For Volunteers

Volunteer Tenets

All alumnae volunteers are guided by the Wellesley College Alumnae Association (WCAA) mission. We are always looking for alumnae interested in sharing their time, energy, and spirit as volunteers for Wellesley. The following tenets are designed to guide you in your volunteer role(s).

As a Wellesley volunteer, you agree to:

• Treat alums, staff, and all members of the Wellesley community with respect and civility in person, in email, in print, and on social media.

• Commit to a role that suits your skills and capacity.

• Commit to being inclusive and addressing issues of diversity along numerous demographic lines (e.g., race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, ability, religion, geography, etc.) in all facets of your volunteer work.

• Communicate regularly with alumnae volunteers and WCAA staff.

• Actively seek opportunities to engage new alumnae. 

• Resolve any conflicts in a transparent and open manner.

• Acknowledge any potential conflicts of interest and recuse oneself when appropriate.

• Keep your contact information current at alum.wellesley.edu, including address, email, and phone number. As a volunteer, you must agree to be contacted by the WCAA or other alumnae via any of these channels. 

• Recognize that your actions will reflect on and speak for not only you, but for other alumnae and the College.

Wellesley College Alumnae Association Mission Statement

The mission of the Wellesley College Alumnae Association is to support the institutional priorities of Wellesley College by connecting alumnae to the College and each other. The Association will serve as a lifelong resource to alumnae and will encourage alumnae to contribute to the continued excellence of the College.

WCAA List and Email Policies

The Wellesley College Alumnae Association (WCAA) may provide class, club, and shared identity group (SIG) leaders with access to lists of their members upon request. These lists contain information useful to volunteer leaders for planning events, managing communications, and calculating metrics. The information shared in these lists is sensitive data and is provided at the discretion of the WCAA.

The WCAA is unable to include alumnae email data in these lists for many varied reasons, including but not limited to the following:

• The Wellesley College Alumnae Association is a 501(c)3 Nonprofit organization and therefore subject to privacy restrictions including the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation and domestic anti-spam laws. All email communications on behalf of the WCAA and its umbrella organizations are legally mandated to provide an option for recipients to unsubscribe or opt-out of receiving future emails. Private mass emails do not allow direct unsubscription from Wellesley mail and therefore are not permitted. Platforms such as Paperless Post are not tied to the Wellesley database and any unsubscribe requests will not be captured for future communications.

• All broadcast emails to classmates, club members or SIG members should be sent through the WCAA’s official website newsletter function, which is connected to the College’s alumnae database. 

○ The College’s records database tracks updates, email accounts that send back mail as undeliverable, and unsubscribe requests. Changes are continuously being made. 

○ This ensures that communications are sent to the most current email addresses. 

○ For help sending emails, please submit a request here. 

○ Personal, one-on-one emails may be sent between alumnae.

• The WCAA offers online directories for all classes, clubs, and SIGs, as well as an all-alumnae general directory, which can be filtered by name, class, state, city, country, current or past employer, job title, or occupation. Use the Directory link at the top of this page to use the general directory (you must be logged in for access). To view your class, club, or SIG directory, please visit their respective websites. 

○ Please note: while the online directories provide email addresses for many alumnae, compiling these addresses into a private list, or using them to send mass emails is strictly prohibited.

○ Solicitation emails are not permitted under any circumstances, regardless of the number of recipients.

• The College and the WCAA aim to meet industry standards of our institutional peers, and we are committed to safeguarding alumnae information. You may view our full privacy policy here.

While broadcast emails are a useful means of communicating with classmates and club/SIG members, they are just one means of contact. Many groups have had great success by varying their communications between email, print mailings, the HIVE, social media, Facebook groups, and in-person events. If you need help reaching a particular individual or group, please reach out to your WCAA staff contact for assistance.

It is the responsibility of each alum to provide the College with any changes in contact information to ensure they are listed correctly. Alumnae can report these changes to recordupdates@wellesley.edu or call our toll-free record updates number at 1.800.339.5233. If you receive news about alumnae contact updates, please let us know.

Social Media Guidelines

The WCAA has developed the following social media guidelines to help our alumnae volunteers manage Wellesley class, club, or shared identity group social media channels. We recommend you post this to your group page/account and/or publish it on your group website, to ensure that all members understand proper use.

