Discover how MSUM uses Almabase’s alumni engagement platform to turn Giving Day donors into lifelong supporters through personalization, automation, and smarter stewardship.
Summary
• Reframe your Giving Day strategy: Instead of viewing Giving Day as a finish line, treat it as the exciting launch of a year-long engagement strategy to cultivate lasting relationships and build a stronger donor pipeline.
• Prioritize rapid and personal stewardship: Boost donor retention by delivering personalized thank-yous, like quick emails or student-made videos, within 24-72 hours; this immediate gratitude makes donors feel seen and encourages future giving.
• Leverage Giving Day data for deeper insights: Move beyond simple gift counts to understand who your donors are by using real-time data to identify high-potential givers and inform your major gift strategy.
• Scale personalization authentically: Tailor your appreciation to different donor segments, from leadership calls for major donors to small, meaningful tokens for first-time givers, ensuring every message feels genuine and impactful.
• Drive year-round connection with micro-campaigns: Keep alumni engaged and giving by launching smaller, focused campaigns throughout the year that highlight tangible projects and allow donors to see the direct impact of their support.
• Transform events for genuine connection: Consider replacing large, traditional galas with more intimate, story-focused events that celebrate your community and foster deeper, more meaningful alumni engagement at a lower cost.
Giving Days have become the Super Bowl of advancement. Teams spend months planning, alumni flood timelines with links and hashtags, and fundraising dashboards light up with activity. But once the campaign clock stops, engagement often fades. Donors vanish. Inboxes quiet down. The cycle resets.
What if Giving Day wasn’t an end but a beginning?
That question shaped a recent conversation hosted by Aaron Riley, VP of Sales at Almabase, joined by Mike Nagel, Chief Strategy and Growth Officer at Catalyst Campaign Partners, and Steve Sjoberg, Director of Foundation Marketing and Communication at the MSUM Foundation. Together they explored how advancement teams can turn Giving Day momentum into a year-round engagement strategy that builds relationships, strengthens retention, and drives sustainable fundraising results.
Fundraising totals across higher education continue to rise, yet fewer people are giving each year. In 2024, colleges in the US raised $61.5 billion, while donor participation declined by 7 percent.
“It’s not sustainable,” Mike said. “Every VP I talk to is thinking about the pipeline. You can’t grow revenue if your donor base keeps shrinking.”
Giving Days are great at attracting first-time and lapsed donors, but retention is the issue. Research shows that 34 percent of Giving Day gifts come from new or reactivated donors, yet only 20 percent make a second gift without continued engagement.
Institutions facing the same challenge can take inspiration from Boyd-Buchanan School’s story, which connected alumni engagement directly to fundraising growth.
At Minnesota State University Moorhead (MSUM), Steve Sjoberg and his team saw Giving Day participation spike, only to drop soon after.
Their solution was simple and strategic — extend the story.
“Giving Day should be the kickoff, not the closing ceremony,” Steve said. “We started asking what it would look like if this became the beginning of our engagement year.”
That mindset reframed MSUM’s communication strategy, building a cadence of connection throughout the year. It mirrors how RISD restructured its engagement journey by connecting alumni activity, fundraising, and communication into a unified experience.
Speed was MSUM’s first priority.
Before Almabase, it took nearly a month to process and thank all donors. With Almabase’s Alumni Engagement Platform, integrated with Blackbaud, the team reduced that to three days.
“Speed builds trust,” Steve said. “When donors hear from you within 24 hours, they remember how that gift felt.”
MSUM layered its stewardship program:
That one shift delivered a measurable impact.
“Just through personalized thank-you videos, we raised an additional $40,000,” Steve shared. “People responded because they felt seen.”
Mike added, “Three out of four first-time donors never renew. Quick and personal acknowledgment is the easiest fix.”
This approach aligns with how Samueli Academy automated alumni communication to maintain consistent connection and achieve a 97 percent engagement rate.
Data without insight is noise. The MSUM team shifted from simply counting donors to understanding who they were.
Mike explained, “Around 10 to 15 percent of your alumni have major-gift capacity. Giving Day is when they raise their hand. If you’re not analyzing that, you’re missing your next big donors.”
Using Almabase, MSUM tagged upgraded gifts, identified high-potential first-time donors, and synced this information with its CRM. Reports that once took weeks now update in real time.
“We moved from spreadsheets to instant visibility,” Steve said. “It freed our staff to focus on relationships, not reconciliation.”
This mirrors Concordia College’s strategy, which used data-driven segmentation to strengthen donor relationships and streamline advancement operations.
Every donor wants to be acknowledged, but the message needs to feel personal.
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At MSUM, stewardship scales without losing authenticity:
Authenticity matters more than automation. “We handwrite names on whiteboards before filming videos,” Steve said. “That’s how they know it’s real.”
Mike compared it to the private sector: “If a retail brand can personalize an experience, advancement teams can personalize gratitude.”
