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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
You may notice that throughout this article, we use the term “investor” when referring to “donors.” This is because Convergent believes in reframing charitable institutions as valuable community assets worthy of investment. By positioning donors as investors, we focus on sustainable funding rather than one-time gifts.
Your educational institution is a pillar of your community. However, you may undermine its stability by approaching your alumni annual fund with a transactional mindset, focusing solely on raising funds rather than on developing relationships with supporters. As a result, you may exhaust your investors and create volatile cash flows in your nonprofit’s financial accounts.
For this reason, it is necessary to shift away from a transactional relationship (in which giving is driven by the expectation of receiving something in return, such as a tax write-off) and toward a sustainable partnership, which is rooted in shared values and strategic alignment.
This guide provides actionable steps to realign your alumni annual fund giving with long-term, mission-critical outcomes. When you treat alumni as true financial partners, you can secure robust, predictable funding that sustains your institution for decades to come.
Different investors have their own reasons for giving, so analyzing giving behavior is an important step to tailoring your investment-driven approach. For example, the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy reported that younger generations tend to support causes tied to social impact and advocacy, so if you want people in this demographic to give more, you have to highlight your mission and the impact you’ve had in your community in your outreach materials.
No two investors are alike. To understand why your supporters choose to contribute, try the following strategies:
Incorporate these insights into your nonprofit’s constituent relationship management system (CRM), so your team can segment your audiences accurately. By the time the alumni annual fundraising comes around, you can deploy tailored messaging, thereby drastically improving conversion rates.
Establish your institution’s value by demonstrating strict alignment between your mission, fundraising objectives, and the outcomes delivered to the community. For example, if your organization is planning a STEM initiative for first-generation students, you can frame it like this:
When sharing the impact report with your investors, spotlight a specific narrative (e.g., a student who benefited directly from the funds), then pair that with hard numbers (e.g., “we’ve helped 100 students achieve their dreams like [Student X]”). By incorporating data in the narrative, you’re showing investors that their contributions fund tangible results.
Realigning your alumni annual fund with strategic outcomes can be challenging because there are several moving parts to consider. For this reason, Convergent recommends conducting a development audit, which provides a clear, objective assessment of your current fundraising efforts and a strategic roadmap to improve them. The result is that everyone in your team is aligned with your goals, and you can build a stronger case for investment.
Shifting from a traditional donation mindset to an investment value proposition fundamentally changes the dynamic between your institution and your alumni. When you operate with a donation mindset, you inherently position the educational institution as a charity in need of a handout. Additionally, a donation mindset relies heavily on emotional appeals and transactional exchanges (e.g., giving a t-shirt or a tax write-off in exchange for money), which ultimately exhaust supporters.
When you reframe your outreach and treat alumni as long-term investors and stakeholders, you unlock distinct benefits that secure sustainable funding, such as:
To complete your shift from a transactional to an investment-driven mindset, you’ll need to audit your current communication templates and eliminate passive phrasing. For example, refer to gifts and donations as “partnerships” instead. So, rather than saying “Your gifts are needed to help maintain our current programs,” you can say, “Your partnership with our organization has helped expand our scholarship endowment and directly funds our new STEM initiative.” This subtle linguistic shift empowers alumni, making them feel like co-architects of the institution's future.
In addition to launching capital campaigns, your organization should integrate workplace giving into your alumni annual fund strategy. This is because corporate philanthropy programs, such as matching gifts and volunteer grants, significantly amplify the ROI of each contribution.
That said, not many people know about workplace giving initiatives; in fact, studies show that nearly 80% of donors are unaware of whether their company offers a matching gift program. Because of this, you must educate your investors about these programs by:
By leveraging corporate philanthropy programs, you’re shifting the giving narrative away from individual charitable donations toward larger-scale, sustainable institutional investments. In other words, you’re ensuring no money is left on the table, while maximizing the impact of your existing investor base.
As an educational institution, you’re an indispensable community asset, and your funding strategies must reflect this vital role. Transitioning from transactional appeals to a sustainable, investment-focused model ensures that you maintain long-term partnerships with alumni investors. By prioritizing data-driven stewardship and clear ROI, your future fundraising efforts will build a resilient foundation for generations to come.
Transforming Your Alumni Annual Fund for Sustainability
Transition alumni giving from transactional exchanges to sustainable investments. Discover how to rethink your alumni annual fund for long-term ROI here.
Brian Abernathy
July 10, 2026
12 minutes
Your university’s marketing strategies shape whether donors feel connected to you. They also determine whether a prospective student finds your institution when they start searching, or finds a competitor instead. Done well, they benefit both enrollment numbers and campaign totals. Because guess what? Advancement and admissions teams now compete for the same audience's attention, trust, and money, whether they've coordinated around that fact or not.
