Like most college graduates, Peter Diepenbrock gets a steady stream of fundraising letters from his alma mater. “It’s pretty regular,” he says. “I guess once you graduate, you’re fair game.”

But unlike many colleges and universities, Diepenbrock’s alma mater, the Rhode Island School of Design, also takes an active role in advancing his career. Among other things, the school organizes traveling exhibits of alumni artworks, partners with out-of-town galleries and museums to showcase the skills of RISD graduates, and works with RISD alumni chapters around the country to promote art, products and businesses with a RISD pedigree. The school also maintains an online database of RISD alumni looking to hire other RISD grads for jobs ranging from studio assistant to advertising executive.

“As an art school, we’ve learned that we need to be proactive,” says Steve Whitten, director of RISD’s department of alumni and career services. “Unlike a traditional college or university, we can’t just wave good-bye to students after graduation and expect them to them to keep writing checks. Many of our graduates take a while to become financially secure, especially in areas like painting and sculpture. So rather than hit them up for money, we do what we can to help.”

If you follow the local art scene, you’re probably familiar with at least some of these efforts. Every spring and fall, for example, Whitten’s office organizes an outdoor art sale on Benefit Street featuring the work of RISD alumni. The school also sponsors the annual RISD Alumni Holiday Sale at the Rhode Island Convention Center.

Yet as important as those events are, they’re just the beginning.

Working through its network of alumni associations, RISD also organizes an array of regional and national exhibits featuring the work of RISD graduates. These include smaller exhibits that showcase the work of artists living in a specific city or region, as well as larger biennial exhibits that focus on disciplines such as painting and furniture-making. At least one alumni exhibit has been held in Seoul, South Korea, where RISD has established a strong presence in recent years.

While these events are generally designed to raise RISD’s profile nationally — and in the case of the Seoul show, internationally — the school’s exhibit program is also active in the New England area. A case in point is “RISD Routes,” a survey of contemporary glass, jewelry, furniture and other craft-oriented works created by RISD alumni. The show, which features works by 37 artists, opens Saturday at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Mass.

“Just in terms of numbers, New England is one of our biggest regions,” says Whitten. “But because we have so many alumni living in the area, it’s also one of the strongest regions artistically.”

Whitten says that plans for the show began to take shape more than year ago, shortly after Fuller officials decided to shift the museum’s focus from that of a traditional art museum to one devoted mainly to contemporary craft.

For the museum, the show offers a chance to burnish its cutting-edge craft credentials while tapping into RISD’s large alumni base in the Northeast. For Whitten and his colleagues, it’s another chance to put RISD and its alumni in the public spotlight.

“For us, it’s a win-win situation,” says Whitten.

Like most of the shows organized through RISD’s alumni office, “RISD Routes” is a juried exhibit — meaning that an outside judge or group of judges selected the artworks from a larger pool of submissions. This time the juror was David Revere McFadden, chief curator at the Museum of Art and Design in New York City.

McFadden, whose high-profile position makes him a popular choice as an exhibit juror, says he jumped at the chance to be a part of “RISD Routes.”

“Obviously, the RISD name carries a lot of weight, especially in areas like glassmaking and furniture,” he says. “But I also had a more selfish reason for agreeing to be a juror for the show. One of the jobs of a curator is to keep abreast of new trends in one’s field of interest. Being a juror is one way to do that. Being a juror on a RISD show is even better.”

At the same time, at least one aspect of the judging process was new to McFadden. Rather than making his selections from photographic slides — long the standard in juried exhibits — McFadden reviewed nearly 400 digital images submitted to a RISD Web site.

“It was the first time I’d actually juried a show online, and it was fantastic,” McFadden says. “There’s no fiddling with projectors or slide trays. You can focus all your attention on the judging process itself.”