal benchmarks
73%
Average Open Rate
10 am
Best time to send
Tuesday
Best day to send
See how higher ed comms teams are actually performing
See where your institution stands against real internal comms benchmarks for higher education.
Internal comms built for higher education
Take your comms beyond faculty and staff
Faculty and staff aren’t the only audience your institution needs to reach. ContactMonkey’s external sending lets internal comms teams send branded, tracked emails to alumni, donors, VIPs, and other outside constituents on their personal email addresses, with a built-in unsubscribe option. It’s the same templates, editor, and analytics you already use for internal newsletters, all from Outlook.
Explore External Sending
See engagement across faculty, staff, and students
Sending a university-wide update doesn’t tell you who actually opened it. ContactMonkey tracks opens, clicks, and read time by department, campus, or audience, so you know which campus messages are landing with faculty, staff, students, and beyond, and can follow up when they’re not.
Explore AnalyticsPersonalize communications without building five campaigns
Faculty, HR, IT, and the library all need different information, and building a separate campaign for each one adds up fast. Dynamic content lets you send a single email that shows relevant updates by audience, campus, department, or recipient type, all from one campus-wide send.
Explore Dynamic Content
A home base for onboarding, benefits, and campus news
Pages lets you turn campus emails into a standalone, branded, trackable hub for longer content, like donor campaign pages, event details, orientation resources, and student or alumni newsletters. This way, important content stays easy to find, instead of getting lost across shared drives or old email threads.
Explore PagesEvery email should look like it came from your university
Manual Outlook sends and clunky templates don’t reflect well on your institution, especially when alumni or donors are on the list. ContactMonkey’s drag-and-drop builder keeps every newsletter, student email, and leadership message polished, consistent, and on brand, no design or IT support needed.
Explore Email Template Builder
More features to reach and engage your audiences
Journeys (Coming soon)
Set up automated, recurring sequences like new faculty onboarding or student welcome series, so every audience gets the right message at the right time.
ConfidenceCheck
AI-powered editorial assistant that catches broken links, typos, and accessibility issues before a campus-wide announcement or newsletter goes out.
Scheduled Sending
Schedule sends around the academic calendar, so faculty updates, student reminders, and alumni newsletters land when your audience checks their inbox.
Sending speeds
Send high-volume comms across entire university systems and multi-campus institutions without hitting the delivery limits Outlook and Gmail impose on sends.
Events
Manage orientation sessions, donor galas, alumni reunions, and campus events with built-in RSVP tracking, so you know exactly who’s attending before the day arrives.
Insights Assistant
Ask the AI chat panel which departments, campuses, or alumni segments aren’t opening a critical update, or get segmented stats on any audience group in seconds.
Audience Preview
Use AI personas to preview how a group, like incoming students or new faculty, will receive a message, or build your own custom persona.
Employee feedback
Run short pulse surveys directly in email to gauge reaction to a new policy, course change, or campus initiative, without a separate survey tool.
Approval Workflows
Route donor comms, official announcements, or leadership messages through the right approvers before they go out, so nothing sends without sign-off.
How higher education comms teams use ContactMonkey
Business case
Ready to make the case for internal comms platform?
Share a few details about your internal comms today, and we’ll put together a business case showing the cost of inaction, time saved, and the engagement gains ContactMonkey could bring to an organization your size.
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- GDPR compliant, with data erasure requests and a Data Processing Addendum available
University of North Texas
UNT, one of North America’s largest public research universities with 38,000 students, had no way to know if faculty and students were actually reading their communications. With ContactMonkey, the team cut their newsletter production time by 3 hours and finally got the analytics to see what was landing.
Read their story“We had no idea if people were seeing the newsletters, no idea if they cared, and no idea if they were beneficial. ContactMonkey has made a huge difference in network flow… we look at the analytics each week, and we can see, ‘Oh, this story was really popular, or this thing didn’t get any attention at all.”
Amy Armstrong
Senior Communications Strategist, University of North Texas
Widener University
Widener University wanted a branded newsletter that lived in Outlook, using the distribution lists HR and IT already managed, without adding a new platform. Since switching to ContactMonkey, the team has doubled their newsletter frequency and scaled the tool across HR, the library, and multiple campuses.
Read their story“We wanted a service like what you have, an add-on to Outlook. We were looking to use the address lists we already have in Outlook, to send right from there.
We see ContactMonkey as a tool that a lot of departments on campus can use to ensure the newsletters they send out are branded and reflect the image we want to present for the University.”
Jessica Reyes
Assistant Director of Communications, Widener University
FAQ
ContactMonkey is employee newsletter software built to work inside Outlook, where most college and university comms teams already send from. Comms offices use their existing Outlook distribution lists to send branded newsletters to faculty, staff, and students, with analytics on every send.
Alumni engagement software helps institutions send trackable, branded communications to alumni outside their internal email system. ContactMonkey’s external sending feature lets comms teams reach alumni on their personal email addresses, using the same templates and analytics as internal newsletters.
Donor communication software should let comms and advancement teams send professional, trackable updates without routing them through a separate CRM. ContactMonkey lets comms teams send branded donor communications directly from Outlook, with full open and click analytics.
Student communication software is used to send announcements, event details, and updates to students at scale. ContactMonkey lets comms teams send trackable, branded student communications from Outlook, segmented by class year, program, or campus.
Yes. ContactMonkey’s external sending feature lets comms teams send branded, trackable emails to alumni, donors, and other outside constituents on their personal email addresses, using the same templates and analytics as internal newsletters. A built-in compliance layer handles unsubscribe requirements automatically.
