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Latest stories, guides, and benchmarks from the world of alumni relations, fundraising, donor engagement, advancement services, events, and higher-education philanthropy
Higher ed fundraising teams face mounting pressure. Juggling relationships with alumni, corporate sponsors, and community donors, often with a team stretched too thin, is already demanding. With the bar for alumni engagement changing, the old “do more with less” mantra is a fast track to burnout.
The right technology can change this. When your team has the right tools in place, they spend less time wrangling messy data and more time doing what they do best: having meaningful conversations with people who care about your institution.
Here are four essential tools to help your team work smarter, avoid burnout, and build stronger higher ed fundraising processes:
Prospect research involves thoughtfully assessing your donor base to understand both financial capacity and affinity for your institution. When advancement teams incorporate data analytics into daily operations, they can move away from gut instinct and identify strong opportunities for major gifts.
According to DonorSearch by EverTrue, modern prospect research tools help higher education fundraising teams work smarter and connect more effectively. These solutions make it easier to:
Beyond initial identification, continuous prospect screening keeps your database dynamic. Set automated alerts for significant wealth events—a company sale, an IPO—among your alumni base to trigger timely outreach from frontline fundraisers.
Today's alumni and supporters expect to engage with your institution as seamlessly as they shop, work, or stream online. A digital-first strategy meets them where they are, providing easy ways to give, gather, and get involved without adding to your team's administrative burden.
What actually motivates younger alumni to give often comes down to convenience and a genuine sense of connection. A modern suite of engagement tools helps advancement teams build across their entire community:
Remove friction from the giving process. Customized, mobile-optimized donation pages let supporters make a gift in seconds, boosting conversion rates and capturing impulse generosity.
Simplify how alumni give their time. These platforms help your team recruit, track, and communicate with volunteers, turning passive supporters into active advocates.
Give constituents a dedicated place to belong. Online networking platforms let alumni connect with one another and stay engaged with the institution year-round, regardless of geography.
Events remain one of the most powerful entry points for constituent relationship-building, but only when logistics don't get in the way. Here, an event software can handle heavy lifting, freeing staff to focus entirely on cultivating connections during a homecoming weekend, an awards program, a parent dinner, or a community donor reception.
Specialized event management platforms help institutions execute memorable gatherings through these capabilities:
Remove friction and help attendees feel welcomed from the moment they sign up. Streamlined forms and flexible, integrated payment processing prevent abandoned registrations and set a positive tone before the event even begins.
Modern platforms capture the data points that matter most to advancement teams:
Analyzing these metrics post-event helps you benchmark performance across homecoming cycles, identify sessions that correlate with higher subsequent giving, and pinpoint rising leaders for regional chapter boards.
Use your platform to guide audiences through all phases of your alumni program:
When selecting an alumni event management tool, prioritize platforms that automatically sync attendee data back to your central CRM.
A CRM is the collective memory for your fundraising team, storing years of conversations, donation histories, and relationship details in one shared place. This continuity protects your institution from the disruptions of staff turnover and ensures donor knowledge belongs to the whole team.
A well-configured CRM supports your work through the following capabilities:
Logging every email, call, and visit means that when staff turn over, relationship momentum doesn’t restart from zero, whether you’re working with a longtime alum or a parent navigating their first major gift conversation.
Constituents move, change jobs, and may change names. Strategies like keeping donor records current through automated employer appends and National Change of Address (NCOA) updates ensure outreach lands exactly where it should.
A CRM that stores and cross-references all five data categories provides advancement teams with the most complete picture of any individual. Making the most of your giving data means tracking the following analytics:
To get the most from your fundraising database infrastructure, establish strict, standardized data entry protocols for all team members. Inconsistent formatting creates duplicate records and skews reporting, undermining the segmentation capabilities you built the system to achieve.
A starting point is to audit your current setup against these tools to identify overlapping systems or critical gaps. You will likely find that one or two targeted additions, or perhaps, better integrations between tools you already own can meaningfully expand what your higher ed fundraising team is capable of achieving.
4 Essential Tools for the Modern Higher Ed Fundraiser
Advancement teams are being asked to do more as alumni expectations continue to rise. Explore four essential tools for the modern higher ed fundraiser.
Hannah Davis
June 23, 2026
12 minutes
If you've been running events on Blackbaud NetCommunity (BBNC), chances are you've felt the strain for a while now. Whether it's the platform's age, limited functionality, or the growing manual processes, you might be coming to the conclusion that BBNC is no longer keeping up with the demands of modern advancement.
We’ve already covered the top 5 BBNC alternatives and how Almabase stacks up against it. In this blog, we’ll talk about how to approach migrating to a new platform, and what to expect in the weeks and months after making the switch.
The reason teams are looking for BBNC alternatives is because advancement itself has evolved. As advancement strategies grow more flexible, personalized, and data-driven, many teams are finding themselves stretching BBNC beyond what it was designed to do.
Modern advancement platforms are built to handle the complex needs that have become standard for advancement teams today.
Here’s a quick comparison of the top 5 alternative BBNC platforms:
For a more detailed look at how these platforms compare to BBNC, check out our blog on Top 5 Blackbaud NetCommunity alternatives.
Choosing a platform is an important first step, but it's only part of the journey. Once you've identified the right fit, understanding the migration process itself becomes just as important.
A good way to approach planning would be to sit down with your team and set expectations on what ‘success’ looks like.
Most BBNC migrations take several weeks to a few months, depending on database size, data quality, and implementation complexity. As much as it is about the data transfer itself, preparation and testing could also take up quite a bit of time, depending on your requirements.
Key stages include:
A realistic timeline allows room for cleanup, validation, and adoption. If a migration plan seems unusually fast, it's worth understanding what has been left out.
A successful migration is always a team effort. Advancement leaders and directors may define goals, timelines, and success criteria, while database managers oversee data cleanup and validation. IT teams review security and integration requirements with your vendor, and front-line users identify critical workflows and day-to-day processes that need to be preserved.
Involving the right stakeholders early helps surface dependencies, customizations, and workarounds that might otherwise be overlooked.
A common challenge is balancing speed with continuity. Leadership may want to move quickly, while staff are focused on preserving workflows and institutional knowledge built up over time. Think about this as an opportunity to identify what remains essential and what can be simplified.
Before moving data, identify what's actively used, what's valuable for historical reporting, and what's no longer relevant. You can bucket it into three categories:
Being selective reduces migration complexity and improves data quality. Moving thousands of outdated or unused records creates additional cleanup work without adding meaningful value.
As with any platform, it is likely that your team’s processes developed around BBNC's features and limitations. Before migrating, figure out which of those processes are essential and which exist because the platform required them.
Look at the last year of advancement activity:
For each workflow, ask two questions:
If a critical workflow depends on spreadsheets, manual reconciliation, or staff workarounds, it's better to identify that before migration than after the go-live day.
Data problems have a way of sneaking up after go-live when your team begins using the system day to day.
This could look like:
To avoid this, set up a system for validation that can go beyond a quick spot check. Pull a random subset and verify complete constituent records, including phone numbers, class years, giving history, event participation, and custom attributes. Have your database manager reconcile export and import counts as part of validation. If 15,000 alumni records were exported and only 14,800 appear in the new system, identify what happened to the remaining 200 before go-live.
At Minnesota State University, Moorhead, the team used Almabase to simplify Giving Day management and support year-round engagement efforts.
A single training session will probably not be enough. Different teams use the platform in different ways, and each group needs training that reflects its day-to-day responsibilities.
A well-considered training plan could include:
Without role-specific training, you risk your team falling back on manual processes simply because they don't know a better option exists. In some cases, institutions discover weeks after launch that staff are still completing tasks manually that the new platform could have automated from day one, at which point they’re not realizing the full potential of the switch made.
Running BBNC and your new platform side by side for a period gives your team a chance to test real workflows before fully committing to the switch.
That might mean running a giving campaign on the new platform while monitoring gift data as it syncs to Raiser's Edge NXT, or sending communications through the new system and comparing results against historical performance.
The goal is that by the time you retire BBNC, you should know how the new platform handles fundraising, events, communications, and data syncs in practice.
Custom fields and custom workflows often create surprises during migration.
A field such as "Giving Capacity” or "Affinity Group" may not exist in the same format in the new platform. Some fields can be imported directly and others may need to be remapped. In some cases, the new platform handles the same information through a completely different structure.
Before signing with a vendor, review the custom fields your team actually uses and ask how each one will be handled. If a field contains years of historical data, confirm what will happen to that data after migration.
The same applies to custom workflows. A process built around BBNC may need to be recreated, modified, or replaced entirely.
Migration support varies widely between vendors. Some handle data migration as part of implementation while others might expect your team to support with managing exports, imports, and validation.
Before signing, ask:
You should also understand how the vendor handles unexpected issues. If data cleanup takes longer than planned or additional migration work is required, will you bear that cost?
Ask vendors how they verify data before and after migration. Consider questions such as:
You want a process that includes testing, review, and approval before the final migration.
Find out who will be working on your migration and what that will look like, and also think about staff training and post-launch documentation.
These questions matter because implementation teams are structured differently. Some vendors assign dedicated resources for the duration of the project. Others route requests through a shared support team, and you will need a plan in place for each scenario.
This is where you ask your vendor about what support looks like during the first few weeks after launch.
Your team will be learning new workflows, finding edge cases, and asking questions they couldn't have anticipated during training. Make sure you know what help is available when that happens.
Your team will notice workflow changes immediately. Different platforms are organized differently, and familiar processes may take time to relearn.
For example, event creation, registration management, and communications may be handled within a single workflow rather than across multiple tools. Email campaigns may no longer require exporting lists and moving data between platforms.
Expect a learning curve during the first few weeks as staff build familiarity with new workflows.
Reporting is one of the first areas where teams need additional training.
Reports that existed in BBNC may not exist in the same format, and information may be accessed through dashboards, filters, or event records instead.
With a modern platform, these dashboards would likely be much more intuitive, but there will still be a learning curve. Staff should spend time learning where they can access key metrics and how to build the reports they use regularly.
With this switch, you might be moving from a process that relies on exports and imports to one where data flows automatically between systems.
Email engagement, event participation, and giving activity may sync directly to the CRM rather than requiring manual updates. These changes do simplify day-to-day operations, but they also change established processes and responsibilities.
As your team is making its way through the learning curve, there will be wins that you can celebrate to build their confidence!
One of the first benefits teams notice is how much less time they might spend pulling data.
Audience segments that once required exports, spreadsheets, and manual filtering can be created directly within the platform. Common questions about donors, event attendees, and engagement history can be answered in minutes instead of hours.
Profile updates, event registrations, and form submissions tend to work much better on mobile devices.
That convenience benefits both alumni and advancement teams. Alumni are more likely to complete registrations, update their information, and submit content when the process takes only a few minutes from their phone.
Many routine tasks can be automated once and reused across campaigns and events.
Thank-you emails, event reminders, registration confirmations, and other common communications can be triggered automatically based on attendee or donor activity. Duplicate detection, data updates, and CRM syncs can run in the background as well.
Even if your team is up and running within a few weeks, you’ll likely see the full value in a bit longer. A more realistic timeline would look something like:
The biggest improvements show themselves gradually, as your team gets used to the new platform and uses it in different settings.
Training should reflect how people actually use the platform.
Also plan for follow-up training after launch. The most relevant questions will arise once your team starts working with the new platform.
Identify a couple of members in your team who will become platform experts inside your organization.
They don't need to master everything right from the get-go, but they should be involved throughout implementation, training, and testing. Over time, they become the first point of contact for questions and reduce reliance on vendor support.
Clearly lay out who owns what:
Clear ownership helps issues get resolved faster and prevents support requests from bouncing between teams.
If you're specifically evaluating Almabase as your BBNC alternative, here's how smoothly the transition works (even if we say so ourselves!).
Before any data is moved, Almabase validates your setup within 30 minutes with a solutions engineer. This is an expectations vs. reality check on your data structure, naming conventions, and requirements and it prevents surprises.
TrueSync handles two-way, real-time sync between Almabase and Raiser's Edge NXT. Your field mappings stay intact and even your naming conventions are preserved. Almabase ensures nothing is lost in translation.
More importantly, you get to control the sync. If new data from Almabase should auto-push to NXT, you set that rule. If you want to review changes before they touch NXT, you can.
Both BBNC and Almabase run simultaneously until you've validated with a live event. BBNC and Almabase can run side by side while you test real campaigns, events, and data syncs. Your team gets to see how the platform performs with live activity before making the switch.
At Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), the advancement team moved from a combination of BBNC and GiveCampus to Almabase and reduced the time spent managing data across multiple platforms.
The biggest change most teams feel is the removal of manual work that had become part of everyday operations. Fewer exports, fewer reconciliation tasks, and fewer systems to manage means more time spent on fundraising, events, and alumni engagement.
The planning around the migration is almost as important as the platform you switch to. You want something your team will actually use, something that doesn't force you to rebuild everything from scratch or hunt down missing records.
