Want better fundraising results? Segment your alumni! Discover simple ways to tailor your messaging by graduation year, engagement level, location, and more. Learn how to make your outreach more personal and effective with easy-to-use strategies.
Before we get into the HOW, let’s look at the WHY.
Blanket messaging no longer works in today’s era of personalized communication. Alumni want to feel that their connection with their alma mater is meaningful and tailored to them. By segmenting alumni, you can
Now, let’s explore the various ways to segment alumni and how this can supercharge your fundraising efforts.
One of the simplest ways to segment alumni is by their graduation year or class year. This allows you to tailor communications to different generations of alumni, addressing their unique concerns and perspectives.
Why it works: Alumni from different eras have distinct experiences with the institution and likely have different capacities and interests when it comes to giving. Younger alumni may need more nurturing before becoming donors, while older alumni might be more financially stable and ready to make significant contributions.
How to use it: Create targeted messages for specific generations. For example, for recent graduates, focus on career support or networking opportunities. For older alumni, focus on legacy giving, reunion events, or updates on how the institution has grown since their time there.
Not all alumni have the same level of connection with your institution. Some may be actively involved, attending events, volunteering, or giving regularly, while others may have limited or no engagement since graduation. Segmenting alumni by their level of involvement allows you to prioritize your efforts where they’ll have the most impact.
Why it works: Engaged alumni are more likely to contribute financially because they already have a strong connection to your institution. By identifying those who are less engaged, you can also develop strategies to re-engage them and turn them into potential donors.
How to use it: Break alumni into tiers such as highly engaged, moderately engaged, and inactive. For highly engaged alumni, you can focus on major giving campaigns or leadership opportunities. For less engaged alumni, offer opportunities to reconnect, such as attending events, joining regional chapters, or participating in mentorship programs.
Where alumni live plays a significant role in their ability to attend events, contribute to local initiatives, or participate in fundraising campaigns. By segmenting alumni based on location, you can create region-specific appeals and engagement opportunities.
Why it works: Alumni are more likely to participate in activities and donate to causes that are locally relevant to them. Whether it’s hosting a local event or showcasing the impact of alumni contributions in their community, geography-based segmentation can create a more personal connection.
How to use it: Identify geographic clusters of alumni and tailor your communications accordingly. For example, alumni living in major cities might be invited to regional events or gatherings, while alumni living abroad might receive updates on international initiatives or virtual engagement opportunities.
Another effective way to segment alumni is by their career or professional interests. Understanding what alumni do professionally helps you tailor your fundraising efforts to appeal to their passions, industries, or expertise.
Why it works: Alumni are more likely to give if they feel that their contribution will make an impact on the areas they care most about. For instance, if you know that a segment of alumni works in healthcare, you can appeal to them by highlighting fundraising campaigns that support health-related programs or research.
How to use it: Use career data to identify key segments such as healthcare professionals, entrepreneurs, educators, or tech industry leaders. You can then personalize your outreach with relevant projects, opportunities, or networking events that align with the alumni’s professional interests.
Alumni who have donated in the past are valuable prospects for future campaigns. Segmenting alumni based on their giving history allows you to tailor your messaging to past donors differently from non-donors.
Why it works: Past donors are more likely to give again, especially if they’ve had a positive experience with your institution. By acknowledging their previous contributions and showing the impact of their donations, you can increase the likelihood of repeat giving.
How to use it: Create segments for first-time donors, repeat donors, and non-donors. For first-time donors, send personalized thank-you messages and show how their gift made a difference. For repeat donors, offer opportunities to increase their impact through matching gift programs or major giving. For non-donors, consider sharing stories of how alumni support has driven significant change at the institution.
Alumni who were involved in specific activities, clubs, or academic programs often maintain a strong connection to those areas post-graduation. By segmenting alumni based on their affinities and interests, you can tap into their passion for a particular cause or community within the institution.
Why it works: Alumni are more likely to contribute to areas that hold personal significance, such as the athletic program they were part of, the student organization they led, or the academic department that shaped their career path.
How to use it: Leverage affinity data to create targeted campaigns for athletics, arts, specific academic programs, or other affinity groups. For example, if an alumnus was involved in the music program, consider asking for their support in funding scholarships or facilities for the arts.
💡 Discover how American University fosters stronger connections through alumni affinity groups and networks [Read more]
Another powerful segmentation method is to assess the wealth or giving capacity of your alumni. Understanding their financial ability can help you tailor your asks and ensure you’re approaching alumni with appropriate, respectful appeals.
Why it works: Tailoring your ask to someone’s giving capacity ensures that you’re not asking for too much or too little, increasing the chances of a positive response.
How to use it: For those with higher capacity, focus on major gifts, planned giving, or naming opportunities. For alumni with lower capacity, emphasize smaller, recurring gifts that add up over time or suggest other ways they can contribute, such as volunteering.
Alumni at different stages in their lives may have different priorities, capacities, and interests when it comes to giving. By segmenting alumni based on their life stages, such as young professionals, mid-career professionals, retirees, or parents of current students, you can create more relatable and appealing messages.
