Why the CGE calendar breaks alumni teams
On paper, the CGE calendar is well known: 6-month survey launched at the start of the calendar year on the most recently graduated class, 30-month survey launched in the second half of the year on the class that graduated three years earlier, consolidation for the CGE report delivered at the start of the academic year. In practice, this calendar stacks two campaigns that almost always overlap over the summer, in a context where placement officers handle them alone (or at 1.5 FTE).
The first difficulty lies in the fragmentation of classes. An n-1 class contains 200 to 600 alumni depending on the size of the school; an n-3 class contains just as many, but far more mobile and far harder to reach again. Keeping two contact databases up to date, ready for outreach, requires sustained discipline.
The second difficulty is the CGE submission window. Exports are expected in a precise format, on a precise date. Any campaign launched too late deprives the school of enough responses to reach the 65-70% response rate recommended by the CGE. Any campaign launched too early hits alumni who have not yet come out of the internship / first-job cycle.
The third difficulty is accreditation. HCERES visits, degree renewals, Title commissions expect recent and substantial figures. A failed campaign is paid for two years later, when you present a thin file. The calendar that follows should therefore be seen as a backbone: you can shift by 2 to 4 weeks depending on local constraints, but no more.
January–February: preparing the CGE 6-month campaign (n-1 class)
The class that graduated in September/October n-1 reaches its 6-month mark in March/April. January and February are therefore plumbing months, not sending months.
Three deliverables over these two months. First, extracting the alumni database for the n-1 class: pulling the exhaustive list (last name, first name, personal email, professional email if any, phone if available, program, option/major) from the student information system. Second deliverable: updating the profiles. Cross-reference with LinkedIn (manually or via a matching tool), push a "check your contact details" email to the whole class, reprocess bounces.
Third deliverable: the questionnaire. Take the previous year's CGE questionnaire, update it with any guidelines from the CGE framework in force, validate internally (DPO, academic affairs, alumni association president). For the exact framing, see the complete guide to the CGE survey.
A classic mistake in this phase: underestimating the time it takes to update the database. On a class of 400 alumni, count on 3 to 5 full days to reach 90% reachability. If you start the extraction in March, you will launch in April with a database at 60% reachability — and you will plateau at 45% responses.
March–May: launching and following up the CGE 6-month campaign
This is the firing phase. Three months during which the CGE 6-month campaign must hit its response target. The CGE recommends at least 65%; well-equipped schools exceed 75%.
Mid-March: launch. First outreach email, ideally a Tuesday or Thursday between 10 and 11 a.m. (peak open rate). Sender: the school's alumni office, never an external vendor. To understand why, see our article on the 7 mistakes that sink a CGE survey. Pre-filling data that is already known (program, class, option) divides response time by 5.
End of March: first reminder. 8 to 10 days after the first send. Shorter email, rewritten subject line, direct link with no re-introduction.
Easter break. Do not send during the zone B and C school holidays — open rates collapse. Use this week to analyze the first responses and fix ambiguous questions if needed.
Mid-April: second reminder. Possibly by SMS for the fraction of alumni who did not open the second email. SMS generally brings +8 to +12 points of completion on the "email non-openers" segment.
Early May: third targeted reminder. This time manually, by class heads or faculty referents. This final personalized touch adds +5 to +8 points, on engineering classes in particular.
End of May: closing. XLSX export in CGE format, quality control, archiving. If you are at 65%+, target reached. If you are at 50-60%, extend by 2 weeks with one last wave — beyond that, the marginal effort no longer brings responses.
June–September: preparing and launching the CGE 30-month campaign (n-3 class)
The 30-month campaign targets the class that graduated three years earlier. A much wider surface: these alumni are spread across all of France, and abroad for 15 to 25% of them depending on the school. Naturally lower reachability — and therefore heavier preparation.
June: extracting and updating the database. Many of these alumni have changed email, phone, sometimes name (marriages). Cross-reference with LinkedIn, cross-reference with contributions to the alumni network (dues, events, mentorship participation). An alumnus who has stayed active on the network has reachability 3 times higher than a dormant one.
July: preparing the questionnaire and testing. The 30-month questionnaire adds questions on career progression, salary, and mobility. Test on 10-15 volunteer profiles, adjust the wording.
Mid-September: launch. The CGE recommends mid-September to October, to take advantage of the return-to-work season (alumni pick up their rhythm again after summer). Launching in August = a clear loss of 15-20 points of response.
First send wave on the n-3 class, first targeted email "You graduated 30 months ago — where are you now?". Pre-filling the known career path is mandatory, otherwise you ask the alumnus to retype their CV — massive drop-off rate.
October–November: analysis and consolidated reporting
October is the month of the 30-month reminders and of the consolidated 6-month analysis. November is the reporting month.
On the 30-month side: two reminders (D+10, D+25), one SMS wave, one targeted call to high-value alumni (elected officers, ambassadors, future mentors). Target: 55-65% responses for the 30-month (a structurally lower rate than the 6-month, due to dispersion).
On the analysis side: XLSX export in CGE format for both campaigns, cross-referencing with external benchmarks (CGE association, sector comparables). Compute the reference CGE indicators: employment rate at 6 months, share of permanent contracts, average job-search duration, median gross salary. For the full methodology, see our guide analyzing the results of a CGE survey.
November: consolidated deliverable. An 8 to 12-page board slide: response rate, employment rate, hiring sectors, geography, salaries, comparison to sector benchmarks (from our field observations, a comparison to the 10 schools closest in size and profile tells the most convincing story for the board). See also our detailed benchmarks on the CGE survey response rate by school type.
December: capitalizing and preparing the next year
December is the often-forgotten month. Yet it is the one that makes the difference between a school that improves from campaign to campaign and a school that drops back to zero every January.
Three actions to lock in before the holidays. First: team debrief. What worked, what got stuck, which reminder waves paid off the most, which alumni segments plateaued. Fifteen minutes per topic, all recorded in a written retrospective.
Second: adjusting the questionnaire for 2027. Identify low-completion questions (often those to reword), questions that have become obsolete, questions to add in anticipation of changes to the CGE framework.
Third: clean archiving. Save the raw XLSX exports, the consolidated reports, the reminder scripts used. Over 3-4 years, this builds a precious history for accreditation visits.
Automate this whole calendar in 1 dashboard
Everything above is feasible in "Excel + Google Forms + Mailchimp" mode. That's exactly what most schools do today, and it's precisely why they plateau at 50% CGE responses while devoting 4 person-days a week for 6 months.
A dedicated CGE / CTI survey tool pre-fills, schedules the waves, manages the SMS, exports in the expected CGE format, and exposes a real-time dashboard of the response rate by class, by segment, by wave. The calendar above is programmed once, then repeats automatically every year. To get started, the simplest thing is to book a demo and watch your first CGE 6-month campaign run on the platform.