If you want to see how different platforms stack up, here's a breakdown of top 5 BBNC alternatives.
Or if you're curious how Almabase handles this kind of migration specifically, request a demo to see how an integrated approach works for your team.
Moving on from Blackbaud NetCommunity: Alternatives, Migration, and What to Expect Next
Planning to migrate from BBNC? Here's a look at how to evaluate alternatives, manage migration, and get your team up and running without missing anything.
Anwesha Kiran
June 22, 2026
12 minutes
Modern fundraising strategies and campaigns are more inclusive of the full donor journey than ever before. With more causes and giving opportunities available to donors than ever before, your fundraising strategy now needs to not just raise but also engage, nurture, and sustain itself.
Despite this, 56% of nonprofits for example, report having no formal donor engagement strategy, according to a 2025 NonProfit PRO survey.
So in this blog, we’ll break down how to build a practical fundraising strategy ready for the modern-day donor so your institution or organization can improve donor relationships, choose the right fundraising channels, and use donor data to strengthen fundraising results over time.
A strong fundraising strategy helps create a structure around how donor engagement, campaigns, stewardship, and reporting work together. Instead of treating fundraising as a series of isolated activities, organizations can build repeatable systems that improve results over time.
For nonprofits, this often means improving recurring giving, strengthening donor retention, and creating more predictable fundraising growth. Schools, colleges, and universities also need to think beyond revenue goals alone. Alumni participation, long-term engagement, annual giving participation, and community involvement all play an important role in advancement success.
A structured fundraising strategy should always help your team:
As fundraising programs grow more digital and multi-channel, having a clear strategy has become more of a necessity for sustainability. Teams that can connect donor outreach, engagement, fundraising campaigns, and reporting into one coordinated approach are often better positioned to build long-term donor relationships and improve fundraising outcomes year after year.
Modern fundraising strategies have evolved to become an ongoing system instead of a one-time campaign plan. The goal is to create a repeatable process that improves donor engagement, strengthens retention, and helps teams make better fundraising decisions over time.
The steps below provide a practical framework that nonprofits, schools, colleges, and universities can use to build a more structured fundraising strategy.
Before planning new fundraising campaigns, start by reviewing how previous efforts actually performed.
Many institutions/organizations jump into campaign planning without fully understanding which fundraising activities generated strong engagement, which donor segments converted best, or where campaign drop-offs happened. This makes it harder to improve future fundraising results.
Prioritize analyzing:
For educational institutions particularly, this review should also include alumni participation trends, reunion giving performance, giving day participation, and engagement across class years or affinity groups.
The goal here is to establish a clear baseline. Once teams understand what is driving participation and where engagement weakens, future fundraising decisions become far more strategic.
The best fundraising goals nowadays are specific, measurable, and connected to broader organizational priorities.
Without clear goals, your campaigns run the risk of becoming activity-driven instead of outcome-driven. The last thing you want is for your team to stay busy executing fundraising efforts but struggle to measure whether those same efforts are actually improving long-term fundraising performance.
Fundraising goals may include:
For schools, colleges, and universities, fundraising goals usually extend into participation and engagement because they reflect long-term donor relationship strength.
For example, a giving day campaign may focus on:
Clearly defined goals also help advancement and fundraising teams allocate resources more effectively across campaigns, communication channels, and donor segments. In fact, according to a Fundraising Effectiveness Project report, recurring monthly givers have yearly retention rates up to 90%, making monthly giving programs one of the most effective ways to build sustainable fundraising revenue.
Not every donor engages with fundraising campaigns in the same way. That is why donor segmentation plays a critical role in improving fundraising strategy and campaign performance. Generic outreach often leads to lower engagement because messaging, campaign timing, and donation asks are not aligned with donor interests or behavior.
Instead, organizations should segment donors based on factors such as:
Common donor segments may include:
Segmentation helps fundraising teams personalize communication and create more relevant donor experiences. A young alumnus attending their first reunion will likely respond differently than a long-term recurring donor or a parent donor contributing to a scholarship campaign.
This level of personalization becomes especially important as fundraising campaigns become more multi-channel and digitally driven.
Different fundraising goals require different campaign formats. While some campaigns are designed to maximize donor participation, others focus on recurring giving, donor acquisition, or peer-driven fundraising momentum.
A strong fundraising strategy aligns campaign selection with donor behavior and organizational goals instead of relying on the same fundraising format every year.
Common fundraising campaign types include:
Equally important is choosing the right communication channels to support those campaigns. Most successful fundraising programs now rely on a mix of:
This multi-channel approach helps organizations create more donor touchpoints throughout the campaign lifecycle. For schools and universities, combining digital outreach with alumni events, reunions, and volunteer-driven campaigns often helps increase both participation and donor visibility across alumni networks.
Even well-planned fundraising campaigns struggle if the messaging comes off as generic or transactional. Strong fundraising communication gives donors a clear reason to participate. It helps them understand the impact of their contribution and creates an emotional connection with the campaign itself. Most effective fundraising campaigns include:
For nonprofits, this may involve showing how donor support directly impacts programs or communities served.
For schools and universities, alumni stories, student success narratives, faculty initiatives, and campus impact stories often create stronger emotional engagement. Donors are more likely to participate when they can clearly connect their contribution to people, experiences, or outcomes they care about.
Urgency also matters. Matching gift challenges, campaign countdowns, donor milestones, and giving day participation goals can help create momentum during fundraising campaigns.
One of the biggest reasons donor retention declines is inconsistent stewardship after campaigns end. Organizations spend heavily on donor acquisition but often underinvest in ongoing engagement and relationship-building.
Neon One's 2026 Recurring Donor Report found that the average recurring donor stays engaged with a nonprofit for 7.77 years, compared to just 1.7 years for non-recurring supporters, demonstrating the long-term impact of consistent stewardship efforts.
Effective donor stewardship includes:
For educational institutions, stewardship often extends into alumni engagement programs, reunions, mentoring opportunities, and volunteer initiatives that keep donors connected beyond fundraising campaigns alone.
Recurring giving programs can also strengthen long-term donor retention because they create more consistent engagement throughout the year instead of limiting donor interaction to annual campaigns.
Events and time-bound fundraising campaigns create visibility, urgency, and participation momentum. For many organizations, these campaigns also serve as important engagement opportunities that strengthen donor relationships beyond the donation itself.
Common fundraising events and participation-driven campaigns include:
The most effective campaigns often combine fundraising with social participation mechanics that encourage donors to share and engage publicly.
This may include:
For schools and universities, giving days are especially effective because they combine alumni engagement, peer participation, social visibility, and fundraising urgency into one coordinated campaign.
Platforms like Almabase support these campaigns through branded giving pages, social fundraising features, engagement tracking, and CRM-connected fundraising workflows that help teams manage participation and donor activity more efficiently.
As fundraising programs grow, managing donor information across disconnected systems becomes increasingly difficult.
CRM-connected fundraising such as Almabase’s Raiser’s Edge NXT integration helps organizations centralize donor data, engagement activity, event participation, and campaign reporting into one system. This improves both operational efficiency and fundraising visibility.
According to the 2026 CCS Philanthropy Pulse report, 36% of organizations reported difficulties leveraging data for decision-making in 2025 (up from just 14% the previous year), while data management and CRM issues more than doubled from 15% to 33%, highlighting the critical need for systems that make data actionable for fundraising teams.
Using donor and engagement data allows teams to:
For schools and universities, connected fundraising data is especially valuable because advancement teams often manage alumni engagement, annual giving, events, volunteer programs, and donor communication simultaneously.
Platforms like Almabase help institutions manage fundraising campaigns, alumni engagement, events, giving days, and donor data within a connected system that works alongside existing CRMs. This helps teams reduce manual work while improving reporting, donor visibility, and campaign coordination across advancement programs.
A fundraising strategy should evolve based on donor behavior, campaign performance, and engagement trends. The more consistently teams measure results, the easier it becomes to improve future campaigns and strengthen long-term fundraising outcomes.
Tracking the right fundraising metrics helps organizations understand what is working and where campaigns need improvement. Some of the most important fundraising KPIs include:
For schools and universities, alumni participation rates are especially important because they reflect long-term engagement strength beyond total dollars raised.
Platforms like Almabase help teams consolidate fundraising and engagement data into one system, making reporting and campaign analysis easier to manage.
Donors rarely engage through a single communication channel anymore. Combining email, SMS, social media, events, and peer outreach helps organizations create multiple engagement touchpoints throughout the donor journey. This improves campaign visibility and increases the likelihood of donor participation.
A coordinated multi-channel fundraising strategy also helps teams maintain engagement before, during, and after campaigns.
Personalized fundraising campaigns consistently perform better than generic donation appeals. Using donor and engagement data allows teams to:
As fundraising programs scale, segmentation and CRM insights become critical for delivering more relevant donor experiences.
Gamification creates momentum by making fundraising campaigns feel more visible, interactive, and community-driven. Common examples include:
In fact, social proof also plays an important role, as donors are often more likely to participate when they see peers, alumni, or community members actively contributing to a campaign.
A growing share of fundraising traffic and donations now comes from mobile devices. To improve mobile conversion rates, you can:
Even small improvements in the mobile giving experience can have a meaningful impact on fundraising performance and donor completion rates.
A strong fundraising strategy is built around consistent donor engagement, better fundraising visibility, and systems that help organizations strengthen relationships over time.
Whether you are leading fundraising for a nonprofit, school, college, or university, the organizations that see long-term fundraising growth are usually the ones that treat strategy, stewardship, and donor experience as connected parts of the same process.
Fundraising becomes harder to scale when campaigns, donor engagement, events, and reporting operate in disconnected systems. Teams spend more time managing manual workflows than building donor relationships, which makes campaign execution and long-term engagement harder to sustain.
Almabase serves as your fundraising platform and addresses this gap by helping nonprofits, schools, colleges, and universities bring fundraising and engagement into one connected platform so teams can execute campaigns more efficiently and make better fundraising decisions over time.
With Almabase, teams can:
Whether the goal is improving donor retention, increasing alumni participation, or running more coordinated fundraising campaigns, having the right infrastructure makes long-term fundraising growth easier to manage.
Book a demo with Almabase to see how your team can streamline fundraising strategy, donor engagement, and campaign execution in one place.
A fundraising strategy template is a structured framework that helps organizations plan campaigns, define donor audiences, organize communication channels, estimate fundraising targets, and track performance. It gives fundraising teams a repeatable process for managing campaigns more consistently instead of rebuilding workflows from scratch every time a new fundraising initiative begins.
Creating a fundraising strategy starts with evaluating past campaign performance, defining fundraising goals, identifying donor segments, selecting the right campaign channels, and tracking results consistently. Platforms like Almabase help organizations manage fundraising campaigns, donor engagement, events, and reporting within one connected system, making strategy execution easier to scale.
Most organizations should review their fundraising strategy quarterly or annually depending on campaign frequency and donor engagement trends. Regular reviews help fundraising teams identify performance gaps, adjust donor communication strategies, improve campaign execution, and respond more effectively to changing donor behavior and fundraising priorities throughout the year.
Some of the most effective fundraising strategies for nonprofits include recurring giving programs, peer-to-peer fundraising, digital fundraising campaigns, donor stewardship initiatives, and multi-channel outreach. Nonprofits that consistently focus on donor retention, personalized communication, and long-term relationship building often see stronger fundraising stability and higher donor lifetime value over time.
Schools and universities often rely on alumni engagement, annual giving campaigns, giving days, reunions, and personalized donor outreach to improve fundraising participation. Advancement teams also use ambassador programs, peer fundraising, and alumni storytelling to strengthen emotional connection, increase donor visibility, and build long-term engagement across alumni communities and supporters.
Organizations can improve donor engagement through personalized outreach, multi-channel communication, stronger stewardship, and a seamless donation experience. Platforms like Almabase help teams increase participation by connecting fundraising campaigns, alumni engagement, giving days, events, and donor data into one centralized platform that supports more coordinated donor experiences.
How to Build a Strong Fundraising Strategy
Learn how to build a fundraising strategy that improves donor engagement, campaign planning, alumni participation, and long-term fundraising growth.
Almabase
June 19, 2026
12 minutes
If I had a penny for every time someone said ‘young alumni just don’t give back anymore’. I’d probably have enough to make a donation myself.
It’s one of the most common assumptions in advancement today, that younger alumni simply aren’t as philanthropic as previous generations.
But the data tells a much more interesting story!
Different generations aren’t less generous than each other. They just think about giving very differently.
A younger alum might donate to a student emergency fund late at night after seeing a story online. An older alum might make the same-sized gift weeks later after thoughtfully reading through a campaign email.
Same generosity. Completely different behavior.
That’s one of the clearest patterns emerging from the 2026 National Alumni Survey, which gathered responses from nearly 82,000 alumni across 31 institutions.
And honestly, it explains a lot about why some fundraising strategies feel harder than they used to.