Why it works: Alumni in different life stages have different motivations. A young alum may be interested in networking or career support, while a retiree may be more focused on leaving a legacy or giving back to future generations of students.
How to use it: Tailor your campaigns to life stages. For young alumni, emphasize career support or paying it forward. For mid-career professionals, focus on networking opportunities or targeted programs. For older alumni, highlight legacy giving or opportunities to make a lasting impact through scholarships or endowments.
Manually creating these segments can be time-consuming and increase the workload. That’s why it’s crucial to have the right tech stack that automates these filters, allowing you to effortlessly create highly segmented lists and tailor your initiatives, requests, and communications.
Here’s how you can easily create and use segmented lists on Almabase:
For example, if you want to host a young alumni meetup for those living near California and invite them, here’s how you can do it using Almabase:
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Pulling lists and updating constituent data, and updating information in Raiser's Edge is now even more efficient! While admins can pull data from Raiser's Edge independently with minimal effort, they still need to pull lists every time they want to pull constituent data, which requires them to keep moving between Almabase and RE. As we continuously make the database processes more efficient, we want to simplify how you create new records, pull lists, and fix errors seamlessly.
And that’s precisely what we’ve done with our latest auto-pull feature!
Dive in to find out more.
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The auto-pull feature lets you set up and update RE lists and queries through multiple one-time and auto-recurring pulls, simultaneously. If a new profile or record is added to RENXT, the recurring pull will automatically add new information from RENXT to the directory, improving data accuracy. Admins can save time by setting up daily, weekly, or monthly auto-pulls.
Note: Recurring pulls allow admins to add only new constituent information without updating existing records, as the sync system handles updates. For bulk updates, administrators should create a separate one-time pull session with the recurring pull option disabled.
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The new auto-pull feature streamlines email list management on Almabase. With the auto-pull update, admins can pull constituent data for email lists. For example, if you establish a daily pull for a list with 100 records on RENXT, any changes—such as adding or removing records—will be automatically reflected in your Almabase list. This means new records will be created for constituents not already on Almabase, and existing records will be updated accordingly.
Note: Almabase will periodically pull data from the RE list or RE query, and depending upon the type of configuration, it will add/remove constituents from the email group or list of records on Almabase.
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The new sync data dashboard lets you set up and manage: set upone-time or recurring and view historical pulls, all in a single dashboard. If there are any errors in constituent records or email lists, you can fix them directly within the same dashboard by clicking on the "Fix errors" button, eliminating the need to switch different tabs on Almabase or RENXT.
If you’re an Almabase customer, simply log into the platform's database settings to create your first auto-pull session.
If you’re not an Almabase customer, click here to learn more about our industry-leading integration with Raiser’s Edge NXT.
Keep email lists and user-directory updated on their own with auto-pull sessions
We are constantly adding new capabilities to our integration with Raiser’s Edge NXT to help you create delightful alumni experiences while minimizing the resources and time you spend collecting, cleaning, reporting, and updating data.
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Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge NXT is a popular CRM used by numerous institutions across the country. However, when institutions use RE NXT along with an alumni engagement tool like Almabase, things can get messy when you want data to be uniformly synced across both systems. That’s where our industry-leading integration with Raiser’s Edge NXT comes in.
Because let’s face it - nobody likes working with data first thing every morning when it involves a lot of tedious back-and-forth between multiple systems. We believe this integration is crucial in setting your Advancement team up for success, and this blog post will show you how.
If you're interested in the technical nitty-gritty of the integration, we've got a blog post that you might be interested in.
Here are four ways Almabase’s integration with RE NXT can set your team up for success.
Almabase’s RE NXT integration works from the get-go, and you won’t have to invest additional resources in third-party integrations. While some of these integrations can be super expensive, others that are cost-effective aren’t very reliable. Your team won’t have to rely on multiple tools (one of these being Importacular) to get data flowing between the two systems. Whether you want a simple integration to work right off the bat, or you want something more customizable to be more flexible with your needs, our integration offers it all.
Picture this – you have a thriving alumni community that is creating hundreds and thousands of engagement touchpoints on your platform. Imagine if every event registration or profile update had to be MANUALLY synced with RE NXT by your Advancement Services team.
That would be a dystopia we wouldn’t like to think about. With our integration, you get to choose how and when your data flows between Almabase and RE NXT, with zero human intervention. Furthermore, the data you import will automatically rid itself of duplicate entries and junk data. This smooth integration means your Advancement Services team can say goodbye to messy .CSV imports/exports all day long.
At this point, you might wonder whether it’s worth maintaining data on multiple platforms if each of them were to store different data. Fortunately, this isn’t the case. Almabase’s integration with RE NXT ensures that the data you see on both platforms will always be in sync with each other. This means you won’t have to worry about making sure the data is uniform across the systems. The integration also has provisions in place to ensure there are no duplicates or junk data on either of your systems, which can take a massive load off your IT team’s shoulders.