In this blog, we’ll go over the best marketing strategies for your university whether you're trying to improve brand awareness, grow donor participation, or get more out of your digital marketing efforts.
University marketing is the set of strategies used to attract new students, retain and engage alumni, and build relationships with donors and community stakeholders. It spans paid advertising, content, events, email, social media, and direct outreach.
Several forces are shaping how universities approach marketing right now. One of the main factors is in how students and donors find and evaluate universities is changing. A school's digital presence, its website, search ranking, social media, and reputation on review platforms all influence decisions and are questions frequently asked on AI tools.
Over 80% of students now use AI tools to research programs. They ask questions about costs, outcomes, and campus life. A university website that doesn't answer those questions effectively to help AI-assisted searches or feed Answer Engine Optimization gets skipped.
Generation Alpha in particular, who entered high school in fall 2024, grew up watching short-form videos and expect two-way conversations. They want to know what a degree leads to in more specific terms. In this case, personalized and outcome-focused communication works well with them.
For advancement teams, the same principle applies. Alumni and donors expect to feel like the institution knows who they are. When communications feel mass-produced, engagement drops, and donor participation follows.
Advancement raised money. Marketing recruited students. For a long time, those were separate jobs with separate teams. But that separation is not so clear cut in 2026.
American colleges and universities received $61.5 billion in voluntary contributions in FY24, according to the CASE VSE report. That number grows at institutions that stay visible and credible all year round, and not just between campaigns.
Here's where the connection between marketing and fundraising becomes inevitable:
Advancement, alumni relations, admissions, and communications share more goals than most universities acknowledge. When those teams coordinate around a shared consistent message, their work compounds. When they don't, they often compete for the same audience's attention with conflicting messages.
These strategies focus on how advancement and alumni relations teams can use marketing to drive donor participation and deeper engagement.
Sending the same appeal to a recent graduate, parents, and a major donor is a missed opportunity for all 3. Effective segmentation divides audiences by graduation year, geographic location, interest area, giving history, and engagement level. Start with what's already in your CRM, even basic segmentation will get you good results.
Personalization today goes far beyond using someone's first name. It means referencing their class year, their program, or the cause they previously supported. Personalized email campaigns consistently outperform generic ones on click-through rates and on conversion to gifts.
Short-form video on TikTok and Instagram Reels generates the highest engagement rates among prospective students, who will be your future donors. It’s also an effective way to invite current students to be influencers or advocates for your campaign. On the other hand, longer-form impact videos work well for alumni and donor audiences. For example, showing how a scholarship changed a student's trajectory or how funding to a particular department helped keep an important program alive. Both formats outperform text-only content for emotional response and sharing.
Alumni give more when asked by people they know. Peer-to-peer campaigns, where engaged alumni solicit gifts from classmates and community members, have consistently raised more per campaign than institution-led appeals. They also extend reach into networks the advancement office can't access.
The less scripted and more user-generated your content is (while keeping the core message intact), the better. All audience segments are starting to prefer more organic content over polished scripts. Alumni sharing their own stories reinforces the value of an institution's network for current donors and giving-day prospects.
A giving day is a marketing campaign with a deadline. The urgency mechanics that make it work are the countdown timers, matching gift challenges, leaderboards, and other gamification elements on the fundraising page. They are the same tools any timed marketing campaign uses to drive action.
Thomas Aquinas College used this approach to achieve a 45% alumni donor participation rate, raising $142K+ from more than 650 donors.
New donors and alumni nowadays often use ChatGPT, Claude, and Google's AI Overview to research institutions and causes before they give. They ask questions like "what has [university] done with donations?". Answer Engine Optimization for AI-powered search tools is now as important as traditional SEO. So, if your institution's impact content, donor stories, and program outcomes aren't structured to answer those questions clearly, you won't appear in AI-generated responses. This means writing content that leads with specific answers: how gifts were used, what changed, and what outcomes were achieved.
Mentorship platforms, alumni directories, job boards, and affinity group networks give alumni reasons to stay connected all year round and not just during fundraising campaigns. Engaged alumni are significantly more likely to donate than those with no ongoing relationship to the institution.
Illinois Tech generated 123,000+ engagement activities in a single month after rebuilding its digital engagement strategy with Almabase.
Blog posts, impact reports, case studies, and research-backed thought leadership serve multiple purposes: they improve SEO, build institutional credibility, and give advancement teams shareable material for donor outreach. Content that addresses what prospective new donors actually care about will work wonders over generic promotional material (for example: student outcomes, program impact, institutional stewardship content over generic giving day numbers)
Which email led to which gift? Which event attendance correlated with a subsequent donation? What content on which platform led to the most amount of engagement? Advancement teams that track attribution across touchpoints can plan and allocate marketing budgets toward what works, and stop spending on what doesn't.