One of the most interesting findings from the National Alumni Survey, 2026 is that younger alumni are still highly charitable. They’re just not prioritizing institutions in the same way older generations traditionally have.
While older alumni are more likely to give consistently to their alma mater, younger alumni tend to spread their support across causes that feel immediate, visible, and personally relevant.
That changes the nature of fundraising itself.
The question is no longer simply:
“Do alumni care about us?”
It’s:
“Why does supporting us matter right now?”
The survey found that only 13% of Millennial and Gen Z alumni reported giving to higher education in the past year, compared to 32% of older alumni.
At first glance, that sounds alarming. But the bigger story is what happens next because, younger alumni are giving. Just elsewhere.
For many older alumni, giving to their institution is often tied to long-term loyalty. It’s part of staying connected.
Younger alumni approach philanthropy differently. They’re more likely to support:
The NAS found that:
And honestly, this shift makes sense when you think about how people engage online today. Most younger donors are constantly exposed to stories that feel personal, urgent, and highly visible.
That preference matters. Because broad institutional messaging often struggles to compete with campaigns that feel deeply human and immediately tangible.
People want to know:
And institutions that answer those questions clearly are seeing stronger engagement.
That’s part of why some of the strongest-performing campaigns right now tend to be highly focused:
Not because alumni suddenly stopped caring about institutions. But because specific impact feels easier to connect to.
The survey also revealed a major difference in giving behavior itself.
Older alumni are far more likely to give on a recurring or planned basis. Younger alumni? Much more reactive.
Many contribute when something feels urgent, timely, or emotionally compelling. That means traditional fundraising rhythms don’t always align with how younger donors make decisions anymore.
Annual campaigns and fiscal-year messaging still matter. But increasingly, alumni are responding to moments rather than schedules, and digital behavior plays a role here too.
The NAS found that younger alumni were significantly more likely to use:
Meanwhile, older generations still showed a stronger preference toward traditional online giving methods and planned contributions.
And suddenly, small details matter a lot more.
A slow donation page. Too many checkout steps. A giving form that doesn’t work smoothly on mobile.
Those things create friction younger alumni rarely tolerate. Because digital experience is no longer separate from fundraising strategy. It’s part of the fundraising experience itself.
Another important shift from the NAS findings is around why alumni choose to give. Older alumni are often motivated by:
Younger alumni tend to prioritize:
And honestly, this shift makes sense too. Younger generations grew up in an environment where trust is earned constantly, not assumed automatically. So broad messaging around institutional pride often lands differently than it once did.
What tends to resonate more are things that feel specific and tangible. A student story, a visible outcome, or a campaign where alumni can clearly see the impact of their contribution.
The NAS doesn’t suggest abandoning traditional fundraising strategies. But it does suggest that relying on a single approach is becoming riskier. Because alumni expectations are diversifying faster than many engagement strategies are adapting.
Some patterns are becoming increasingly clear:
Especially with younger alumni. Broad “support the institution” messaging often underperforms compared to focused campaigns connected to specific outcomes or communities.
That’s part of why many institutions are seeing stronger engagement through Giving Days, crowdfunding campaigns, and donor-choice initiatives that feel more tangible and immediate.
For example, the University of North Carolina School of the Arts expanded its Giving Day campaign to include more than 40 donor-choice funds, allowing alumni to support causes they personally connected with rather than contributing to a single broad campaign.
And honestly, that shift reflects a larger behavioral pattern the NAS surfaced throughout the data: people are far more likely to engage when the impact feels visible and personally relevant.
The survey repeatedly showed that alumni who feel informed, understood, and connected are significantly more likely to give.
That means relevance matters more than frequency.
Increasingly, institutions are moving away from broad alumni-wide messaging and toward more targeted engagement, whether that’s identity-based campaigns, segmented storytelling, personalized event outreach, or communications tied to specific interests and life stages.
We’re already seeing this shift show up across alumni engagement strategies tied to volunteer communities, affinity groups, and donor interest areas, where institutions are focusing less on sending more communication and more on making communication feel genuinely relevant.
Because when communication reflects what alumni actually care about, engagement feels far more meaningful and less transactional.
Connection drives giving. The institutions seeing stronger donor participation are often the ones investing consistently in:
Because by the time someone makes a gift, the relationship has usually been building long before the donation page appears.
That’s also why volunteer engagement stands out so strongly in the NAS findings. Alumni who volunteer tend to feel significantly more informed and connected to their institution, and those feelings often translate into stronger long-term philanthropic behavior over time.
And that’s really the bigger takeaway here:
Fundraising outcomes are increasingly tied to how connected alumni feel before an ask is ever made.
This isn’t about one generation caring more than another. It’s about understanding that generosity now looks different depending on who you’re speaking to and the institutions adapting fastest are the ones paying attention to those differences early.
The biggest takeaway from the National Alumni Survey isn’t that alumni generosity is declining. It’s that alumni expectations are evolving.
Younger donors still want to support causes they believe in. Older donors still value long-term institutional connection. Both groups care deeply, just in different ways.
Which means advancement teams can no longer rely on a one-size-fits-all engagement strategy.
The institutions that succeed over the next decade will likely be the ones that understand this shift early and build fundraising experiences around relevance, trust, and connection.
Giving Behaviors Across Generations: What Actually Drives Alumni to Give Today
The way alumni give is changing across generations. This blog explores what motivates today’s donors from cause-driven giving to long-term institutional loyalty and what advancement teams need to adapt.
Chetana More
June 18, 2026
12 minutes
Higher ed fundraising teams face mounting pressure. Juggling relationships with alumni, corporate sponsors, and community donors, often with a team stretched too thin, is already demanding. With the bar for alumni engagement changing, the old “do more with less” mantra is a fast track to burnout.
The right technology can change this. When your team has the right tools in place, they spend less time wrangling messy data and more time doing what they do best: having meaningful conversations with people who care about your institution.
Here are four essential tools to help your team work smarter, avoid burnout, and build stronger higher ed fundraising processes:
Prospect research involves thoughtfully assessing your donor base to understand both financial capacity and affinity for your institution. When advancement teams incorporate data analytics into daily operations, they can move away from gut instinct and identify strong opportunities for major gifts.
According to DonorSearch by EverTrue, modern prospect research tools help higher education fundraising teams work smarter and connect more effectively. These solutions make it easier to:
Beyond initial identification, continuous prospect screening keeps your database dynamic. Set automated alerts for significant wealth events—a company sale, an IPO—among your alumni base to trigger timely outreach from frontline fundraisers.
Today's alumni and supporters expect to engage with your institution as seamlessly as they shop, work, or stream online. A digital-first strategy meets them where they are, providing easy ways to give, gather, and get involved without adding to your team's administrative burden.
What actually motivates younger alumni to give often comes down to convenience and a genuine sense of connection. A modern suite of engagement tools helps advancement teams build across their entire community:
Remove friction from the giving process. Customized, mobile-optimized donation pages let supporters make a gift in seconds, boosting conversion rates and capturing impulse generosity.
Simplify how alumni give their time. These platforms help your team recruit, track, and communicate with volunteers, turning passive supporters into active advocates.
Give constituents a dedicated place to belong. Online networking platforms let alumni connect with one another and stay engaged with the institution year-round, regardless of geography.
Events remain one of the most powerful entry points for constituent relationship-building, but only when logistics don't get in the way. Here, an event software can handle heavy lifting, freeing staff to focus entirely on cultivating connections during a homecoming weekend, an awards program, a parent dinner, or a community donor reception.
Specialized event management platforms help institutions execute memorable gatherings through these capabilities:
Remove friction and help attendees feel welcomed from the moment they sign up. Streamlined forms and flexible, integrated payment processing prevent abandoned registrations and set a positive tone before the event even begins.
Modern platforms capture the data points that matter most to advancement teams:
Analyzing these metrics post-event helps you benchmark performance across homecoming cycles, identify sessions that correlate with higher subsequent giving, and pinpoint rising leaders for regional chapter boards.
Use your platform to guide audiences through all phases of your alumni program:
When selecting an alumni event management tool, prioritize platforms that automatically sync attendee data back to your central CRM.
A CRM is the collective memory for your fundraising team, storing years of conversations, donation histories, and relationship details in one shared place. This continuity protects your institution from the disruptions of staff turnover and ensures donor knowledge belongs to the whole team.
A well-configured CRM supports your work through the following capabilities:
Logging every email, call, and visit means that when staff turn over, relationship momentum doesn’t restart from zero, whether you’re working with a longtime alum or a parent navigating their first major gift conversation.
Constituents move, change jobs, and may change names. Strategies like keeping donor records current through automated employer appends and National Change of Address (NCOA) updates ensure outreach lands exactly where it should.
A CRM that stores and cross-references all five data categories provides advancement teams with the most complete picture of any individual. Making the most of your giving data means tracking the following analytics:
To get the most from your fundraising database infrastructure, establish strict, standardized data entry protocols for all team members. Inconsistent formatting creates duplicate records and skews reporting, undermining the segmentation capabilities you built the system to achieve.
A starting point is to audit your current setup against these tools to identify overlapping systems or critical gaps. You will likely find that one or two targeted additions, or perhaps, better integrations between tools you already own can meaningfully expand what your higher ed fundraising team is capable of achieving.
4 Essential Tools for the Modern Higher Ed Fundraiser
Advancement teams are being asked to do more as alumni expectations continue to rise. Explore four essential tools for the modern higher ed fundraiser.
Fundraising
Hannah Davis
June 23, 2026
12 minutes
If you've been running events on Blackbaud NetCommunity (BBNC), chances are you've felt the strain for a while now. Whether it's the platform's age, limited functionality, or the growing manual processes, you might be coming to the conclusion that BBNC is no longer keeping up with the demands of modern advancement.
We’ve already covered the top 5 BBNC alternatives and how Almabase stacks up against it. In this blog, we’ll talk about how to approach migrating to a new platform, and what to expect in the weeks and months after making the switch.
The reason teams are looking for BBNC alternatives is because advancement itself has evolved. As advancement strategies grow more flexible, personalized, and data-driven, many teams are finding themselves stretching BBNC beyond what it was designed to do.
Modern advancement platforms are built to handle the complex needs that have become standard for advancement teams today.
Here’s a quick comparison of the top 5 alternative BBNC platforms:
For a more detailed look at how these platforms compare to BBNC, check out our blog on Top 5 Blackbaud NetCommunity alternatives.
Choosing a platform is an important first step, but it's only part of the journey. Once you've identified the right fit, understanding the migration process itself becomes just as important.
A good way to approach planning would be to sit down with your team and set expectations on what ‘success’ looks like.
Most BBNC migrations take several weeks to a few months, depending on database size, data quality, and implementation complexity. As much as it is about the data transfer itself, preparation and testing could also take up quite a bit of time, depending on your requirements.
Key stages include:
A realistic timeline allows room for cleanup, validation, and adoption. If a migration plan seems unusually fast, it's worth understanding what has been left out.
A successful migration is always a team effort. Advancement leaders and directors may define goals, timelines, and success criteria, while database managers oversee data cleanup and validation. IT teams review security and integration requirements with your vendor, and front-line users identify critical workflows and day-to-day processes that need to be preserved.
Involving the right stakeholders early helps surface dependencies, customizations, and workarounds that might otherwise be overlooked.
A common challenge is balancing speed with continuity. Leadership may want to move quickly, while staff are focused on preserving workflows and institutional knowledge built up over time. Think about this as an opportunity to identify what remains essential and what can be simplified.
Before moving data, identify what's actively used, what's valuable for historical reporting, and what's no longer relevant. You can bucket it into three categories:
Being selective reduces migration complexity and improves data quality. Moving thousands of outdated or unused records creates additional cleanup work without adding meaningful value.
As with any platform, it is likely that your team’s processes developed around BBNC's features and limitations. Before migrating, figure out which of those processes are essential and which exist because the platform required them.
Look at the last year of advancement activity:
For each workflow, ask two questions:
If a critical workflow depends on spreadsheets, manual reconciliation, or staff workarounds, it's better to identify that before migration than after the go-live day.
Data problems have a way of sneaking up after go-live when your team begins using the system day to day.
This could look like:
To avoid this, set up a system for validation that can go beyond a quick spot check. Pull a random subset and verify complete constituent records, including phone numbers, class years, giving history, event participation, and custom attributes. Have your database manager reconcile export and import counts as part of validation. If 15,000 alumni records were exported and only 14,800 appear in the new system, identify what happened to the remaining 200 before go-live.
At Minnesota State University, Moorhead, the team used Almabase to simplify Giving Day management and support year-round engagement efforts.
A single training session will probably not be enough. Different teams use the platform in different ways, and each group needs training that reflects its day-to-day responsibilities.
A well-considered training plan could include:
Without role-specific training, you risk your team falling back on manual processes simply because they don't know a better option exists. In some cases, institutions discover weeks after launch that staff are still completing tasks manually that the new platform could have automated from day one, at which point they’re not realizing the full potential of the switch made.