Besides, Almabase is so much more than an online community for your constituents, or a CRM for your team. With powerful alumni-centric engagement tools, Almabase empowers your team to unlock higher participation and donations. That’s why many institutions prefer to use Almabase in tandem with RE NXT.
When it comes to integrations, we don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all approach. Every institution will have unique guidelines in place to handle data. That’s why our integration allows you to create custom workflows to dictate when, and how, data flows between Almabase and RE NXT. The customization is limitless and can be tweaked to fit your needs. If you’re feeling particularly experimental, you can tinker around with APIs to build your workflow, or you can use Microsoft Power Automate for that tailor-made fit that works best with your processes.
So there you have it – an overview of how Almabase’s best-in-class integration with Raiser’s Edge NXT can set your Advancement team up for success. While we tried to cover the most obvious advantages of the integration for your team, there’s still a lot we couldn’t fit into a blog post.
If you have any specific queries about the integration, or you want to see it in action, you can always get in touch with one of our Alumni Success Specialists. We have a feeling you’re going to like what you see!
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How Almabase’s integration with Raiser’s Edge NXT can set your Advancement team up for success
From improving the efficiency of your team to optimizing your workflows and processes, find out how the integration can set your team up for success.
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It can be terribly hard to keep data sane and organized, and even more so when your team’s working with different platforms to store constituent data.
Moving things across several platforms can be a daunting task, but we’ve got you covered. If your institution uses Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge NXT to store constituent data, Almabase’s state-of-the-art integration with RE NXT makes data management a breeze. The integration works right out of the box, and with a push of a button, you can have your data flow seamlessly between Almabase and RE NXT.
Read how Northwestern Health Sciences University leverages Almabase & Raiser's Edge integration for their engagement and fundraising needs.
Here’s everything you need to know about Almabase’s integration with RE NXT.
We started working on this integration with a simple goal – to ensure that your team won’t have to spend resources (and their time) on an expensive third-party solution. That’s why our integration works right out of the box, without the need to set it up manually. With the integration, Almabase and RE NXT can sync multiple data points with the push of a button. What’s more, the data that flows between the platforms is going to be clean and structured, without the hindrance of duplicates. This means that there will be zero compromise on the quality of your data when it flows between systems, which is a huge plus for your IT team.
We’ve approached our integration to sync data based on three distinct fields, which are:
Each of these fields relates to an engagement touchpoint that a constituent might create through different channels. For instance, imagine an alum makes a gift to one of your campaigns, or another registers to and participates in your next event. All of these data-points will be captured and relayed back to RE NXT through the integration.
With Almabase, your alumni have the option to sign up using social sync (either through LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google). By using social sync to sign up, the platform automatically pulls the latest information of your constituent. This information will be fed back to RE NXT, where their records will be updated. Here’s a look at the data that gets collected and updated:
However, that’s not all. Any time a constituent updates their information while registering for, or participating in an event, the updated information automatically flows back to their record on RE NXT. All of this magic happens behind the scenes, without you or a team member having to lift a finger. This can be a huge time-saver for Advancement Services professionals.
Every time you create an event page on Almabase, the integration syncs key data points of this event (event name, date, description, ticketing details, and so on) with RE NXT. This means that all events created on Almabase will also be reflected in your RE NXT database.
Once an event page is live and open for registrations, you can go to the corresponding event page on RE NXT to view detailed participant information. Here are a few key details that get recorded on RE NXT as soon as your constituent completes their registration:
You can always create custom workflows to dictate how the data should flow back to RE NXT, and which fields they should correspond to. You also have a whole host of options when it comes to printing receipts. All of these features take the stress out of events for your event managers!
Every time a constituent pledges a gift to your giving campaign on Almabase, the data associated with each gift will be reflected on our versatile gift dashboard. Payments made on Almabase can be split into gift amount and services/tickets to accommodate any downstream processes as well. From the dashboard, you have the option of creating a batch of gifts, using a broad set of data filters. Once you’ve created a batch, you can run a workflow to import all the gifts corresponding to that batch into RE NXT. Here are some of the data points that get synced:
Creating a batch of gifts on Almabase is simple, as you have plenty of filters at your disposal. Once gift data flows to your RE NXT database, you can view all your gifts, and even make edits to gift details wherever needed. This can help professionals working with Annual Fund and Major Gifts to plan more effective campaigns and raise more funds.
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So there you have it – an overview of Almabase’s best-in-class integration with Raiser’s Edge NXT. While we tried to cover most of how the integration works, there’s still a lot we couldn’t fit into this blog post, for obvious reasons.
If you want to learn more about how the integration can help set your Advancement Team up for success, we have a blog post just for that.
Get in touch with one of our Alumni Success specialists if you want to see the integration in action - we have a feeling you’re going to like what you see!
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Almabase 🔁 RENXT | Simplified data processes for your educational institution
Almabase's industry-leading integration with Raiser's Edge NXT has saved Advancement teams from leading institutions in the U.S. countless hours and resources. Find out how the integration works, and see how all your data can move between Almabase and RE NXT.
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