Most alumni and prospective donors open emails, visit giving pages, and register for events on their phones. Giving pages and event registration forms that aren't mobile-optimized see higher abandonment rates. Test the entire donor journey on a phone before every campaign launch.
Digital-only or mail-only campaigns never consistently outperform integrated approaches. A direct mail followed by a personalized email, or a social ad retargeting someone who visited your giving page but didn't donate, will outperform either channel working on its own. The next section covers the data.
According to the M+R Benchmarks 2026 report, direct mail revenue grew 9%, online giving revenue grew 15%, and email revenue grew 16% in 2025. Digital is growing faster, but direct mail is holding its own.
According to the same report, the average direct mail gift was $120. For every dollar raised online, nonprofits in the study raised $0.66 through direct mail. That's a channel that still drives real money and not one in decline, especially with donors who already know your institution.
But digital channels do bring different strengths to the table: lower costs, wider and more accurate targeting, real-time data, and the ability to reach alumni whose mailing addresses have long since changed.
The truth is, the right mix depends on your audience, budget, and your data quality. Older alumni tend to respond better to direct mail. Younger alumni and recent graduates engage more through digital. That's not a reason to run two separate campaigns. You can let channel selection be driven by the audience segment rather than what’s been the norm.
Generic goals like "Increase alumni engagement" are too broad to act on. Create clear and practical goals such as "Increase donor participation rate among alumni who graduated between 2015 and 2022 by 10% before our March giving day" which is actionable.
Here are some common goals you can include:
Different audiences need different messages, channels, and timing. Know who you're talking to before you decide what to say or where to say it. Typical higher ed audiences usually include:
Most universities lead with what they're proud of. Rankings, facilities, research output. But for some that might already be common knowledge and in any case, that's not always what your audience is there for.
A prospective student is curious about the costs involved, the campus life, and whether the degree will open doors for them. A donor wants to know if their last gift made a difference and if this one will too.
Build the message around what your audience is asking, not based on internal priorities or what your institution wants to say.
Channel selection should always follow your audience and your goal, not over team familiarity. Ask yourself,
A giving day campaign has vastly different channel needs than a graduate program recruitment campaign, and marketing is heavily dependent on choosing and making the most out of the right channels for each objective.
Based on what we’ve already discussed above, you'll need a combination of:
A smart team builds a measurement before launch. Set up A/B tests where volume permits and track which channels, subject lines, and messages are actually driving the outcomes important to you, not just opens and clicks, but registrations, gifts, and engagement activities.
Use your analytics tools during and after each campaign to review and carry the findings forward.
Your marketing strategy will continue to improve through several iterations. For longer campaigns, a team that collects data and iterates on the go tends to see better results.
Here are some common pitfalls that you or your team may want to avoid while marketing your university.
A 23-year-old recent graduate and a 60-year-old major donor share almost nothing as an audience. Generic communications that try to speak to everyone end up reaching no one. Basic segmentation by graduation year and giving history alone will improve your campaign performance.
A lot of advancement teams pour everything into a giving day and then go quiet for months. Donors who give once and hear nothing back are less likely to give again. A newsletter, an alumni spotlight, an event invitation, or impact stories - low-pressure touchpoints between campaigns keep the relationship warm.
High follower counts and strong open rates feel good. But they don't always translate to gifts. Track what actually matters: donor participation rates, year-over-year retention, cost per gift, and lifetime donor value. Track the entire journey, from first impression, to gift, to retention.
Donors want to know their gift made an impact. Show them, specifically: "Our endowment grew by X%" tells a donor little to nothing. "Here's a student whose scholarship changed what was possible for her" tells donors their impact.
A slow-loading giving page, a confusing registration process, or a broken confirmation email does more damage than a weak campaign. Donors who hit friction don't often come back. Walk through your own giving journey multiple times and fix on the go.
Some teams default to direct mail because that's what they've always done. Others go fully digital because it's cheaper. Both channels work. The best results come from using them together and letting your audience segment guide you.
Give current students, recent alumni, and active donors moments and opportunities worth sharing, since organic awareness grows when people with a genuine connection to your institution talk about it publicly. Build on that momentum through consistent content marketing across every channel and paid social advertising in your target markets.
Neither of them win out categorically. Both channels work and the right balance changes from one institution to another. Most modern approaches use them together, as in a direct mail piece followed by a personalized email to the same person lets each touchpoint build on the last and reinforces your message.
For undergraduate programs, Instagram and TikTok see the highest engagement. RNL's 2025 research found that social media mattered most for 56% of students when they first started thinking about college, and students tend to follow college accounts for organic student life content, application information, and major-specific content. For graduate and professional programs, LinkedIn usually performs better. You’ll want to pick two or three that match your audience and invest in them.