Running BBNC and your new platform side by side for a period gives your team a chance to test real workflows before fully committing to the switch.
That might mean running a giving campaign on the new platform while monitoring gift data as it syncs to Raiser's Edge NXT, or sending communications through the new system and comparing results against historical performance.
The goal is that by the time you retire BBNC, you should know how the new platform handles fundraising, events, communications, and data syncs in practice.
Custom fields and custom workflows often create surprises during migration.
A field such as "Giving Capacity” or "Affinity Group" may not exist in the same format in the new platform. Some fields can be imported directly and others may need to be remapped. In some cases, the new platform handles the same information through a completely different structure.
Before signing with a vendor, review the custom fields your team actually uses and ask how each one will be handled. If a field contains years of historical data, confirm what will happen to that data after migration.
The same applies to custom workflows. A process built around BBNC may need to be recreated, modified, or replaced entirely.
Migration support varies widely between vendors. Some handle data migration as part of implementation while others might expect your team to support with managing exports, imports, and validation.
Before signing, ask:
You should also understand how the vendor handles unexpected issues. If data cleanup takes longer than planned or additional migration work is required, will you bear that cost?
Ask vendors how they verify data before and after migration. Consider questions such as:
You want a process that includes testing, review, and approval before the final migration.
Find out who will be working on your migration and what that will look like, and also think about staff training and post-launch documentation.
These questions matter because implementation teams are structured differently. Some vendors assign dedicated resources for the duration of the project. Others route requests through a shared support team, and you will need a plan in place for each scenario.
This is where you ask your vendor about what support looks like during the first few weeks after launch.
Your team will be learning new workflows, finding edge cases, and asking questions they couldn't have anticipated during training. Make sure you know what help is available when that happens.
Your team will notice workflow changes immediately. Different platforms are organized differently, and familiar processes may take time to relearn.
For example, event creation, registration management, and communications may be handled within a single workflow rather than across multiple tools. Email campaigns may no longer require exporting lists and moving data between platforms.
Expect a learning curve during the first few weeks as staff build familiarity with new workflows.
Reporting is one of the first areas where teams need additional training.
Reports that existed in BBNC may not exist in the same format, and information may be accessed through dashboards, filters, or event records instead.
With a modern platform, these dashboards would likely be much more intuitive, but there will still be a learning curve. Staff should spend time learning where they can access key metrics and how to build the reports they use regularly.
With this switch, you might be moving from a process that relies on exports and imports to one where data flows automatically between systems.
Email engagement, event participation, and giving activity may sync directly to the CRM rather than requiring manual updates. These changes do simplify day-to-day operations, but they also change established processes and responsibilities.
As your team is making its way through the learning curve, there will be wins that you can celebrate to build their confidence!
One of the first benefits teams notice is how much less time they might spend pulling data.
Audience segments that once required exports, spreadsheets, and manual filtering can be created directly within the platform. Common questions about donors, event attendees, and engagement history can be answered in minutes instead of hours.
Profile updates, event registrations, and form submissions tend to work much better on mobile devices.
That convenience benefits both alumni and advancement teams. Alumni are more likely to complete registrations, update their information, and submit content when the process takes only a few minutes from their phone.
Many routine tasks can be automated once and reused across campaigns and events.
Thank-you emails, event reminders, registration confirmations, and other common communications can be triggered automatically based on attendee or donor activity. Duplicate detection, data updates, and CRM syncs can run in the background as well.
Even if your team is up and running within a few weeks, you’ll likely see the full value in a bit longer. A more realistic timeline would look something like:
The biggest improvements show themselves gradually, as your team gets used to the new platform and uses it in different settings.
Training should reflect how people actually use the platform.
Also plan for follow-up training after launch. The most relevant questions will arise once your team starts working with the new platform.
Identify a couple of members in your team who will become platform experts inside your organization.
They don't need to master everything right from the get-go, but they should be involved throughout implementation, training, and testing. Over time, they become the first point of contact for questions and reduce reliance on vendor support.
Clearly lay out who owns what:
Clear ownership helps issues get resolved faster and prevents support requests from bouncing between teams.
If you're specifically evaluating Almabase as your BBNC alternative, here's how smoothly the transition works (even if we say so ourselves!).
Before any data is moved, Almabase validates your setup within 30 minutes with a solutions engineer. This is an expectations vs. reality check on your data structure, naming conventions, and requirements and it prevents surprises.
TrueSync handles two-way, real-time sync between Almabase and Raiser's Edge NXT. Your field mappings stay intact and even your naming conventions are preserved. Almabase ensures nothing is lost in translation.
More importantly, you get to control the sync. If new data from Almabase should auto-push to NXT, you set that rule. If you want to review changes before they touch NXT, you can.
Both BBNC and Almabase run simultaneously until you've validated with a live event. BBNC and Almabase can run side by side while you test real campaigns, events, and data syncs. Your team gets to see how the platform performs with live activity before making the switch.
At Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), the advancement team moved from a combination of BBNC and GiveCampus to Almabase and reduced the time spent managing data across multiple platforms.
The biggest change most teams feel is the removal of manual work that had become part of everyday operations. Fewer exports, fewer reconciliation tasks, and fewer systems to manage means more time spent on fundraising, events, and alumni engagement.
The planning around the migration is almost as important as the platform you switch to. You want something your team will actually use, something that doesn't force you to rebuild everything from scratch or hunt down missing records.
If you want to see how different platforms stack up, here's a breakdown of top 5 BBNC alternatives.
Or if you're curious how Almabase handles this kind of migration specifically, request a demo to see how an integrated approach works for your team.
Moving on from Blackbaud NetCommunity: Alternatives, Migration, and What to Expect Next
Planning to migrate from BBNC? Here's a look at how to evaluate alternatives, manage migration, and get your team up and running without missing anything.
Events
Anwesha Kiran
June 22, 2026
12 minutes
Modern fundraising strategies and campaigns are more inclusive of the full donor journey than ever before. With more causes and giving opportunities available to donors than ever before, your fundraising strategy now needs to not just raise but also engage, nurture, and sustain itself.
Despite this, 56% of nonprofits for example, report having no formal donor engagement strategy, according to a 2025 NonProfit PRO survey.
So in this blog, we’ll break down how to build a practical fundraising strategy ready for the modern-day donor so your institution or organization can improve donor relationships, choose the right fundraising channels, and use donor data to strengthen fundraising results over time.
A strong fundraising strategy helps create a structure around how donor engagement, campaigns, stewardship, and reporting work together. Instead of treating fundraising as a series of isolated activities, organizations can build repeatable systems that improve results over time.
For nonprofits, this often means improving recurring giving, strengthening donor retention, and creating more predictable fundraising growth. Schools, colleges, and universities also need to think beyond revenue goals alone. Alumni participation, long-term engagement, annual giving participation, and community involvement all play an important role in advancement success.
A structured fundraising strategy should always help your team:
As fundraising programs grow more digital and multi-channel, having a clear strategy has become more of a necessity for sustainability. Teams that can connect donor outreach, engagement, fundraising campaigns, and reporting into one coordinated approach are often better positioned to build long-term donor relationships and improve fundraising outcomes year after year.
Modern fundraising strategies have evolved to become an ongoing system instead of a one-time campaign plan. The goal is to create a repeatable process that improves donor engagement, strengthens retention, and helps teams make better fundraising decisions over time.
The steps below provide a practical framework that nonprofits, schools, colleges, and universities can use to build a more structured fundraising strategy.
Before planning new fundraising campaigns, start by reviewing how previous efforts actually performed.
Many institutions/organizations jump into campaign planning without fully understanding which fundraising activities generated strong engagement, which donor segments converted best, or where campaign drop-offs happened. This makes it harder to improve future fundraising results.
Prioritize analyzing:
For educational institutions particularly, this review should also include alumni participation trends, reunion giving performance, giving day participation, and engagement across class years or affinity groups.
The goal here is to establish a clear baseline. Once teams understand what is driving participation and where engagement weakens, future fundraising decisions become far more strategic.
The best fundraising goals nowadays are specific, measurable, and connected to broader organizational priorities.
Without clear goals, your campaigns run the risk of becoming activity-driven instead of outcome-driven. The last thing you want is for your team to stay busy executing fundraising efforts but struggle to measure whether those same efforts are actually improving long-term fundraising performance.
Fundraising goals may include:
For schools, colleges, and universities, fundraising goals usually extend into participation and engagement because they reflect long-term donor relationship strength.
For example, a giving day campaign may focus on:
Clearly defined goals also help advancement and fundraising teams allocate resources more effectively across campaigns, communication channels, and donor segments. In fact, according to a Fundraising Effectiveness Project report, recurring monthly givers have yearly retention rates up to 90%, making monthly giving programs one of the most effective ways to build sustainable fundraising revenue.
Not every donor engages with fundraising campaigns in the same way. That is why donor segmentation plays a critical role in improving fundraising strategy and campaign performance. Generic outreach often leads to lower engagement because messaging, campaign timing, and donation asks are not aligned with donor interests or behavior.
Instead, organizations should segment donors based on factors such as:
Common donor segments may include:
Segmentation helps fundraising teams personalize communication and create more relevant donor experiences. A young alumnus attending their first reunion will likely respond differently than a long-term recurring donor or a parent donor contributing to a scholarship campaign.
This level of personalization becomes especially important as fundraising campaigns become more multi-channel and digitally driven.
Different fundraising goals require different campaign formats. While some campaigns are designed to maximize donor participation, others focus on recurring giving, donor acquisition, or peer-driven fundraising momentum.
A strong fundraising strategy aligns campaign selection with donor behavior and organizational goals instead of relying on the same fundraising format every year.
Common fundraising campaign types include:
Equally important is choosing the right communication channels to support those campaigns. Most successful fundraising programs now rely on a mix of:
This multi-channel approach helps organizations create more donor touchpoints throughout the campaign lifecycle. For schools and universities, combining digital outreach with alumni events, reunions, and volunteer-driven campaigns often helps increase both participation and donor visibility across alumni networks.
Even well-planned fundraising campaigns struggle if the messaging comes off as generic or transactional. Strong fundraising communication gives donors a clear reason to participate. It helps them understand the impact of their contribution and creates an emotional connection with the campaign itself. Most effective fundraising campaigns include:
For nonprofits, this may involve showing how donor support directly impacts programs or communities served.
For schools and universities, alumni stories, student success narratives, faculty initiatives, and campus impact stories often create stronger emotional engagement. Donors are more likely to participate when they can clearly connect their contribution to people, experiences, or outcomes they care about.
Urgency also matters. Matching gift challenges, campaign countdowns, donor milestones, and giving day participation goals can help create momentum during fundraising campaigns.
One of the biggest reasons donor retention declines is inconsistent stewardship after campaigns end. Organizations spend heavily on donor acquisition but often underinvest in ongoing engagement and relationship-building.
Neon One's 2026 Recurring Donor Report found that the average recurring donor stays engaged with a nonprofit for 7.77 years, compared to just 1.7 years for non-recurring supporters, demonstrating the long-term impact of consistent stewardship efforts.
Effective donor stewardship includes:
For educational institutions, stewardship often extends into alumni engagement programs, reunions, mentoring opportunities, and volunteer initiatives that keep donors connected beyond fundraising campaigns alone.
Recurring giving programs can also strengthen long-term donor retention because they create more consistent engagement throughout the year instead of limiting donor interaction to annual campaigns.
Events and time-bound fundraising campaigns create visibility, urgency, and participation momentum. For many organizations, these campaigns also serve as important engagement opportunities that strengthen donor relationships beyond the donation itself.
Common fundraising events and participation-driven campaigns include:
The most effective campaigns often combine fundraising with social participation mechanics that encourage donors to share and engage publicly.
This may include:
For schools and universities, giving days are especially effective because they combine alumni engagement, peer participation, social visibility, and fundraising urgency into one coordinated campaign.
Platforms like Almabase support these campaigns through branded giving pages, social fundraising features, engagement tracking, and CRM-connected fundraising workflows that help teams manage participation and donor activity more efficiently.
As fundraising programs grow, managing donor information across disconnected systems becomes increasingly difficult.
CRM-connected fundraising such as Almabase’s Raiser’s Edge NXT integration helps organizations centralize donor data, engagement activity, event participation, and campaign reporting into one system. This improves both operational efficiency and fundraising visibility.
According to the 2026 CCS Philanthropy Pulse report, 36% of organizations reported difficulties leveraging data for decision-making in 2025 (up from just 14% the previous year), while data management and CRM issues more than doubled from 15% to 33%, highlighting the critical need for systems that make data actionable for fundraising teams.
Using donor and engagement data allows teams to:
For schools and universities, connected fundraising data is especially valuable because advancement teams often manage alumni engagement, annual giving, events, volunteer programs, and donor communication simultaneously.
