Alumni-Connect: Integrating NLP and Blockchain for Enhanced Alumni Engagement

Educational institutions face significant challenges in maintaining meaningful connections with their alumni networks, which are crucial for institutional advancement, student mentorship and fundraising initiatives. Despite the importance of these relationships, existing alumni engagement platforms suffer from critical limitations: ineffective matchmaking between students and relevant alumni mentors and a lack of transparency in financial transactions. This research introduces Alumni-Connect, a novel platform that integrates NLP and blockchain technologies to address these challenges. The platform features a recommendation engine that powers alumni search and personalized recommendations to boost engagement. TF-IDF and sentence transformers are used to extract and semantically embed key skills from alumni and student profiles. Cosine similarity is then applied to measure relevance between profiles, enabling accurate alumni recommendations. Blockchain ensures trust and verifiability in financial transactions using Ethereum for scalability and cost efficiency. Our findings demonstrate that the integration of advanced NLP techniques with blockchain technology creates a synergistic effect, transforming alumni networks into intelligent, trust-driven ecosystems that significantly enhance the advancement capabilities of the institution while providing tangible benefits to all stakeholders.