Gann Academy’s example proves how small tweaks in personalization can lift open rates and engagement across the board.
Large campaigns attract visibility. Micro-campaigns sustain participation.
MSUM’s wrestling room renovation campaign invited alumni and fans to fund upgrades. In six weeks, it met its goal. “It wasn’t about the size of the gift,” Steve said. “It was about people feeling connected to something they love.”
Another small but powerful initiative expanded the campus Oceanarium, adding a teaching space for local schools. Both efforts gave alumni tangible proof of their impact.
A similar approach worked for DMBA, which funded its engagement platform through targeted micro-campaigns instead of large appeals.
MSUM replaced its traditional gala with Dragon Legacy Luncheons — smaller, college-based events that celebrate faculty, students, and alumni together.
“Legacy Luncheons let us lift up real stories,” Steve said. “People leave feeling valued, not entertained.”
Attendance grew, costs dropped, and alumni involvement deepened.
Antioch College saw similar success by focusing on community events that created real relationships instead of one-time gatherings.
Retaining young alumni begins before graduation.
MSUM’s Career Connections Office collects accurate contact data from seniors, offering small incentives like alumni gifts or pizza.
“A small reward today leads to stronger loyalty tomorrow,” Mike said. “If you capture contact info early, you never lose them.”
This early engagement mirrors Nicholls State University’s spotlight series, which kept young graduates connected through personal stories.
Institutions can also explore Almabase’s blog on how to engage alumni more effectively for actionable ideas to build meaningful early connections.
With Almabase, MSUM automated repetitive tasks like thank-you emails, donor segmentation, and event follow-ups. The team now spends more time creating experiences than managing workflows.
“Before, we reacted,” Steve said. “Now we plan ahead. The system gives us space to be creative.”
By aligning technology with human storytelling, MSUM built a sustainable rhythm of connection that continues long after Giving Day ends.
Learn more about how Almabase supports this workflow in the Alumni Engagement Platform overview.
Aaron Riley summarized the takeaway that tied everything together.
“Building systems matters more than building campaigns. When you create a rhythm of gratitude, storytelling, and follow-up, Giving Day becomes one part of a longer conversation.”
This mindset shifts advancement from transaction to transformation.
Since adopting this approach, MSUM has
The result isn’t only more funds but deeper community trust.
Giving Day may start as a 24-hour event, but its real value lies in what follows after the giving day event. The institutions that treat donors as partners, not participants, will build stronger communities and more sustainable pipelines.
To see how this strategy works in practice, watch the full conversation with Aaron, Mike, and Steve or explore how Almabase helps advancement teams sustain engagement throughout the year.
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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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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:
The initiative is seeing great reception, with the class of 2025 in particular being the most engaged users.
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.
RISD’s transformation can be summarized in three outcomes: efficiency, clarity, and connection.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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
How RISD Simplified Alumni Engagement with Almabase’s Integrated Platform
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Fundraising for educational institutions has always been a challenging landscape to navigate, but recent shifts have made it even harder to maintain momentum. The donor pipeline is shrinking, and major donors, many of whom are aging, are not being replaced. At the same time, younger generations of alumni remain disengaged, with many opting out of giving or not participating in the same ways as their predecessors.
As communication channels become increasingly crowded and competitive, educational institutions face the ongoing challenge of standing out in a noisy environment. However, one area of fundraising that remains underutilized, yet can play a significant role in differentiating appeals, is matching gifts.
By leveraging alumni matching gifts, educational institutions can significantly amplify the impact of each donor’s contribution, helping to close the gap between dwindling donor pools and the need for sustainable funding. In this guide, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know to make the most of these programs’ potential. We’ll cover:
Interested in accessing the full insights this blog was inspired by? Register here to receive the on-demand recording of the presentation.
Let’s begin!
With the right strategies, school fundraisers can create an environment where alumni feel engaged, valued, and empowered to give. Let’s first lay the groundwork for successful alumni engagement here.
The first step to raising more donations from alumni is building the foundation of a strong, connected network. It’s not enough to simply ask for donations once or twice a year; your alumni need to feel personally invested in your cause. In fact, alumni who are more engaged with their alma mater are 23 times more likely to give.
Creating meaningful connections is key, and there are many ways to do so. Community-building initiatives, mentorship programs, and volunteering opportunities not only foster these bonds but also open the door to new funding opportunities.
Once you've built a strong foundation, it's time to fine-tune your approach. Each interaction with your alumni, whether via email, social media, or through your website, should be optimized for maximum impact.
The key to success in fundraising is understanding your audience. Use A/B testing to optimize subject lines, email content, and calls to action. By tracking alumni behavior on your website, you can identify warm leads and tailor your outreach for maximum effectiveness.
With over 50% of web traffic coming from mobile devices, optimizing your donation forms for mobile users is crucial. A mobile-friendly donation form, with pre-filled fields and a progress indicator, can increase conversion rates by up to 200%.