Platforms like Almabase help institutions manage fundraising campaigns, alumni engagement, events, giving days, and donor data within a connected system that works alongside existing CRMs. This helps teams reduce manual work while improving reporting, donor visibility, and campaign coordination across advancement programs.
A fundraising strategy should evolve based on donor behavior, campaign performance, and engagement trends. The more consistently teams measure results, the easier it becomes to improve future campaigns and strengthen long-term fundraising outcomes.
Tracking the right fundraising metrics helps organizations understand what is working and where campaigns need improvement. Some of the most important fundraising KPIs include:
For schools and universities, alumni participation rates are especially important because they reflect long-term engagement strength beyond total dollars raised.
Platforms like Almabase help teams consolidate fundraising and engagement data into one system, making reporting and campaign analysis easier to manage.
Donors rarely engage through a single communication channel anymore. Combining email, SMS, social media, events, and peer outreach helps organizations create multiple engagement touchpoints throughout the donor journey. This improves campaign visibility and increases the likelihood of donor participation.
A coordinated multi-channel fundraising strategy also helps teams maintain engagement before, during, and after campaigns.
Personalized fundraising campaigns consistently perform better than generic donation appeals. Using donor and engagement data allows teams to:
As fundraising programs scale, segmentation and CRM insights become critical for delivering more relevant donor experiences.
Gamification creates momentum by making fundraising campaigns feel more visible, interactive, and community-driven. Common examples include:
In fact, social proof also plays an important role, as donors are often more likely to participate when they see peers, alumni, or community members actively contributing to a campaign.
A growing share of fundraising traffic and donations now comes from mobile devices. To improve mobile conversion rates, you can:
Even small improvements in the mobile giving experience can have a meaningful impact on fundraising performance and donor completion rates.
A strong fundraising strategy is built around consistent donor engagement, better fundraising visibility, and systems that help organizations strengthen relationships over time.
Whether you are leading fundraising for a nonprofit, school, college, or university, the organizations that see long-term fundraising growth are usually the ones that treat strategy, stewardship, and donor experience as connected parts of the same process.
Fundraising becomes harder to scale when campaigns, donor engagement, events, and reporting operate in disconnected systems. Teams spend more time managing manual workflows than building donor relationships, which makes campaign execution and long-term engagement harder to sustain.
Almabase serves as your fundraising platform and addresses this gap by helping nonprofits, schools, colleges, and universities bring fundraising and engagement into one connected platform so teams can execute campaigns more efficiently and make better fundraising decisions over time.
With Almabase, teams can:
Whether the goal is improving donor retention, increasing alumni participation, or running more coordinated fundraising campaigns, having the right infrastructure makes long-term fundraising growth easier to manage.
Book a demo with Almabase to see how your team can streamline fundraising strategy, donor engagement, and campaign execution in one place.
A fundraising strategy template is a structured framework that helps organizations plan campaigns, define donor audiences, organize communication channels, estimate fundraising targets, and track performance. It gives fundraising teams a repeatable process for managing campaigns more consistently instead of rebuilding workflows from scratch every time a new fundraising initiative begins.
Creating a fundraising strategy starts with evaluating past campaign performance, defining fundraising goals, identifying donor segments, selecting the right campaign channels, and tracking results consistently. Platforms like Almabase help organizations manage fundraising campaigns, donor engagement, events, and reporting within one connected system, making strategy execution easier to scale.
Most organizations should review their fundraising strategy quarterly or annually depending on campaign frequency and donor engagement trends. Regular reviews help fundraising teams identify performance gaps, adjust donor communication strategies, improve campaign execution, and respond more effectively to changing donor behavior and fundraising priorities throughout the year.
Some of the most effective fundraising strategies for nonprofits include recurring giving programs, peer-to-peer fundraising, digital fundraising campaigns, donor stewardship initiatives, and multi-channel outreach. Nonprofits that consistently focus on donor retention, personalized communication, and long-term relationship building often see stronger fundraising stability and higher donor lifetime value over time.
Schools and universities often rely on alumni engagement, annual giving campaigns, giving days, reunions, and personalized donor outreach to improve fundraising participation. Advancement teams also use ambassador programs, peer fundraising, and alumni storytelling to strengthen emotional connection, increase donor visibility, and build long-term engagement across alumni communities and supporters.
Organizations can improve donor engagement through personalized outreach, multi-channel communication, stronger stewardship, and a seamless donation experience. Platforms like Almabase help teams increase participation by connecting fundraising campaigns, alumni engagement, giving days, events, and donor data into one centralized platform that supports more coordinated donor experiences.
How to Build a Strong Fundraising Strategy
Learn how to build a fundraising strategy that improves donor engagement, campaign planning, alumni participation, and long-term fundraising growth.
Fundraising
Almabase
June 19, 2026
12 minutes
If I had a penny for every time someone said ‘young alumni just don’t give back anymore’. I’d probably have enough to make a donation myself.
It’s one of the most common assumptions in advancement today, that younger alumni simply aren’t as philanthropic as previous generations.
But the data tells a much more interesting story!
Different generations aren’t less generous than each other. They just think about giving very differently.
A younger alum might donate to a student emergency fund late at night after seeing a story online. An older alum might make the same-sized gift weeks later after thoughtfully reading through a campaign email.
Same generosity. Completely different behavior.
That’s one of the clearest patterns emerging from the 2026 National Alumni Survey, which gathered responses from nearly 82,000 alumni across 31 institutions.
And honestly, it explains a lot about why some fundraising strategies feel harder than they used to.
One of the most interesting findings from the National Alumni Survey, 2026 is that younger alumni are still highly charitable. They’re just not prioritizing institutions in the same way older generations traditionally have.
While older alumni are more likely to give consistently to their alma mater, younger alumni tend to spread their support across causes that feel immediate, visible, and personally relevant.
That changes the nature of fundraising itself.
The question is no longer simply:
“Do alumni care about us?”
It’s:
“Why does supporting us matter right now?”
The survey found that only 13% of Millennial and Gen Z alumni reported giving to higher education in the past year, compared to 32% of older alumni.
At first glance, that sounds alarming. But the bigger story is what happens next because, younger alumni are giving. Just elsewhere.
For many older alumni, giving to their institution is often tied to long-term loyalty. It’s part of staying connected.
Younger alumni approach philanthropy differently. They’re more likely to support:
The NAS found that:
And honestly, this shift makes sense when you think about how people engage online today. Most younger donors are constantly exposed to stories that feel personal, urgent, and highly visible.
That preference matters. Because broad institutional messaging often struggles to compete with campaigns that feel deeply human and immediately tangible.
People want to know:
And institutions that answer those questions clearly are seeing stronger engagement.
That’s part of why some of the strongest-performing campaigns right now tend to be highly focused:
Not because alumni suddenly stopped caring about institutions. But because specific impact feels easier to connect to.
The survey also revealed a major difference in giving behavior itself.
Older alumni are far more likely to give on a recurring or planned basis. Younger alumni? Much more reactive.
Many contribute when something feels urgent, timely, or emotionally compelling. That means traditional fundraising rhythms don’t always align with how younger donors make decisions anymore.
Annual campaigns and fiscal-year messaging still matter. But increasingly, alumni are responding to moments rather than schedules, and digital behavior plays a role here too.
The NAS found that younger alumni were significantly more likely to use:
Meanwhile, older generations still showed a stronger preference toward traditional online giving methods and planned contributions.
And suddenly, small details matter a lot more.
A slow donation page. Too many checkout steps. A giving form that doesn’t work smoothly on mobile.
Those things create friction younger alumni rarely tolerate. Because digital experience is no longer separate from fundraising strategy. It’s part of the fundraising experience itself.
Another important shift from the NAS findings is around why alumni choose to give. Older alumni are often motivated by:
Younger alumni tend to prioritize:
And honestly, this shift makes sense too. Younger generations grew up in an environment where trust is earned constantly, not assumed automatically. So broad messaging around institutional pride often lands differently than it once did.
What tends to resonate more are things that feel specific and tangible. A student story, a visible outcome, or a campaign where alumni can clearly see the impact of their contribution.
The NAS doesn’t suggest abandoning traditional fundraising strategies. But it does suggest that relying on a single approach is becoming riskier. Because alumni expectations are diversifying faster than many engagement strategies are adapting.
Some patterns are becoming increasingly clear:
Especially with younger alumni. Broad “support the institution” messaging often underperforms compared to focused campaigns connected to specific outcomes or communities.
That’s part of why many institutions are seeing stronger engagement through Giving Days, crowdfunding campaigns, and donor-choice initiatives that feel more tangible and immediate.
For example, the University of North Carolina School of the Arts expanded its Giving Day campaign to include more than 40 donor-choice funds, allowing alumni to support causes they personally connected with rather than contributing to a single broad campaign.
And honestly, that shift reflects a larger behavioral pattern the NAS surfaced throughout the data: people are far more likely to engage when the impact feels visible and personally relevant.
The survey repeatedly showed that alumni who feel informed, understood, and connected are significantly more likely to give.
That means relevance matters more than frequency.
Increasingly, institutions are moving away from broad alumni-wide messaging and toward more targeted engagement, whether that’s identity-based campaigns, segmented storytelling, personalized event outreach, or communications tied to specific interests and life stages.
We’re already seeing this shift show up across alumni engagement strategies tied to volunteer communities, affinity groups, and donor interest areas, where institutions are focusing less on sending more communication and more on making communication feel genuinely relevant.
Because when communication reflects what alumni actually care about, engagement feels far more meaningful and less transactional.
Connection drives giving. The institutions seeing stronger donor participation are often the ones investing consistently in:
Because by the time someone makes a gift, the relationship has usually been building long before the donation page appears.
That’s also why volunteer engagement stands out so strongly in the NAS findings. Alumni who volunteer tend to feel significantly more informed and connected to their institution, and those feelings often translate into stronger long-term philanthropic behavior over time.
And that’s really the bigger takeaway here:
Fundraising outcomes are increasingly tied to how connected alumni feel before an ask is ever made.
This isn’t about one generation caring more than another. It’s about understanding that generosity now looks different depending on who you’re speaking to and the institutions adapting fastest are the ones paying attention to those differences early.
The biggest takeaway from the National Alumni Survey isn’t that alumni generosity is declining. It’s that alumni expectations are evolving.
Younger donors still want to support causes they believe in. Older donors still value long-term institutional connection. Both groups care deeply, just in different ways.
Which means advancement teams can no longer rely on a one-size-fits-all engagement strategy.
The institutions that succeed over the next decade will likely be the ones that understand this shift early and build fundraising experiences around relevance, trust, and connection.
Giving Behaviors Across Generations: What Actually Drives Alumni to Give Today
The way alumni give is changing across generations. This blog explores what motivates today’s donors from cause-driven giving to long-term institutional loyalty and what advancement teams need to adapt.
Alumni Engagement
Chetana More
June 18, 2026
12 minutes
With a lean advancement team and an alumni community that genuinely cares about staying connected, Cornell has always found ways to make meaningful relationships work. So when Taylor Petersen and Naomi Winder sat down to look honestly at how their team was spending its time, the question wasn't whether their alumni were engaged. The question was whether their systems were keeping up with them.
At the time, that meant managing alumni engagement across Blackbaud NetCommunity and several other tools. While everything worked, the team saw an opportunity to simplify workflows, reduce manual effort, and create a more connected experience for both staff and alumni.
So we sat down with them to talk about how they moved from disconnected systems to a more unified, easier-to-manage alumni experience. What stood out wasn't just the tools they used. It was how they simplified the way their team actually works.
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Cornell College, located in Mount Vernon, Iowa, is a small liberal arts institution with a distinctive academic model.
Instead of juggling multiple classes, students focus on one course at a time in 18-day blocks, creating a highly immersive experience and strong, lasting connections. That sense of connection carries into their alumni community.
Today, Cornell supports a network of 15,000–17,000 alumni. But the team managing that?
Which means every decision about how they spend their time is intentional. When you're managing events, campaigns, and communications all at once, the way you work matters just as much as the work itself.
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Earlier, Cornell was working with multiple systems across giving, events, email, and alumni data. And to be fair, everything functioned.
Pages could be built. Emails could be sent. Events could run. But behind the scenes, it looked like this:
None of these challenges were deal-breakers on their own. But over time, they added up, making everyday tasks more complicated than they needed to be and creating extra work behind the scenes. And more importantly, it pulled time away from what the team actually wanted to focus on, engaging their alumni.
Instead of asking, “What more do we need?”, the team asked a simpler question:
What would this look like if it were easier to manage?
That led to a shift toward consolidation. By moving to Almabase, Cornell brought giving, events, email, forms, and community management into one platform, all seamlessly connected to Raiser’s Edge NXT through a deep, reliable integration.
Instead of spending time moving data between systems or managing manual syncs, the team could work from a single source of truth, with information flowing smoothly across campaigns, events, and donor engagement activities.
This reduced the need to move between systems and minimized manual processes.
More importantly, it created a shared environment where the team could collaborate more effectively, working on different parts of the same campaign without stepping on each other’s toes.