Define what ROI means for each campaign first, because it changes with the goal. A giving day might be measured by total revenue raised, cost per gift, or donor participation rate, while admissions might look at applications per dollar spent or yield improvement. Track the full funnel rather than the single channel that drove traffic, asking which touchpoints in what sequence led to the outcome you wanted. UTM parameters reveal which email, ad, or post someone clicked, CRM attribution reporting shows which touchpoints led to a gift, and A/B testing tells you which subject lines, messages, and formats perform best.
University Marketing Strategies: 12 Proven Tactics for Higher Ed
Whether it is to attract admissions, donations, or simply to raise your institution's brand, university marketing plays a big role in your institution's engagement strategy.
Prajnya Yelamali
July 8, 2026
12 minutes
For decades now, fundraising galas have been at the forefront of philanthropic events, and with good reason. It’s a format that combines formality, cause and accessible fun very effortlessly.
The best part about a fundraising gala is that it doesn’t have to follow specific guidelines; you can customise it however you want according to your needs and your donors. It can include just about anything ranging from live entertainment, food, presentations to auctions and awards.
And that’s also why the distinctness of your particular gala is all the more important. We’ll take a look into how these events are planned, and some unique ideas that you can adopt to engage your donors.
Galas have been a philanthropy event mainstay for a long time now, but it begs the question of whether they still provide ROI or just function as a general networking event.
The data on this leans towards the former. Overall, in 2025, about 77% of organizations met or exceeded their fundraising goals. The ones that organized purely in-person events or mixed it up with virtual/hybrid events were the standout performers.
But there’s more. Here are a couple of interesting takeaways from the same study:
This gives us two important takeaways: one being that events in general continue to be a crucial part of philanthropy. Secondly, galas meet both the criteria of being an in-person event as well as an event that can incorporate virtual or hybrid events (or purely any of the three).
All that is to say that galas continue to meet the preferences of donors as well as the innovations of fundraising teams, giving us an easy answer to our question above: Yes, galas are definitely worth it in 2026 and will in all likelihood, continue to be in the foreseeable future.
With events involving so much of spontaneous conversation, recreation, chance sign-ups, and curating experiences, it can be quite hard to see how extensive the benefits are and the areas they influence:
As you might know, a successful fundraising gala sometimes takes months and months of preparation. Coming up with plans and goals is easy enough, but with the amount of moving parts, keeping track of progress across all fronts can be confusing. The step-wise approach outlined below ensures you don’t leave any stones unturned.
Clearly define every team’s roles and responsibilities. A few key roles to include are:
It’s important to make sure you have enough event volunteers to pull the gala off without a hitch. You will inevitably need help with minor problems and logistics hurdles during the gala itself.
Go through past event data to set a realistic goal. Refresh your lists and segments, check ticket sales from previous galas, and take into account all the revenue sources. The key here is to have goals centered around net revenue, not total cashflow. Setting goals using the SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) can help a lot.
Getting this right is crucial, as your fundraising goals are directly dependent on the gala budget. Be as extensive as you can, and categorize expenses to track them better. Separate fixed costs (like venue, catering) from variable costs (merch, printing, staff) and compare it against projected revenue from all the different sources like tickets, donations, and auctions. If your expenses are greater than the potential earnings, reduce costs wherever possible without taking away from the core experience itself.
You don’t really have restrictions as fundraising galas can be held at any time of the year. So decide the date and venue based on your donors’ availability and proximity. You can gauge this through surveys/forms or analyzing participation data from previous events.
Depending on projected footfall, choose a venue that has enough space to comfortably accommodate everyone. Before you book it though, gather information on AV capabilities, official capacity, catering conditions, and Wi-Fi speed. Visit the venue in person and take note of power sources, layout, and parking as well. Evaluate the venue based on the participant’s convenience.
A good way to land on a feasible ticket price is to work backwards from the total cost of hosting the gala. A simple yet useful formula for calculating ticket prices is as follows:
(Total event cost + fundraising goal) / paid attendees = minimum ticket price
On average, gala tickets are usually in the $100 - $250 range. Of course, you also have to account for platform fees if you’re using ticket management software.
There’s really no need for all tickets to be the same price. There are also options like the pay-what-you-want model if you want to provide more flexibility to your attendees. Introduce tiered prices offering different perks. Give discounts to families, students, etc. Early-bird offers are actually great to get some initial ticket sales and momentum going.
Identify your event host early. Finding a good orator who is familiar with your organization, and does a good job of engaging the crowd, can take time. Create an inventory tracker and source equipment for entertainment (speakers, lights, stage props and the like).