A well-rounded fundraising strategy should include more than just a generic appeal. Consider running micro-impact funds, gamifying donations, or launching re-engagement campaigns. Matching gifts are a key component of these strategies, as they create an immediate incentive for donors to give more.
People give to causes they care about, and one of the most effective ways to connect with your alumni is through storytelling. Use the "Challenge → Impact → Hope" narrative arc to highlight the tangible outcomes of donations. For example, "15 students graduated debt-free because of your support" can show alumni exactly where their money is going.
One of the most underutilized tools in educational fundraising is matching gift programs. These corporate giving initiatives offer employees the opportunity to double their donations, multiplying the impact of their contributions.
Corporate matching gifts are employer-sponsored programs in which companies match the charitable contributions made by their employees. For example, if an alumnus donates $100 to your school, their employer may match that donation with another $100, effectively doubling the gift and allowing your institution to do more with the funds.
The specifics of matching gift programs can vary by company, but there are some common parameters to be aware of as you navigate these initiatives. These include:
The more you know about a matching gift program, the better you can target donors who work for the company.
Many prominent companies offer matching gifts specifically to or including educational institutions, providing a valuable opportunity for your alumni to maximize their donations.
Here’s a list of notable companies that match donations to higher education institutions like yours:
These companies represent just a few of the thousands that match employee donations to schools and other educational institutions. By encouraging alumni to check if their employer participates in a matching gift program, you can tap into additional resources to drive fundraising success.
Top tip: It's important to maintain an up-to-date list of companies offering matching gifts and provide an easy way for alumni to identify these opportunities. Consider integrating matching gift company databases directly into your donation forms and communications, so donors can quickly see if their employer is eligible for a match.
Matching gifts are a powerful way to amplify alumni donations without asking for more money from your donors. Here’s how they can significantly boost your fundraising efforts:
By promoting matching gifts within your overall fundraising strategy, you can significantly increase both the amount and engagement of alumni donations.
Despite the clear benefits of matching gifts, many organizations are still missing out on this opportunity. A major reason for this is a lack of education and promotion. Only 7% of donors are aware that matching gift programs exist, and even fewer know how to apply for them.
To fully leverage matching gifts and maximize their potential, fundraisers need to implement strategic tactics. These efforts will help ensure that alumni are aware of matching opportunities, motivated to participate, and supported throughout the process.
The first step in boosting matching gift participation is educating your donors about the programs. Many alumni may not be aware that their employers offer matching gifts, or they might not know how to access this benefit. To bridge this gap, make sure to clearly communicate the value of matching gifts in all your fundraising materials.
Include matching gift information in your alumni communications, such as email newsletters, donation receipts, and event invitations. Remind alumni that their donations can go further without additional spending, which can incentivize them to engage.
Your school’s website is one of the most important tools for promoting matching gifts. We recommend creating a dedicated landing page that explains how matching gifts work, provides a list of participating companies, and includes easy-to-follow instructions for how donors can claim a match.
To ensure maximum participation, integrate matching gift opportunities directly into your donation page. When donors contribute online, include a prominent option for them to check if their employer offers matching gifts.
This ensures that matching gifts are top-of-mind as donors finalize their contributions.
Send reminder emails shortly after donations are made to encourage alumni to take advantage of matching gift opportunities. These emails should include clear instructions and links to facilitate the process.
Follow-up emails should be sent periodically, especially if a donor has expressed interest in matching gifts but hasn't yet completed the submission.
Donor appreciation is a key factor in retaining donors and encouraging future contributions. Make sure to thank your donors promptly, and include a special thank-you for their matching gift contributions.
Not only should you thank them for their original gift, but also for the additional impact their employer’s match has made. Personalized acknowledgment of the matching gift will reinforce the donor’s positive experience and show them that their generosity, both as an individual and through their employer, has a significant effect.
To ensure that your matching gift efforts are successful, your team needs to be well-prepared. Provide your staff with the necessary training and resources to effectively communicate with donors about matching gifts. Make sure everyone on the team understands the details of how matching gifts work and can guide donors through the process.
Further, implementing a matching gift tracking system can help streamline the process, ensuring that no matching gifts are overlooked. Consider using software like Double the Donation, which automates the process of identifying and tracking matching gifts, making it easier for your team to manage.
Matching gifts present a golden opportunity for fundraising organizations to significantly boost their alumni donations. This not only increases the amount raised but also strengthens relationships with alumni and corporate partners, fostering a deeper sense of engagement and commitment to the cause.
However, simply having a matching gift program in place isn't enough. To maximize the impact, you must take proactive steps to educate alumni, promote matching gifts at every touchpoint, and ensure the process is as seamless as possible. By integrating matching gift options into the donation flow, sending timely reminders, and expressing sincere gratitude for matching gifts, nonprofits and educational institutions alike can cultivate a more engaged and loyal donor base.
Double Alumni Impact: Maximize Donations with Matching Gifts
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