The result was fewer handoffs, fewer workarounds, and fewer moments where someone had to stop and figure something out.
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This is where the shift becomes visible, not in theory, but in day-to-day work.
Giving Day became easier to run and more engaging to participate in.Instead of a single static page, the team could:
Each improvement may seem incremental on its own, but together they created a more engaging experience for donors and a smoother process for the team running the campaign.
Events like Homecoming and reunions no longer required constant back-and-forth.
Bringing event management into the same ecosystem reduced the amount of coordination required behind the scenes and made it easier to keep information aligned across teams.
Even routine tasks became easier. With a more self-serve alumni experience:
Which meant less manual work for the team, and more accurate, up-to-date data.
This is where everything comes together.
For a team of this size, those results speak to more than campaign performance. They reflect the impact of having systems that support the work rather than compete for attention, giving the team more capacity to focus on alumni relationships and engagement.
One of the themes that came up repeatedly during the conversation was focus. By bringing key pieces of the alumni experience into one place, Cornell created a workflow that is easier for staff to manage and easier for alumni to engage with.
The result is a stronger foundation for everything the team is already doing from events and giving to ongoing alumni engagement without requiring additional complexity behind the scenes.
If you'd like to see how the team approached this transition and hear their experience firsthand, you can watch the full conversation here.
How Cornell College Moved from Blackbaud NetCommunity to Almabase and Built a More Connected Alumni Experience
Managing alumni engagement with multiple systems can slow teams down! Here’s how Cornell College simplified workflows and built a more connected alumni experience.
Live event recaps
Chetana More
June 18, 2026
12 minutes
Blackbaud NetCommunity (BBNC) has been the go-to online engagement and event management tool for institutions already using Raiser's Edge. It handles basic donation forms, email sends, and simple event registration.
However, BBNC was built for a different era of advancement work. It lacks the modern features that teams today need for complex events, constituent-level engagement intelligence, sophisticated giving campaigns, and integrated alumni outreach. If you’re considering switching to Almabase, here’s how it stacks up against BBNC.
If you’re considering alternatives to BBNC, check out our blog on Top 5 Blackbaud NetCommunity Alternatives.
Blackbaud NetCommunity is a legacy online engagement tool that has been around for nearly two decades. It was designed to integrate withBlackbaud products, primarily Raiser's Edge, and it provides basic functionality for donation forms, email sends, and event registration. It's deeply embedded in many institutions' tech stacks, mostly for long-time Raiser's Edge users who likely adopted it years ago and haven't revisited their choice of platform.
This is especially true considering there are alternatives that can streamline this and bring it all seamlessly together into one platform.
Almabase is a modern digital engagement platform built specifically for advancement teams at colleges, universities, and independent schools. It combines event management, online giving, email campaigns, and alumni engagement tools in a single platform, all natively integrated with Raiser's Edge NXT through TrueSync.
The platform is designed around how advancement teams work: managing complex alumni events, running giving campaigns, sending segmented email outreach, and tracking constituent engagement across all those touchpoints, simultaneously.
Before we move into the deep-dive section, here’s a feature-wise comparison at a glance:
Both platforms integrate natively with Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT, which is a major reason BBNC has historically retained its foothold at RE NXT institutions.
But there's a critical difference in how they sync. BBNC acts as a transactional gateway. When a constituent interacts with your site, BBNC processes and pushes transactional elements, such as gifts, basic profile updates, or event registrations back into the Raiser's Edge database view via its plugin interface. While BBNC can track basic email metrics like opens and link-level clicks, extracting that data requires manual report building. It acts only as a repository of historical actions.
Almabase, through its native TrueSync integration, shifts the focus from simple data logging to behavioral intelligence. Almabase feeds this digital engagement such as email clicks, web visits, and campaign interactions directly into your CRM. With TrueSync's bi-directional architecture, an advancement professional looking at a constituent's profile in RE NXT can instantly see what’s bringing in the most active engagement, such as exactly which campaign emails they opened most or which specific giving pages they visited before abandoning a form.
Almabase advantage: Seamless, native bi-directional sync through TrueSync that transforms raw data into actionable behavioral intelligence, allowing advancement teams to prioritize prospects based on active digital engagement.
Blackbaud NetCommunity can handle basic, single-tier RSVPs just fine. However, when it comes to complex, multi-event milestone weekends like Homecoming or a multi-day Alumni Reunion, the system imposes massive friction on both your alumni and your advancement staff.
A common roadblock for BBNC users is the platform's rigid form-to-part architecture. Because BBNC relies on isolated website "parts" to build forms, registering an alumnus for a multi-day weekend with multiple sub-events looks like building dozens of separate registration pages, or attempting a complex "Payment 2.0" workaround to link forms to a single checkout page. This requires extensive labor from your digital team, forces alumni through clunky multi-step navigation, and leaves your staff to manually reconcile disjointed registration data inside the Raiser’s Edge plugin view.
Almabase excels at handling high-stakes advancement events. It natively supports sub-event hierarchical structures, meaning you can manage a 15-event Homecoming weekend under a single, unified registration umbrella.
On the attendees’ end, this looks like a clean, mobile-first flow where they can register themselves and manage +1 (or more) guests, select sub-events, choose preferences and respond to conditional form questions designed for their class year/cohort within a single checkout experience.
On the backend, your team gains real-time visibility with tools like automated QR-code check-ins, while attendance data syncs back to RE NXT flawlessly via TrueSync.
Almabase advantage: sub-event management with guest allocation, mobile-optimized flows and automated QR check-ins within a single branded experience that completely eliminates manual data reconciliation.
A feature BBNC users ask for constantly is the ability to build forms that adapt based on who's filling them out.
If you want alumni to see alumni-only events, parents to see only family-weekend events, or the Class of 2016 to see cohort-specific reunion activities, BBNC forces a complex workaround. You either have to design separate registration pages for each audience or use BBNC’s Targeted Content part to display entirely different form elements. This results in fragmented user paths, heavy backend maintenance, and a disjointed experience for all involved.
With Almabase, you can create one registration flow that feels personalized. Almabase supports affinity-based targeting directly inside a single form, thanks to conditional questions. You can configure individual form fields such as dropdowns, radio buttons, or checkbox options to act as triggers that instantly reveal or hide follow-up nested questions based on real-time user input.
Almabase advantage: single-form conditional logic and affinity-group visibility constraints that consolidate multiple target segments into a single user journey.
For basic "give now" pages linked to a single fund, BBNC works fine. However, when an institution scales up to more ambitious, high-energy fundraising events like a 24-hour Giving Day, BBNC's structural limitations quickly become apparent.
Modern giving days have evolved to weave in gamification, immediate visual confirmation, and real time updates that build urgency. These require centralized campaign hubs, dynamic real-time progress thermometers, live leaderboards, and time-sensitive matching challenges. BBNC does not provide these interactive capabilities natively. As a result, institutions are forced to layer on third-party crowdfunding tools. This means the week after the campaign is spent reconciling gift data across platforms, manually.
Within Almabase, you can launch fully branded pages and campaign hubs equipped with automated fund-level goals, peer-to-peer (P2P) fundraising tools, live matching challenge banners, and automated leaderboards, challenge milestones and thermometers.
Every transaction captured during the rush of a giving day flows directly into Raiser’s Edge NXT via TrueSync.
Almabase advantage: Competitive fundraising pages with leaderboards, challenges, and campaign hubs for giving days.All support mobile-responsive checkout, multiple funds, gift splitting, with instant RENXT syncing: zero post-campaign reconciliation for your team!
A well-documented ‘hidden cost’ of BBNC is the manual data reconciliation that follows an event. If you rely on BBNC for emails, but turn to third-party solutions during campaigns, you’ll find data fragments across multiple platforms. Post-event and post-campaign, your team is exporting CSVs, importing them back into Raiser's Edge, manually reconciling attendance and gift data.
Almabase completely automates this process. Because your event registration flows, email communications, digital alumni directories, and giving day pages run within the RE NXT database, data silos are instantly eliminated.
Instead of routing data to a staging plugin that requires click-by-click review, Almabase's TrueSync maps data fields and automatically streams clean information directly into Raiser's Edge NXT records.
Almabase advantage: True automation via TrueSync that drastically reduces CSV importing cycles.
While BBNC can broadcast blast emails to lists built from internal Raiser’s Edge queries, its editing ecosystem and flat reporting struggle to support modern, segmented communication strategies.
All email lists must originate as RE queries and you cannot feed in a list of email addresses. The email editor offers limited design flexibility and emails don't render well on mobile. It’s analytics too, offer a limited view of what’s going on: they tell you how many people opened an email, but not which alumni are most engaged or what made them click. BBNC also doesn't support preference-level opt-outs, so if an alumnus wants to unsubscribe from event emails but keep getting annual fund appeals, well, you’ll have to figure that out on your own.
Almabase has a modern drag-and-drop builder, mobile-responsive templates, and analytics that tell you more than campaign metrics. You can see which constituents opened, clicked, visited your giving page, and registered for an event. For list creation, teams can build segments directly or quickly upload spreadsheets. More importantly, Almabase accounts for the users’ communication preferences. When a recipient clicks unsubscribe, they aren't globally blocked from hearing from your institution; instead, they see a list of email groups and categories, allowing them to manage their preferences at a granular level.
Emily AI is built right into Almabase and can draft professional, context-aware emails in seconds with just a simple prompt, helping teams move from blank page to polished first draft in moments.
Almabase advantage: Modern drag-and-drop template editors with granular, category-level subscriber preference centers, combined with timeline-mapped behavioral engagement analytics that automatically update donor profiles.
BBNC is designed to report on the macro level. It tells you how a campaign performed and shows you that a Giving Day email blast achieved a 22% open rate and that your registration page received 500 clicks. However, BBNC leaves your team in the dark regarding individual behavior.
Almabase, on the other hand, shifts the focus to how each individual engaged, with real-time data on how each individual person interacts across your entire ecosystem.
This allows your team to easily track physical event participation , trigger targeted follow-up communications based on email engagement, and empower alumni to connect through an online directory. Because the system captures engagement activity across events, communications, giving, and community experiences, it helps build a more complete picture of alumni engagement over time.
Almabase advantage: Individual engagement history, email opens/clicks, giving page visits, event registrations.
BBNC doesn't have native sponsorship workflows. So if you're running a fundraising gala or reunion with sponsorship tiers, it’s very possible you're creating separate sponsorship forms, listing sponsorship packages as ticket line items, and manually tracking sponsor benefits.
With Almabase, teams can create and manage sponsorship tiers with custom pricing, benefits, and included attendee passes from a single admin dashboard. Sponsors enjoy a dedicated registration experience where they can reserve a tier, submit company details and logos, and choose to pay online or later via a branded PDF invoice.
To make coordination easier, sponsors receive a unique link that lets them return at any time to add guest information and other event details. Behind the scenes, administrators can track registrations, manage payments, and keep sponsorship data organized, with support for syncing event data to Raiser's Edge NXT.
Almabase advantage: Sponsor-specific registration pages, automated logo collection, PDF invoicing, flexible guest management, and centralized sponsor administration, all built into a single workflow.
Because Blackbaud NetCommunity does not have a native mobile check-in app or QR code scanning capabilities, schools are forced onto outdated manual workarounds.
Almabase simplifies event check-in with QR code–based attendance tracking and mobile-friendly guest management. Registered attendees automatically receive a confirmation email containing a unique QR code, which volunteers can scan using the Almabase check-in app on a smartphone or tablet. Staff can also look up guests, register walk-ins, and collect payments on-site when needed.
Attendance and check-in data are captured centrally and can sync to Raiser's Edge NXT through TrueSync, helping institutions keep constituent records up to date without manual reconciliation.
Almabase advantage: QR check-in, instant walk-in registration, live guest list updates, and attendance data synced to RENXT.
BBNC offers limited style controls, which means adding elements like a promotional video banner, changing a button color, or styling a modern grid layout requires changes at the code level.
Almabase gives advancement and marketing teams a no-code way to create branded digital experiences without relying on developers. Staff can build event pages, giving forms, and community microsites that align with their institution's branding, while the platform automatically handles mobile responsiveness across devices. With streamlined registration and donation flows, teams can launch polished experiences quickly and make it easier for alumni to engage, register, and give online.
Almabase advantage: Branded event and giving pages, mobile-responsive design, alumni-facing microsites, and no-code customization.
BBNC is designed to process individual transactions as they happen. It records an email sent, takes a gift, or logs an event sign-up. However, these actions are treated as isolated events. Modern alumni engagement requires connecting dots across emails, events, giving, page visits, and directory activity.
Almabase gives advancement teams a more connected view of alumni engagement by bringing together activity from across the platform into a single constituent profile. Teams can track event participation, giving history, email engagement, website activity, and community interactions in one place, making it easier to understand how individuals are engaging over time.
