New mobile start-up, EverTrue, aims to help colleges stay close to young alums

Who better than a recent business school grad to launch a new start-up that is creating mobile apps to help universities stay connected to their alumni?

Brent Grinna started working on EverTrue while at Harvard Business School; he graduated last month, and around the same time, the company launched its first app, Brown Alumni Connect.

Grinna says EverTrue is focused on building "young alumni engagement tools" that will deliver news, sports scores, video, and an event calendar to alums via their iPhones (and eventually, Android phones and BlackBerries, too.)

"When you move to a new city, you can update your contact information so friends can find you, and you can use the app to find other alumni in the area," he says. Grinna adds that schools often don't dedicate much energy to communicating with young alumni, who aren't likely to become big donors for a decade or two. That's exactly the demographic that Grinna expects will be attracted to EverTrue's apps. ("Mobile giving" will also be rendered easy, presumably in small amounts, for those note yet ready to have their name chiseled on a building.)

Grinna has been bootstrapping the company thus far, following the advice of Jeffrey Bussgang, an entrepreneur-in-residence at HBS and a partner at Flybridge Capital in Boston. "Our plan is to sign up some more schools, and then raise some funding," he says. In addition to Brown (Grinna's undergrad alma mater, where he was captain of the football team), he says the company is in discussions with other New England colleges and boarding schools. EverTrue has developed a prototype app for HBS, but the school hasn't yet signed a deal with EverTrue.