The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) was founded in 1877 and is home to ~2,500 students and a global community of over 33,000 alumni across 57 countries. Their 40 member advancement team hosts notable events and initiatives such as Giving Days, Life after RISD, Family Weekends, etc.

Over the last several months, Almabase has been helping RISD solve some long-standing issues to provide a smooth alumni engagement platform for staff and alumni alike. In this blog, we’ll be revisiting a wonderful conversation we had with RISD’s  Director of Advancement Data and Services, Rob Odoardi on how Almabase solved some of their biggest issues.

The Challenge: Fragmented Engagement and Scattered Data

Like many educational institutions, RISD’s alumni engagement systems did not truly reflect the unity of its community.With each team, including advancement, career services, and academic departments, working independently .This meant that data was fragmented and existed on multiple systems, leading to duplicate records with no single unified viewpoint for alumni data. Alumni often received the same forms and emails multiple times, and their experiences with events and fundraisers were often discouraging due to clunky processes. 

To alleviate these problems, teams spent hours fixing spreadsheets and reconciling duplicate entries. What should have been time spent building relationships became an exercise in maintenance.

RISD needed a platform that could consolidate information, streamline collaboration, and give every team a clear picture of alumni interactions in real time.

Searching for Simplicity

When the advancement data services team began evaluating options, they were essentially looking for less friction. The goal was to unify engagement data and have it flow seamlessly without disrupting daily work or requiring heavy technical support.

Almabase’s integrated approach stood out immediately. The platform combined digital engagement, event management, and fundraising modules within a single environment. More importantly, it allowed institutions to deploy and operate the system without coding knowledge or complex integrations. For a team that valued creativity over configuration, the ability to plug in and start using it quickly was key.

The decision came down to one simple idea: technology should empower teams to engage more, not spend more time managing tools.

The Almabase Difference

Almabase enabled RISD to bring all alumni engagement activity under one roof. Every event registration, donation, or interaction now flows into a unified data layer, automatically syncing with the school’s advancement CRM. This means that when an alum attends a reunion or participates in a mentorship program, the information updates across all systems instantly.

The platform’s no-code setup allowed RISD’s staff to create campaigns, segment audiences, and design events through simple drag-and-drop interfaces. Tasks that once required IT support became self-service. The result was faster execution, fewer delays, and a renewed focus on what mattered most: engaging alumni.

This essentially boiled down to achieving:

• A single platform for events, giving, communications, and engagement.
• A single source of truth: All alumni activity flows into a central dashboard and is synced to Raiser’s Edge NXT (or RE NXT) using TrueSync
• Detailed real-time engagement data: Event attendances, giving patterns, and community interactions in one place
• Cohesive alumni journeys: Vision on how alumni moved across events, giving, and affinity groups instead of incomplete snapshots from siloed data.
• Automated RSVPs, reminders, and QR-code check-ins
• Time and energy saved to allow focus on strategy and impact
• Smarter decisions: Data-informed alumni engagement strategies to identify high-engagement opportunities, optimize outreach, and personalize experiences 

Transitioning to new technology often raises concerns about complexity and adoption. RISD’s experience was quite the opposite. With Almabase’s dedicated onboarding support, implementation followed a structured and low-stress process.

Changes in Action

1. RISD Giving Day 2025

One of RISD’s first fundraisers in partnership with Almabase was their ‘RISD Giving Day 2025’ which was a major success. 

Together with Almabase, they were able to:

• Bring in 319 gifts from alumni, faculty, staff, family and friends
• Bring in support from 2 major matching gift challenges
• Personalize email campaigns to achieve a 60.9% open rate
• Implement easy sharing through leaderboards, tributes, and “invite a friend” tools
• Track gifts and challenges in real-time
• Sync gift data automatically to RE NXT through TrueSync

2. Life after RISD

Life after RISD is an initiative to provide future graduates with necessary tools, knowledge, networks, experiences, advice,  guidance, and habits that will shorten students’ time to launch into their chosen fields.

Through Almabase’s Digital Engagement module, RISD was able to create a hub that allowed them to launch:

• Webinars for professional preparedness
• Alumni mentoring at scale
• Networking opportunities (regional + affinity)
• Tailored career resources such as job boards, internships, and entrepreneurship support

The initiative is seeing great reception, with the class of 2025 in particular being the most engaged users.

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These are just a couple of instances to highlight the simple yet fundamental improvements that Almabase brings to the table. We continue to work with RISD on many other initiatives, events, and essential features that their alumni and donors may appreciate.

The Impact: From Manual Work to Meaningful Relationships

RISD’s transformation can be summarized in three outcomes: efficiency, clarity, and connection.

1. Efficiency that Scales

Manual data transfer and reconciliation were eliminated. Information from events, communications, and donations now syncs automatically, saving staff countless hours each month. Those hours are redirected toward creative initiatives and relationship building.

2. Clear and Actionable Insights

Unified data has given leadership visibility into engagement across departments. Reports that once took days can now be generated in minutes, allowing faster strategic decisions and better forecasting of fundraising potential.

3. Stronger Alumni Engagement

With barriers removed, teams can now design targeted and personalized outreach campaigns. Alumni receive consistent communication, while RISD gains a clearer picture of how individuals interact with the institution over time.

This is more than a technology success. It is an operational transformation that supports RISD’s mission of nurturing lifelong connections within its creative community.

What Institutions can learn from RISD’s journey

RISD’s journey reflects a broader shift in educational advancement. Institutions depend on accurate and easily accessible data to cultivate donors, engage alumni, and build communities that last. Their journey with Almabase highlights some key learning points:

1. Simplify before you scale. Streamlining existing processes often produces faster results than adopting multiple new tools.
2. Empower non-technical teams. Platforms designed for ease of use accelerate adoption and unlock creative capacity.
3. Giving has evolved. Your donor’s gifting experience and features such as matching gifts, leaderboards, easily shareable campaigns, and personalized email reminders are all integral to modern giving culture.
4. Let data guide collaboration. Centralized engagement metrics eliminate duplication and encourage cross-department alignment.
5. Improve upon feedback. Initiatives like Life after RISD are an example of taking feedback and going one step further to truly impress constituents.

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Wrapping it up

We had a lovely time catching up with Rob and RISD’s journey with us. If you would like to listen to the full conversation, we’ve provided a recording you can watch as well as a link to it below! 🤗

→ How Rhode Island School of Design Built an Integrated Alumni Experience