Because these engagement signals are connected, staff can build targeted segments based on real behavior rather than static demographic lists. These insights can then power more relevant follow-up campaigns and outreach workflows, helping advancement teams engage alumni with messages that reflect their interests and activity.
Almabase advantage: A unified engagement view that combines event participation, giving behavior, email engagement, website activity, and community interactions, enabling smarter segmentation and more personalized follow-up.
You can look at moving from BBNC to Almabase as setting up a new platform rather than a straight migration. Because Almabase uses its own page-building and data architecture, functional pages such as giving forms and event registration pages will have to be recreated during implementation. Most institutions find this is actually a great excuse to move on from outdated layouts and upgrade their forms to a cleaner, more modern look.
Almabase’s guided transition is built to get your team up and running comfortably in a matter of weeks. From establishing your secure Raiser's Edge NXT connection and payment gateway to validating your data before going live, you will have 24x7 live support from the support and implementation team. The onboarding process also includes configuring your institution's branding and domain settings, ensuring the platform feels like a natural extension of your existing digital presence. Teams receive guidance on setting up data synchronization rules so data updates are handled accurately before they reach Raiser's Edge NXT. Self-paced learning resources through Alma Academy help staff get comfortable with the platform on their own schedule.
Almabase advantage: Guided onboarding with support for Raiser's Edge NXT integration, sync rule configuration, data validation, Alma Academy training, and live implementation assistance.
For an institution with a simple "give now" page, occasional email sends, and a relatively light event calendar, Blackbaud NetCommunity may still do the job. If your needs are straightforward and your team isn't asking much of the platform, there may not be an urgent reason to change.
But as your programs grow, so do your requirements from the technology behind them. Homecoming registrations, reunion management, fundraising events, annual giving campaigns, alumni communities, and engagement tracking all introduce new layers of complexity. Over time, many teams find themselves relying on workarounds, manual processes, and additional tools to fill the gaps. Those solutions might work, but they also create more administrative overhead year after year. This is the point where you might consider an alternative.
Ultimately, the decision comes down to whether you want to continue managing those workarounds or move to a platform designed around the way modern advancement teams operate today.
When institutions move from Blackbaud NetCommunity to Almabase, the motivations are quite consistently similar. They want to reduce manual data cleanup, manage events and fundraising from a single platform, deliver a more polished, modern experience for alumni and donors, and give advancement staff better visibility into engagement across channels.
Switching from BBNC doesn't have to feel risky or disruptive. With Almabase's white glove switch experience, you'll run both platforms simultaneously until you validate with a live event, so your team can test Almabase in a live event. Your entire NXT history comes with you, and before you even sign, you get a free 30-minute integration audit with a solutions engineer to walk through your data setup and address any concerns. Most institutions are able to go live within weeks.
Rob Odoardi, Director of Advancement Data at Rhode Island School of Design details his team’s experience switching to Almabase from BBNC and GiveCampus; read more here.
Book a personalized demo with Almabase to see how your team can manage alumni engagement, giving, events, and RENXT-connected workflows in one modern platform.
Almabase vs Blackbaud NetCommunity: Which Platform Is Better for Modern Event Management
Still managing BBNC workarounds? Discover how Almabase simplifies events, giving campaigns, and alumni engagement in a unified flow.
Events
Anwesha Kiran
June 17, 2026
12 minutes
Donors are the champions of your mission, your cause. The connection you have with them ultimately decides your ability to impact people and communities. So having a solid strategy for donor relationship management becomes a key part of ensuring your institution or nonprofit’s success.
In this blog, we’ll explore donor lifecycles, the best outreach and communication practices, helpful tools, and guide you in creating the best relationship management strategy for your organization.
Nonprofits focus on two things primarily to increase funds. Acquiring new donors, and retaining existing ones for continued contributions. Donor relationship management is the set of practices that are used to improve and maintain both.
This includes, but is not limited to campaigning, stewardship, and milestone recognitions, which will be expanded upon in the later sections. Ultimately, it boils down to fostering a positive culture and making donors feel like they’re making a difference.
It’s quite easy (and tempting) to go all-in on acquiring as many donors as possible. While this might lead to great gains in the short-term, building a reliable, sustainable pipeline of donations takes much more.
If you’re aiming for lasting impact and stability, deepening your relationships with your donor base is the way to go. A few important reasons to do this:
1. Improved Donor Retention: It’s a well established fact that retaining donors is a lot more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. Having solid engagement and stewardship plans gives you a much-needed edge in fundraising. Donor retention in the US sits at around 20%, with organizations often underutilizing recurring programs. Use it to your advantage.
2. Increased Donor Lifetime Value: The more loyal your donors are, the more they are likely to contribute. Retained donors have a higher likelihood of increasing their donation amounts, contributing to annual campaigns, and donating to emergency causes in a pinch. They end up feeding your cause a lot more throughout their lifetime.
Overall, organizations with great relationship management practices perform better in fundraising, and have higher DLVs.
3. Greater Advocacy and Support: New donors introduced through friends, family, or word-of-mouth in general tend to stick around. Engaged donors don’t just contribute more long-term, but also bring in new faces and spread word of your nonprofit’s impact and cause.
4. Success Beyond Numbers: Building trust and engaging donors in meaningful ways often is a great way of not only bringing in reliable, recurring revenue, but also creating a sense of community. Your mission is only as strong as the people supporting it. A satisfied donor base contributes in other non-financial ways too, like volunteering.
While coming up with a strategy for building relationships with donors, follow these practices to cover all bases efficiently.
A donor profile holds all the relevant information about your current and prospective donors. They live in your institution’s database or CRM, and have to be updated regularly. Treat them as live documents giving you the relevant, up-to-date data.
Donor profiles are used extensively for almost every step of the way in fundraising. Targeted outreach, reviewing campaign performance, and so much more require accurate donor data.
What do you include in a donor profile? There are some necessary fields that are useful for many fundraising activities. Some important ones are:
Different types of donors need different outreach strategies and messaging. You don’t want veteran donors looking at an introductory email with blank faces. Or scare away first time/casual donors with too much information.
Segmenting your donors based on their financial capability, giving history, volunteering interests, and associations with particular causes lets you execute targeted campaigns that have far more effective conversion rates.
Having segmented lists of donors helps greatly here. You can’t expect someone to be moved by your cause if the messaging sounds like generic marketing slop. While it’s impossible to personalize every single message, you can tweak outreach group-wise. Ask for small contributions from first timers, introduce recurring programs to existing donors.
With the right data and outreach tools, you can even personalize based on local events and non-philanthropic interests.
We probably know this all too well, but if there’s one thing that kills confidence, it’s getting ghosted. Timely recognition is non-negotiable unless you want donors feeling like they’re shooting money into a void.
Immediate thank-you messages acknowledge donors’ valuable time and contribution, and builds trust. Use multiple channels to thank your donors. Apart from one-off emails, social media can be used for collective recognition.
Knowing how exactly your contribution is being utilized is a great way of gaining trust and deepening your relationship with a nonprofit or a mission. Regularly update donors on ongoing initiatives, communities being helped, total money raised for causes, and overall impact.
Take this a step further by sharing video snippets, pictures, and other visual media to make them truly feel like they’re working together with you and are a part of your organization. Engaged donors are more likely to continue contributions long-term.
While emails get the job done, inboxes are more often than not flooded with unimportant emails and your messages can be lost among them. To increase interaction, plan an outreach strategy across multiple channels.
Aside from personalized email sequences, create a social media schedule to reach donors organically. Another underrated channel is text messaging – it feels a lot less formal and increases authenticity.
Your outreach plan should contain steps for initial campaign introduction, building up anticipation in the days leading up to it, live updates during the campaign, and nurture sequences post-event/campaign. Share relevant news and ask for donations every now and then, but don’t overdo it.
With the volume of donors and donations, it can sometimes be hard to track follow-ups manually, leading to gaps in communication. Having a dedicated platform for automating follow-ups makes sure that messages aren’t lost among the confusion.
Regular, timely emails constantly expose your nonprofit to potential donors. Consistent reminders and nudges are necessary as most people operate with tight and busy schedules.
Increasing your donations over time isn’t just about launching effective campaigns or reaching the most donors. It’s also about identifying the most engaged participants, seeing what drove the engagement, and replicating it for different donor groups.
Using a digital engagement platform, track metrics that give you an idea of donor engagement. This can include response rates across different channels (fundraising appeals, feedback requests, social media engagement), number of event/volunteer sign-ups, donor retention rate, and online engagement metrics such as email open rate, click-through rates, donation form abandonment rate, and website traffic sources.
As emphasized earlier, your donor profiles are live documents that contain accurate, updated information at all times. Inaccuracies in donor data can lead to wrong segmentations, incorrect campaign enrollments, and mismatched donation data, all of which affect fundraising performance in subsequent campaigns significantly.
While it’s possible to manually update records, it can be very time consuming and leave your head spinning. Using workflows to auto-update fields and contributions is a lot more efficient and accurate.
Some essential metrics allow you to measure your progress and to see how good your donor management strategy really is. These are different from donor engagement metrics; evaluating fundraising performance can give you a good indication of how much donors are willing to contribute to your cause, which groups have the most capability, what segments are strong targets, and where your teams can improve.
Here’s a few of them in no particular order:
Donor lifecycle is the journey that unaware, potential donors make that ends in some form of contribution to your cause. There are various stages in the cycle, each requiring its own set of initiatives and strategies.
Understanding the donor lifecycle step-by-step can help you identify potential gaps in your donor management process, and gives you insight into the donor’s perspective leading to better outreach and retention methods.
Here are the 5 major steps that nonprofits take to manage donors:
This is the start of it all, when your nonprofit tries to identify prospective new donors and engage with them. To do this, you utilize paid ads, emails, and social media to reach low to mid-level donors.
They might also land in your website through referrals, word-of-mouth, or stumbling across some of your mass-communication material.
For acquiring major donors though, a more personalized approach is required. This usually means researching affluent donors who might be connected to your cause or willing to contribute to it and contacting them through their preferred channel of communication (calls, emails, etc).
In this stage, nonprofits start building their relationships with potential donors. For casual donors, this means introducing your nonprofit’s mission, the goals, initiatives and the like. The key here is to build trust; answering queries and showcasing impact are important.
Cultivating major donors isn’t as straightforward. Aim for long-term relationship building by meeting them one-on-one, developing consistent communication threads, and offering engagement opportunities that will expose them directly to your nonprofit’s work, like volunteering and attending events.
Again, keep in mind that major donor cultivation can take a long time. Constantly research, personalize, and meet. Fundraising performance depends on your charisma too, no pressure.
Once you’ve introduced your nonprofit and its causes, donors will evaluate if it’s worth contributing to. You will be asking donors to contribute for the first time, and this is easy with smaller gifts. After all, $10 isn’t exactly life changing for either party. The intent here is to get them to make a contribution, how much doesn’t really matter at this stage.
To turn interest into action, make your forms easy to fill (only the necessary details), and make it easy to contribute. Payment should be frictionless, and they should have multiple choices when it comes to payment modes.
Soliciting major donors might require a lot more presentation, involvement and relationship-building beforehand.
It’s very important to express gratitude for contributions, and make donors feel recognized. This can range from a simple thank-you email to major personalized gifts and plaques.
One good pointer to keep in mind is to match the scale of their contribution. For example, for small donations, a simple email might suffice. For major gifts, recognition should involve exclusive event invites, awards, etc.
After receiving donations, have nurture programs in place to ensure constant communication, awareness, and deeper relationships over time. Highlight new initiatives, invite for volunteering, host events, and provide impact updates regularly.
Your stewardship efforts directly tie into donor retention. Aside from that, there are a couple of things you can do to avoid driving them away.
Predicting churn proactively is a good way to boost donor retention. This can be achieved by thorough analysis of data, following up with lapsed donors to get feedback, and creating lists. Another thing you can do is alternating donation requests with other appeals to prevent fatigue.
What does upgrading your donors look like? It just simply means increasing their contributions; converting a one-time donor to a recurring donor, or a casual donor to a major donor are all upgrades. Keep tracking donor engagement and gifting data to determine the right time to ask for more.
We’ve laid out the best practices to cultivate long-term relationships with donors and build a pipeline of steady, reliable contributions over extended periods of time. There are a few minor tweaks which, though optional, can help you identify gaps quicker, save time, and just have an easy time of maintaining the hygiene of the overall process.
Taking a step back and experiencing your organization through a donor’s perspective can be massively helpful in seeing if your process is actually smooth and easy, and finding out where friction creeps in. What’s optimal for your team isn’t necessarily optimal for the average donor.
Often, prospective major donors are hidden in plain sight. By checking wealth data against donor profiles, you might be able to fish out members who are already aligned to your cause and have the ability to contribute a lot more.
Stewardship is a vital part of donor outreach management. Automating the generic follow-ups (immediate thank-you messages or gift acknowledgements) gives you more time to focus on personalized updates and asks.
