Built to connect to the systems your school already runs
- Outlook
- Excel or CSV
One place your community actually uses.
Most schools keep alumni in a database, students in a portal, and the connection between them in somebody's inbox. The people who could help each other most never actually meet.
- alumni in BostonAisha Bakari '04matchJamal Freeman '99match
A directory that stays alive
Everyone on one list and one map, keeping their own profiles current. When your office needs someone, the search takes plain English and the database does the finding.
- Introduction requestsEthan Park '26 → Wei Chen '10approvedKayla Washington '28 → Aisha Bakari '04in review
Mentorship with a counselor in the loop
A student finds an alum through safe fields and asks for an introduction. The request reaches a counselor first — every time, by design — and approved intros open monitored conversations.
- This weekWelcome to the new communitypinnedAlumni career panel41 going
A feed you actually run
School-wide and per-group, pinned by your office, with events people turn up to. Nothing arrives from outside your community, and no algorithm decides what rises.
- The annual fundAisha Bakari '04$250Thomas O'Brien '08$500
Giving that lands in your account
Campaigns run through Stripe and settle to your own account. Arcus never touches the money, and your office watches gifts arrive in real time.
Tell it who you're looking for. It does the finding.
Describe the person in plain language. Arcus turns it into a search across your own community, and keeps every introduction on the record.
Type “a lawyer in Boston who could talk to a senior.” AI turns the request into filters and the database does the finding, inside your own community's data and nowhere else.
A student picks an alum and writes a note. It goes to a counselor before it goes anywhere else, and the conversation that follows is monitored from the first message.
Only the owner can edit a profile, so the roster stops aging the moment people log in. Your office reviews it; it never has to maintain it.
The site lives at your domain and carries your school's name and crest. Arcus stays off it.
Our students are minors. The product is built like it.
The rules aren't a policy page. They're enforced at the data layer, for every school, and no configuration can loosen them.
An adult can never start a conversation with a student. Not through messages, not through mentorship, not through any path. Enforced at the query layer and re-checked at send time.
Read the modelAdults never make first contact
Every mentorship request goes to a counselor or admin for review before the alum ever sees it. Rejected requests return to the student; nothing reaches an adult unreviewed.
Read the modelA counselor approves every introduction
Every adult–student interaction writes an immutable audit entry: the request, the approval, the acceptance, every message event. The log is append-only; nobody can edit history.
Read the modelEvery conversation is on the record
Students are never browsable or searchable by alumni or any external adult. An alum who opens a student's profile link gets a full block, not a redacted view.
Read the modelStudents are never browsable by alumni
From roster import to first introduction. Here's how.
We set up your site
Your own domain or a subdomain, your crest on the door, and the modules you want turned on. You don't build anything.
Your roster comes in
We import alumni and students from whatever you have today — a spreadsheet is enough — and invitations go out under your school's name.
Members claim their profiles
Everyone keeps their own page current. Only the owner can edit it — not us, not even your admins.
Students ask, counselors approve
A student finds an alum through safe fields and requests an introduction. A counselor reviews it before it ever reaches the alum.
The community runs
The feed fills, events get RSVPs, gifts settle to your account, and your office finally sees all of it in one place.
Built for schools, not adapted for them.
Most alumni platforms were built for universities, whose students are adults. Arcus was built for schools, whose students aren't. Same job, very different floor.
Read the safeguarding modelWith Arcus
One product, one house look, your crest on the door
- Built for
- College-prep and secondary schools
- Adult to student contact
- Never. Blocked in the database
- First contact with a student
- A counselor approves it first
- Mentorship
- The point of the product
- Who edits a profile
- Only its owner
- Finding people
- Ask in plain English
A typical alumni platform
Built for a university, adapted down
- Built for
- Universities and their adult alumni
- Adult to student contact
- A setting, or a policy
- First contact with a student
- Left to the school to police
- Mentorship
- A module
- Who edits a profile
- Admins can, too
- Finding people
- Filters and dropdowns
Students are minors, and the rules are enforced in the database, not the interface. An adult can never start a conversation with a student. Students reach alumni only through introductions a counselor has approved, and every adult–student conversation is monitored and logged. The full model is public on the safeguarding page.
Your school does. You are the data controller; Arcus is the processor. Every member can export or delete their own data, nothing is ever used to train a model, and each school's data is isolated from every other's at the database level.
It helps. Today we import from an export of either — a spreadsheet is enough to get a roster in. Direct connectors to Veracross, Raiser's Edge NXT, and ClassLink are in development.
We're bringing on our first schools deliberately, and we do the setup ourselves: the site at your domain, the roster import, the invitations. We'll agree a timeline with you rather than quote one here that we haven't earned yet.
There's no rate card yet, on purpose. Each engagement is priced with the school, sized to the community and agreed up front, with nothing changing mid-year. Giving runs through Stripe, and Stripe's own processing fees apply to donations.
Bring Arcus to your school. One pilot at a time.
We set the site up at your domain, import your roster, and hand the keys to your advancement office. Done properly.
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