If you’re running a live auction, then contact and book an auctioneer a few months before the event. Set procurement targets for auction items and include 3 or 4 premium ‘big-money’ items that bidders will contest over (like unique art, travel packages, etc.)
Prepare a full-fledged agenda for attendees to refer to and for you to plan around with.
Getting the right sponsor can not only reduce expenses, but also add to your marketing efforts. Depending on the scale of your gala, choose between local businesses and corporate sponsors. Having a company whose mission aligns with yours (creating affordable health-monitoring devices, for example) can provide a big boost in trust.
Have a tiered system for sponsorships, and clearly outline the different levels of visibility and recognition that your sponsors get like social media shoutouts, speaking slots, banners, and so on.
After you have your list of prospects, promote your gala in as many channels as you can. This means multiple teams with their own responsibilities. You’ll have to create email sequences, a social media post schedule, landing pages on your website, and visual media like billboards and posters. Marketing starts months before the gala. Start off by providing sneak peeks, and gradually reveal details as the event draws closer. Building anticipation takes time.
For your more affluent donors, send out personalized invites through their preferred mode of communication.
Open registration around the same time you send out invites. Collect key information such as meal preferences, payment methods, and additional guests to ensure a smooth experience during the gala. Save-the-date emails can be sent a couple of months prior.
Your registration process should only ask for necessary information and should be fairly easy to complete. As the event date approaches, send targeted reminders to certain segments.
Fundraising galas are heavily customizable, making it easy for you to incorporate themes and programs catered to your organization and its donors. Here are a few gala ideas that can create fun, memorable experiences that inspire your donors to contribute.
Silent auctions can be a great alternative to conventional ones as they don’t involve crowding, too much competition, or loud announcements. You’ll have to decide on a bidding app and pay a lot of attention to how the items are presented, but it is well worth the effort.
Combined with a cocktail party, this creates a really nice environment for interesting conversations, some friendly competition, and generates good interest for items in the auction. Attendees can bid at their convenience without the stress of time running out or the pressure of matching someone else’s amount on the spot.
This one changes the energy of the room entirely. Instead of a seated program with a single fundraising moment, guests rotate between blackjack tables, roulette, and poker throughout the evening, with chips that convert to charitable contributions at the end.
It's also one of the easier formats to get sponsors involved with. Each table can be presented by a different sponsor, giving them more visibility without cramping the experience. You could layer it with a James Bond or Las Vegas theme, but it’s entirely optional, the format holds up even without the extra theatrics.
Note: Check your local regulations on charity gaming events before you start planning as the rules vary quite a bit by state.
Commission local artists to create work live during the event. Guests watch the pieces come together over the course of the evening, and it goes up for auction towards the end of the night when emotional investment is at its peak.
It works particularly well because it gives people something to gather around and talk about, rather than just passive participation. Art is an important subject of interest for a lot of wealthy donors. But do keep in mind that the work should be compelling enough that guests actually want it, not just feel obligated to bid. Vetting the artists beforehand is not something to skip over.
A strong theme does something a generic gala dinner can't – it gives guests a reason to get excited before the event even starts. A masquerade or a black and white affair creates a strong visual identity perfectly suited for social media. They’re also extremely conversation friendly, with plenty of compliments and ice-breakers being thrown around.
The key is committing to it properly. Half-hearted theming, like placing a few props in a standard hotel ballroom can sour things. The decor, music, dress code, and even the menu should all ideally have the same aesthetic. For healthcare organizations especially, a well executed theme can shift the tone away from the clinical and toward something your donors look forward to all year.
If you’re stuck on deciding a theme or are looking for some inspiration, check out this list by the American Fundraising Association.
Keeping track of outreach sequences, responses, and registrations while simultaneously planning for event logistics can end up being messy and stressful. Almabase gets some weight off your shoulders by bringing together engagement, giving, and event planning under one roof.
Especially with a gala involving auctions and sponsorships, you’ll need varying registration forms and workflows. With the built-in event builder module you don’t have to worry about losing track of different groups of attendees and the relevant forms. Almabase can also accommodate complex tiered ticketing structures, which you will need to tackle for a large fundraising gala with multiple sub-events.
With Emily AI, you don’t have to take painstaking effort to manually personalize outreach for every segment of attendees. The context-aware AI drafts subject lines and event emails which you can further tweak to your liking.
During the gala itself, ground operations can be hard to manage even with enough volunteers. QR check-ins, payments, and on-site registrations are all automatically synced to your CRM when using Almabase. Additionally, seating assignments and name tags are easy to arrange.
As for tracking and collecting event data, you can do away with spreadsheets (well, most of them). Almabase lets you see registrations, revenue, attendance, and engagement data all at the same place. If you’re selling merch, tracking order count ensures that you’re prepared with just the right amount of stock next time around.