To actually execute the best practices in donor relationship management, having the right tools is a must. The bare essentials include a nonprofit CRM to build and manage donor profiles, a digital engagement platform for donor outreach management, and an event management tool to coordinate volunteering, award ceremonies, and other interactions with donors.
Just like in real life, donors give subtle hints through the material they choose to interact with. Tracking non-financial activity like content downloads, visits to a particular program page, video views, and email click-through rates gives your team much needed signals on the donor’s affinities to various activities and causes.
The right donor management software can save your team a lot of time and frustration. The wrong one can turn even simple tasks like updating records or sending follow-ups into a headache.
Before evaluating platforms, think about your team's day-to-day work. A tool might have lots of advanced features, but if it has a tacky UI and a steep learning curve, your staff may end up avoiding it altogether. The best donor management software is the one your team will actually use consistently.
Below are a bunch of priorities to keep in mind while you’re on the lookout.
Segmentation is one of the foundations of effective fundraising. Your software should make it easy to group donors based on giving history, donation size, engagement levels, volunteer activity, interests, and other relevant criteria.
The easier it is to create and update donor segments, the easier it becomes to run targeted campaigns and personalized outreach.
Look for platforms that can track donation trends, campaign performance, donor retention, engagement levels, and other fundraising metrics.
Good reporting helps your team identify which donor groups are performing well, which campaigns are driving results, and where improvements need to be made.
Manually handling acknowledgements, follow-ups, reminders, and record updates can quickly become overwhelming as your donor base grows.
A strong donor management platform should automate repetitive tasks such as thank-you emails, recurring donation reminders, event follow-ups, and data updates. This allows your team to spend more time building relationships and less time managing spreadsheets.
Donor information often ends up scattered across spreadsheets, email inboxes, event platforms, and fundraising tools. This stands in the way of creating complete donor profiles like we outlined earlier.
Choose a platform that serves as a central source of truth for donor records, engagement history, campaign interactions, and contributions.
Fundraising teams rarely use a single platform. Your donor management software should integrate with donation forms, email marketing tools, event management platforms, and payment processors, or, better yet, have all that functionality built in.
It's also worth thinking long-term. A platform that works for 500 donors should still work when you're managing 5,000.
Ultimately, the goal isn't to find the software with the longest feature list. It's to find a platform that helps your team maintain accurate donor data, automate routine work, execute targeted outreach, and build stronger relationships as things scale without breaking anything.
Almabase brings fundraising and engagement data together in one place, helping teams understand how donors interact with the institution over time. With a connected view of donor activity, it's easier to identify engaged supporters, track interests, and build more meaningful outreach strategies.
The platform also helps teams segment donors based on giving history, engagement levels, event participation, etc. This makes personalized communication easy, allowing you to send more relevant appeals, updates, and stewardship messages to different donor groups, and with the workflow automation capabilities, automate general tasks and follow-ups.
If you’d like to see how Almabase can help you build and nurture your relationships with your donors, feel free to book a free personalized demo and we’d love to discuss how we can help!
10 Donor Relationship Management Best Practices
Here are 10 practices you definitely want to keep in mind to build and nurture your donor relationships.
Fundraising
Hari Govind
June 16, 2026
12 minutes
In 2025, NC State pulled in $50 million from 18,500 gifts in a single day. Boston University's 11th giving day broke records with $4.5 million from 12,000+ donors. Numbers like these come from a plan started six to nine months out that shows up as a single orchestrated moment.
In this blog, we’ll walk through how to organize a giving day from the first planning meeting to the final thank-you email.
A giving day is a 24-hour, digitally driven fundraising campaign that rallies a community around a shared cause. Donors give online, ambassadors share the link, matching gifts unlock at set thresholds, and a real-time progress thermometer keeps the energy up until the clock runs out.
It is an industry mainstay event to acquire new donors, kick off year-end giving, and motivate an existing donor base.
Before you pick a platform or write a single email, be able to say in one sentence why this campaign exists. If three people on your team would answer that question differently, you are not ready to start planning.
Work through these with your team:
Common purposes include supporting scholarship funds, athletics funds, student emergency aid, patient care; growing annual fund participation; lapsed donor re-engagement, first-time donor acquisition, or supporting a specific program/community initiative. A clear purpose statement helps you test every decision you make later.
Most teams set one goal. The strongest teams set two: a fundraising goal and an engagement goal. A dollars-raised goal tells a story about impact ("We need $100,000 to fund 40 scholarships"). A donor-participation goal tells a story about community, and every gift carries the same weight, which works well for students, young alumni, and grateful patients.
Apart from the headline numbers like total dollars raised and number of donors, a few secondary metrics tell you whether the day moved you forward:
A Hubbub guide recommends combining two approaches when setting your number.
The right goal usually sits where these two numbers meet. If your top-down number is much bigger than your bottom-up estimate, the gap tells you where you need a matching gift, a major donor challenge, or a new donor base.
A giving day is cross-functional. If it sits entirely with one annual giving manager, you are setting up for a tough week. The recommendation here is to have a dedicated campaign manager for at least six months before and one to three months after, with weekly check-ins.
Think of the roles in your team in three layers:
Pull in annual giving, alumni relations, advancement services, major gifts, communications, deans, athletics, and student affairs. If your campaign has school or department-specific giving lines, a representative from each unit makes the difference between a campaign that feels campus-wide and one that lives only in the alumni office. When deans ask their faculty and alumni to give, response rates jump.
Schools tend to run leaner. You will want the development office, alumni office, board members, parent association, head of school, a few class agents, and student ambassadors. Parents are often the highest-converting segment, so do not leave them out of planning.
Involve the executive director, development director, program team, communications team, board members, volunteer leaders, and the person who owns the donor database.
Pick a date that connects to your story. A school might pick its founding date. A hospital foundation might tie the day to a patient awareness month. A scholarship campaign might launch the same week financial aid letters go out.
Most giving days run for 24 hours. Universities with global alumni bases sometimes stretch to 36 or 48 hours to cover time zones. Stanford's Athletics Giving Day ran 36 hours in 2024 in honor of its 36 varsity sports and raised $521,173 from 1,128 donors, showing how the length itself can be part of the story.
Your platform should complement your campaign plan, not force you to redesign your campaign around what the platform can and cannot do. If the tool is making your strategy smaller, you have the wrong tool.
A few features earn their place on the day:
The right platform should complement how your audience engages with you before, during, and after the day. Almabase's giving day platform sits on top of the same alumni and donor database your team already uses year-round. Which means the audiences you segment in the lead-up, the signals you capture during the day, and the records you steward afterward all live in the same place. Before, during, and after end up as one continuous workflow instead of three disconnected ones.
Messaging is the reason donors participate and treating it as a copywriting task produces something forgettable. If your message can be swapped onto another institution's giving day without changing anything, it is too generic to have any real effect.
Run a short messaging workshop. Start with your mission and what this giving day is funding. Finalise a single line plus supporting sentences ambassadors can use without rewriting. Fundraise Up puts it well: giving day "doesn't reward the loudest voice, it rewards the most interesting one". Souls Harbour Rescue Mission set a 2025 Giving Tuesday goal of $7,000 to fund Christmas dinners. After building a story-led campaign that launched a week early, they raised $138,978, nearly 20 times their goal. The story did the work.
The pattern is the same across all. The line is short; it makes the stakes clear, and it tells the donor who is involved and why now.
One message does not work for every group. A first-year alum and a board member share an institution, not a relationship to it. Research states that personalized emails see a much higher open rate than generic ones, and a giving day is when that gap shows up in dollars.
Ambassadors are how your campaign reaches past your email list and official social accounts. Hubbub has seen campaigns where up to 28% of gifts came from ambassador referrals. And peer-to-peer data shows that 71% of all donors learn about new causes through friends and family, making ambassadors a reliable acquisition channel.
Good reach comes from two different kinds of advocates - Influencers and Ambassadors. Influencers have large audiences and move attention quickly – North Texas Giving Day, for example, recruited pro athletes like Texas Rangers star Nathaniel Lowe and players from the Cowboys, Stars, Mavericks, and Dallas Wings as campaign "Champions of Giving." Ambassadors may have a smaller network but are genuinely passionate about your mission and will advocate one conversation at a time. You want both, and you treat them differently.
The best ambassadors already love your institution and are willing to ask their friends to give. That usually includes student leaders, faculty, recent graduates, current parents, board members, longtime volunteers, and grateful patients or families. A small group of committed ambassadors will outperform a long list of people who said yes but never shared the link.
Keep the ask simple:
Give ambassadors everything they need in one place so they are not building from scratch:
Matching gifts and challenges are the most reliable way to create momentum on giving day. According to Double the Donation, mentioning matching gifts in a fundraising appeal increases response rate by 71% and average donation amount by 51%. 360MatchPro reports that 84% of survey respondents said they are more likely to donate when a match is offered.
Match types and challenges to consider:
Layering at least two of these is recommended because each motivates a different audience at different moments.
Major donors love being on the other side of a match. Instead of writing one check, they get to feel like they multiplied the impact of hundreds of other donors. Approach them with a specific challenge to fund, specific gifts to unlock, or to match smaller gifts. The Hubbub network has seen almost $750,000 in low-level major donor matching gifts across its campaigns in a single year.
This step decides whether everything else shows up to donors. A great campaign with a quiet email plan will lose to a modest campaign with a strong communications cadence.
The two to four weeks before the day are where you condition your audience to show up:
The volume can feel high, but giving day is a one-day moment, and donors expect a higher tempo than usual:
33% of donors say email is the tool that most inspires them to give – and giving day amplifies that effect because of the urgency and matching incentives stacked into the day.
Your social plan should mirror the email cadence with more variety in format:
SMS is underused in fundraising. Nonprofit texts average a 98% open rate, which is way higher compared to email open rates. The trade-off is that texts feel intrusive when overused. Reserve SMS for ambassadors, students, young alumni, board members, and opted-in donors. A "we are live" text in the morning, a midday push, and a final-hour reminder will outperform a steady drip.
Save calls for board members, major donors, challenge donors, high-capacity donors, and lapsed donors. A call from a dean, executive director, or trustee on giving day morning often closes gifts that emails never would.
The day itself is mostly execution. If the planning was thorough, your team will be energetic rather than scrambling.
Keep a live dashboard up in the campaign room. Watch total dollars, total donors, first-time donors, average gift size, gift designations, ambassador-driven gifts, matching gift progress, failed or incomplete donations, and finally Email opens and clicks and Social media engagement. Failed donations are quietly expensive – a handful can cost real dollars if nobody catches them until the next morning.
Updates create momentum. The best ones tell donors that something is happening right now:
Ambassadors will not stay engaged for 24 hours on their own. Message them four or five times: morning launch, midday update, challenge-specific push, final-hour rally, thank-you at close.
Staff your inbox and phones. Day-of questions are predictable:
A two-hour response time on giving day is too slow. Aim for under 30 minutes.
The first 72 hours of follow-up set the tone for everything that comes next. New donors are deciding whether you were worth their gift.
Send a personal thank-you within 24 hours. Bloomerang cites research from Penelope Burk that a thank-you call from a board member within 24 hours of a gift increases the donor's next gift by 39%, and first-time donors who get a personal thank-you within 48 hours are 4x more likely to give a second gift. A handwritten note from a student or short video from your executive director will be remembered longer than the gift.
Publish the final numbers. Tell the story of who participated, what got funded, and what comes next. Donors gave to be part of something, and the recap tells them that they were.
Not every donor needs the same next email. First-time donors need a welcome series. Recurring donors need a thank-you and a quiet ask to keep their recurring gift active. Major donors need a personal follow-up from a gift officer. Lapsed donors who came back need a reason to stay.
This is where the platform choice from Step 5 pays off. Get every gift, designation, soft credit, and ambassador attribution into your CRM, and tag the cohort so you can measure retention against it a year from now. Clean data is what gives you a real shot at retaining your donors
Build a 90-day journey for new donors. Mix impact updates, an event invitation, a soft ask to convert to monthly giving, and one personal touchpoint. The second gift matters, but what you are really after is the relationship that produces a third, fourth, and fifth.
A giving day produces an enormous amount of donor data in a short window. Gifts, designations, soft credits, ambassador attribution, lapsed donors who came back, and first-time donors needing a welcome journey, all in 24 hours. If that data has to be exported, cleaned, and re-imported by hand, your team spends the week after giving day in spreadsheets instead of stewardship.
Almabase's giving day platform sits on top of the same alumni and donor database your team already uses, so day-of data flows straight back into the records you steward year-round. Class-year participation rates update automatically, ambassador referrals tie to real records, and new donors are segmented for the welcome journey by Monday morning. The campaign ends at midnight, but the relationships you built during it with the right platform will pay off for years to come.
How to Plan a Giving Day: 10-Step Guide for Fundraisers
Giving days can be surprisingly complex. Our 10-step guide walks you through the essentials that will form the pillar for your next giving day.
Fundraising
Prajnya Yelamali
June 12, 2026
12 minutes
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