Melt Studio built Legacy Link — an alumni engagement platform where graduates see their giving history and earn recognition through a five-tier "Legacy Rings" system — in four weeks, as part of its pro-bono prototype program, for founder Roy Roach III.

Legacy Link: an alumni-first engagement platform for universities

Roy Roach III spent about ten years shaping one idea: alumni platforms are usually built around what universities need, and Legacy Link flips that. Alumni come first. They create a profile, see the giving opportunities that matter to them — at their alma mater, including HBCUs, or around causes they care about — and get recognized for what they contribute.

The challenge: testing an alumni-first idea without building everything at once

An idea held for ten years comes with a long list of features. The real question for this first version was simpler: will alumni engage when they're the center of the experience? Answering it meant getting a working platform in front of them quickly — without the months of work and regulatory red tape that payment processing, donation tracking, and full automation would add.

The solution: an alumni engagement platform with a recognition system at its core

We built the version that could answer that question, across three portals:

• Alumni portal: profile creation, a giving history, and a simple way to express interest in a pledge — no dollar commitment required in the first version.

• Legacy Rings: a five-tier recognition system that makes each alumnus's contribution visible, designed to motivate through social proof.

• Alumni directory: a public, LinkedIn-style directory to find peers by university, graduation year, and major, with privacy built in (no personal emails on public profiles).

• University and Super Admin dashboards: manage universities and giving opportunities, open and close them, and track engagement metrics.

• English and Spanish across the platform.

Payments, automated tier assignment, and in-platform donation tracking were set for Phase 2, once real usage shows how alumni actually give.

How a dedicated team built it in four weeks

Weekly planning on Mondays and demos on Fridays, with Roy approving each flow as it landed. The team wrote short RFCs for the recognition system and the directory before building them, so decisions were clear before code was written.

Results: 10 features, 34 user stories, and a platform ready to launch

• 10 major features and 34 user stories delivered in four weeks.

• Three working portals — Alumni, University Admin, and Super Admin — on a production-ready setup with search, email, and error monitoring.

• A clear Phase 2 roadmap: payments, automated Legacy Ring progression, and richer analytics.

  
  

"They're showing me the dashboards and they're like, you didn't ask us to do this, but we hope you like it. And I'm watching like, Holy smokes, this is even better than what I thought." — Roy Roach III, Founder, Legacy Link

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Thx for reading. With Love, MS.