Fundraising galas inject some much needed spectacle and celebration when it comes to giving. They’ve been a mainstay in philanthropy for many decades, and will continue being so long into the future. Hopefully, you’ve gained some helpful pointers in planning one of your own and drawing people to your cause.
If you’re on the lookout for tools that could help your team and wish to learn more about Almabase, we’d suggest booking a personalized demo. Happy planning!
How To Plan a Fundraising Gala + Gala Ideas
The perfect blog for planning your next fundraising gala. We go over the essential steps to planning your next fundraising gala as well as creative ideas you can use.
Hari Govind
July 7, 2026
12 minutes
A decade ago, a university fundraising campaign was judged mainly by how much it raised. Today, donors care just as much about what that money actually does. According to the FY2025 CASE Insights on Voluntary Support of Education survey, 81% of all donations to higher education went toward specific purposes like student success, financial aid, and research.
The same CASE study found that while total alumni giving rose 10.9% in fiscal 2025, the number of alumni donors actually shrank, pushing the median gift per alumni donor up to $1,895. Institutions are now leaning on a narrower, higher-capacity donor base to keep their fundraising afloat.
That tension between deepening loyalty and widening the circle of who gives, is the real story of university fundraising in 2026. In this article, we'll explore how university fundraising programs are structured, the trends influencing higher education fundraising, and the strategies institutions are using right now to grow sustainably instead of just riding a good year.
There are many trends and even more moving parts shaping university fundraising at any given time. For the purpose of this blog, we’ll boil it down to four key trends that might prove vital for the next few years to come.
For years, the health of an alumni program was reduced to one number: what percentage of alumni gave back, and that number was built into university rankings for decades. Then, in 2023, U.S. News & World Report updated its methodology and removed alumni giving as a ranking indicator.
What does this mean for university fundraising?
Without a vanity number forcing every program toward "more donors, any donors," institutions can now build toward something sturdier: fewer transactional asks, more genuine relationship-building, and metrics that actually track whether someone feels connected to the place, not just whether they wrote a check this fiscal year. Building these holistic programs will also give institutions insights into retention tracking, lifetime value, and how many touchpoints, volunteering, mentoring, and events happen before anyone gets asked for money.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, effective for the 2026 tax year, shook up things this summer. Starting this year, non-itemizers can claim a new above-the-line deduction for cash gifts, up to $1,000 for single filers and $2,000 for joint filers. That's a real, if modest, incentive for exactly the broad-based donor pool that giving days and annual appeals are built to reach.
Itemizers got the opposite treatment with a new floor that disallows deductions on the first 0.5% of AGI given (that applies to every itemizer, regardless of income) plus a cap on the value of the deduction once a donor is in the top bracket. None of that kills major giving, but it does change the math around timing; bunching multiple years of giving into a single tax year now makes more sense for a donor who used to spread gifts evenly.
Recent CASE findings reported increases in bequest intentions, realized bequests, and unexpected estate gifts, an encouraging sign for institutions investing in long-term donor relationships.
This could be a significant and possibly unanticipated outcome of the ongoing Great Wealth Transfer. These findings point to a more comprehensive understanding of potential beneficiaries for these transfers, which goes beyond simply passing money from one generation to the next within a family to include possibly greater advantages to younger generations through gifts to institutions.
For advancement teams, it’s a powerful reminder that stewardship isn't all just retaining donors for the next campaign but about building relationships strong enough to become part of an institution’s legacy.
University fundraising is bringing in record levels of support, but the donor base behind that giving is becoming increasingly concentrated. According to the FY2025 CASE Insights on Voluntary Support of Education survey, 89% of funds raised came from just 2% of donors.
Major gifts will always play a critical role in university fundraising. But long-term fundraising health depends on more than a handful of generous supporters. To shift this donors-to-dollars imbalance trend, institutions need to think beyond the next campaign and focus on building a broader pipeline of engaged donors.
That work starts early. Today's student volunteer, reunion attendee, mentor, or first-time donor could become tomorrow's major donor, planned giver, or campaign champion. The challenge is creating meaningful opportunities for people to stay connected long before they're ready to make a significant gift.
By investing in engagement, stewardship, and community-building, universities can strengthen both donor participation and long-term philanthropic support.
With the trends established, let’s walk you through some best practices to adapt to what is shaping modern university fundraising:
Before launching a new campaign, planning a Giving Day, or investing in new technology, ask yourself a simple question: how confident are you in your donor data?
Outdated records, duplicate profiles, and incomplete engagement histories can quietly undermine fundraising efforts. When advancement teams don't have a clear picture of who their supporters are, personalization becomes difficult, and opportunities slip through the cracks.