As a social media group representing the ______________ [e.g.,Wellesley Class of 1984, New York Wellesley Club, etc.], we would like to make members aware of our acceptable use policy. Your social media presence reflects not only you personally, but your professional reputation, your group or organization, and, by extension, Wellesley College and the Alumnae Association. Even within an unofficial or closed Wellesley channel, your comments and/or behavior online may have far-reaching consequences.

We ask that those who engage with Wellesley’s social media communities act in accordance with The Honor Code, with respect, honesty, and integrity.  Please conduct yourself in a manner befitting a Wellesley alumna. We reserve the right to remove comments by impersonators or those who do not comply with the guidelines below:

Be respectful. Comments should not defame, attack, or disparage. Profanity, obscene content, and personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Be authentic. All comments and content must be from named individuals. Do not post using an alias or an identity other than your own. Do not copy and paste comments or content from other individuals or institutions without their permission.

Be confidential. Do not post confidential or proprietary information. As a safety precaution, do not post your address, phone number or email address on social media. If you wish to share this information with a fellow alumna, do so privately via a direct message.

Encourage conversation. To keep dialogue on topic, comments that appear to be commercial or that could otherwise be viewed as spam will be deleted.

Realize your posts are public; nothing is truly private. Do not post anything that you would not want attributed to you in a newspaper. Think about your comments, photos, videos or other content in a larger context. Before posting, remember that anything you share in social media, even within closed networks, immediately becomes public and lives on in perpetuity. Your content can be stored and shared around the world instantaneously, even if you try to delete it.

Charitable Donations

Each Wellesley class/club is a 501(c)(3), a non-profit organization, whose mission is to connect Wellesley alumnae to the College and to each other. Each class/club operates under the umbrella of the Wellesley College Alumnae Association and as such must operate in a manner that upholds the shared mission of the class/club and the WCAA so that both the class/club and the WCAA may maintain their legal standing as non-profits.

While community service can be a large part of a class/club’s engagement, direct financial support of another charity is not permitted. All money collected by the class/club must be utilized to further the mission of the class/club, the WCAA, and Wellesley. In other words, funds raised and held in the class/club's bank account are to be used to connect alumnae to each other, the class/club, the WCAA, and the College or may be donated to the class/club’s scholarship fund, if applicable, or as a gift to the College. Direct financial support of another 501(c)(3) is outside the class/club’s mission, and therefore must not occur.

If you have any questions about a class/club's financial responsibilities, please contact alumnae@wellesley.edu.

Non-Discrimination Policy

Each Wellesley class/club/SIG operates under the umbrella of the Wellesley College Alumnae Association and is closely associated with Wellesley College through the club/club/SIG’s mission to connect Wellesley alumnae to the College and to each other. As such, each Wellesley class/club/SIG is expected to share Wellesley College’s commitment to providing equal opportunity in employment and education to all employees, students, and applicants of Wellesley College. Wellesley College policy strictly prohibits discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, religion, color, sex/gender, age, ethnic or national origin or ancestry, veteran status, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, veteran or military status, membership in Uniformed Services, or any category protected by applicable state and federal laws. Wellesley College is committed to making its programs and campus accessible and compliant with all applicable non-discrimination laws. Sexual harassment, including sexual violence, is a form of gender discrimination that is illegal and prohibited by College policy. Retaliation against any individual for making a complaint regarding this type of conduct or for participating in the investigation of such a complaint, is not tolerated.

If you have any questions about this non-discrimination policy, contact alumnae@wellesley.edu. You can also review the College’s website for more information.

Peer Resources - Leadershare

Sometimes the best ideas come from connecting with our peers. We encourage you to utilize Leadershare, a platform WCAA has created for volunteer leaders to share ideas, ask questions, and discuss their volunteer experience. If you have a question about best practices, or are wondering how other groups have handled a particular situation, this is the place to ask! Similarly, if you see questions being asked and you have experience that could be helpful, we encourage you to respond to others' questions. Leadershare is located within the HIVE, Wellesley's networking site for students and alums. Instructions on how to join Leadershare can be found here.

Find the Toolkit with information specific to your volunteer role here.

Find Online Resources for volunteers here.