A periodic data audit and clean-up may not be the most exciting fundraising project on your list, but it often delivers some of the highest returns. Clean data makes it easier to segment audiences, identify engaged supporters, and build stronger donor relationships over time. In fact, it forms the foundation of any successful fundraising strategy.
Let's be honest. Alumni don't attend events because they're fundraising events. They attend because they see value in them.
The value could be to connect with classmates, mentor students, celebrate milestones, engage with campus life in meaningful ways, or simply for the opportunity to feel connected to a community they care about. The fundraising often follows naturally because the relationship comes first.
The goal is to create experiences that alumni want to talk about long after they're over. When you build momentum through social media campaigns, alumni ambassadors, peer-to-peer outreach, challenges, and gamification elements that encourage participation and friendly competition, it encourages your alumni to take part. Institutions that follow this approach to plan their Giving Day turn their fundraising events into a community-wide effort rather than a one-day transaction.
Donors today don't just want to know that their contribution was received. They want to know what happened because of it. Did a student receive a scholarship? Did a research project move forward? Did a new program launch?
The challenge, of course, is making that impact visible at scale.
A thank-you email is a good start, but the strongest institutions go beyond acknowledgments and find ways to bring their impact to life:
Not every donor interacts the same with content. Some will watch a short video. Others will open an email, browse social media, attend a webinar, or listen to a podcast featuring alumni and faculty.
The institutions breaking records lately aren't relying on a single channel and hoping it scales. They're stacking peer-to-peer storytelling, short-form video, text alerts, and live updates throughout a campaign, so a donor encounters the ask in more than one place, in more than one format. Text messages alone still see open rates above 98%, genuinely underused for the urgent, time-bound moment a Giving Day creates, while a platform like TikTok carries video storytelling in a way a static email never will.
The goal is to meet a donor in whichever channel they're paying attention to, rather than asking them to come find you in yours. It works best since it allows institutions to meet supporters where they already are while reinforcing the same message across different channels.
Imagine a donor is ready to give.
How many clicks does it take? Can they donate from their phone? Support multiple funds in a single transaction? Set up a recurring gift without jumping through hoops? Complete the process in under two minutes?
As fundraising programs become more sophisticated, even small inefficiencies can create challenges for both donors and advancement teams. That's exactly what Elon University experienced. For years, the institution relied on an in-house Giving Day platform and faced setbacks. After moving to a purpose-built platform, the result wasn't just a smoother Giving Day. It was a record-breaking one.
For the first time in its Giving Day’s history, it removed a kind of friction that had nothing to do with money and everything to do with decision fatigue. Mobile-first, frictionless, and flexible aren't three separate features. They help you get out of the way of a donor who's already decided to give. When donors can give easily, and advancement teams can spend less time troubleshooting systems, everyone can focus on what matters most: building relationships and inspiring support.
We’d like to also briefly go through some of the common challenges currently faced in university fundraising before we move on.
University fundraising continues to benefit from generous major donors. But relying too heavily on a small group of supporters can create long-term risk.
According to the FY2025 CASE Insights on Voluntary Support of Education survey, 89% of funds raised came from just 2% of donors. That's an impressive testament to the impact of major gifts, but it also raises an important question: How to set right this imbalance?
The instinct is usually to ignore and lean harder into the major donors already giving. The better move, and the one a lot of programs skip, is paying real attention to the low- and mid-value donors who are the ones actually holding up your giving rate when you zoom out. Building a healthy donor pipeline takes time. Alumni don't become major donors overnight. They are built through years of engagement, participation, volunteering, mentoring, and smaller acts of support.
Fundraising has become much more sophisticated over the past decade. Advancement teams are expected to manage Giving Days, alumni engagement programs, donor stewardship, digital communications, events, major gifts, planned giving, and increasingly complex reporting requirements. At many institutions, however, team sizes haven't grown at the same pace.
As a result, many advancement professionals find themselves balancing competing priorities while trying to deliver personalized experiences at scale.
The institutions navigating this challenge most effectively aren't necessarily doing more. They're finding ways to focus their time where it matters most and using technology to eliminate unnecessary administrative work.
Your alumni nowadays are receiving fundraising appeals, event invitations, newsletters, volunteer requests, and Giving Day campaigns not just from your institution, but from every cause and organization that has information about them.
Even highly engaged supporters can begin to tune out when every message competes for their attention. The resulting problem (or situation) is that more communication doesn't always create more engagement.
If every interaction feels like an ask, supporters may begin to disengage. That's why many advancement teams are shifting their focus from communication frequency to communication value. Are you giving alumni enough reasons to stay connected when you're not asking for a donation?
Sometimes the most meaningful message isn't a fundraising appeal at all. It could be a student success story, an invitation to mentor, an exclusive alumni event, or an update on a project they helped support.
Most institutions report a positive view of AI in fundraising, and plenty have already deployed it somewhere in donor communications. According to CCS's 2026 data, staff rating their knowledge of AI as mostly or fully knowledgeable doubled to 20%, yet 65% of organizations report no AI training. It flags the gap underneath that enthusiasm: limited training, unclear governance, and weak coordination across teams are slowing how much value institutions actually get from it. The risk isn't that advancement teams adopt AI too slowly. It's that they adopt it without anyone deciding who owns it, what it's allowed to say to a donor, or how two officers are supposed to use the same tool without stepping on each other.
Reading through this blog, you might have noticed something. None of the strategies we've discussed are particularly controversial. Most advancement professionals already know they should steward donors better, engage young alumni earlier, personalize communications, and make giving easier. The challenge is execution, and this is where the right technology earns its place.
With Almabase, universities can:
Almabase was built for advancement teams that want to spend less time stitching together spreadsheets, exporting reports, and managing disconnected systems, and more time focusing on strategy, engagement, and fundraising.
Whether you're running a Giving Day, building alumni communities, managing events, or tracking engagement, now may be a good time to evaluate whether your current fundraising approach and the tools supporting it are helping you get there.
Book a personalized demo to learn how Almabase helps advancement teams engage alumni, streamline fundraising, and build stronger donor relationships.
University Fundraising in 2026: Strategies, Trends & Best Practices
A look into the strategies and trends shaping university fundraising in 2026 and the best practices that will allow your institution to stand out.
Sharada Koti
June 29, 2026
12 minutes
You may notice that throughout this article, we use the term “investor” when referring to “donors.” This is because Convergent believes in reframing charitable institutions as valuable community assets worthy of investment. By positioning donors as investors, we focus on sustainable funding rather than one-time gifts.
Your educational institution is a pillar of your community. However, you may undermine its stability by approaching your alumni annual fund with a transactional mindset, focusing solely on raising funds rather than on developing relationships with supporters. As a result, you may exhaust your investors and create volatile cash flows in your nonprofit’s financial accounts.
For this reason, it is necessary to shift away from a transactional relationship (in which giving is driven by the expectation of receiving something in return, such as a tax write-off) and toward a sustainable partnership, which is rooted in shared values and strategic alignment.
This guide provides actionable steps to realign your alumni annual fund giving with long-term, mission-critical outcomes. When you treat alumni as true financial partners, you can secure robust, predictable funding that sustains your institution for decades to come.
Different investors have their own reasons for giving, so analyzing giving behavior is an important step to tailoring your investment-driven approach. For example, the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy reported that younger generations tend to support causes tied to social impact and advocacy, so if you want people in this demographic to give more, you have to highlight your mission and the impact you’ve had in your community in your outreach materials.
No two investors are alike. To understand why your supporters choose to contribute, try the following strategies:
Incorporate these insights into your nonprofit’s constituent relationship management system (CRM), so your team can segment your audiences accurately. By the time the alumni annual fundraising comes around, you can deploy tailored messaging, thereby drastically improving conversion rates.
Establish your institution’s value by demonstrating strict alignment between your mission, fundraising objectives, and the outcomes delivered to the community. For example, if your organization is planning a STEM initiative for first-generation students, you can frame it like this:
When sharing the impact report with your investors, spotlight a specific narrative (e.g., a student who benefited directly from the funds), then pair that with hard numbers (e.g., “we’ve helped 100 students achieve their dreams like [Student X]”). By incorporating data in the narrative, you’re showing investors that their contributions fund tangible results.
Realigning your alumni annual fund with strategic outcomes can be challenging because there are several moving parts to consider. For this reason, Convergent recommends conducting a development audit, which provides a clear, objective assessment of your current fundraising efforts and a strategic roadmap to improve them. The result is that everyone in your team is aligned with your goals, and you can build a stronger case for investment.
Shifting from a traditional donation mindset to an investment value proposition fundamentally changes the dynamic between your institution and your alumni. When you operate with a donation mindset, you inherently position the educational institution as a charity in need of a handout. Additionally, a donation mindset relies heavily on emotional appeals and transactional exchanges (e.g., giving a t-shirt or a tax write-off in exchange for money), which ultimately exhaust supporters.
When you reframe your outreach and treat alumni as long-term investors and stakeholders, you unlock distinct benefits that secure sustainable funding, such as:
To complete your shift from a transactional to an investment-driven mindset, you’ll need to audit your current communication templates and eliminate passive phrasing. For example, refer to gifts and donations as “partnerships” instead. So, rather than saying “Your gifts are needed to help maintain our current programs,” you can say, “Your partnership with our organization has helped expand our scholarship endowment and directly funds our new STEM initiative.” This subtle linguistic shift empowers alumni, making them feel like co-architects of the institution's future.
In addition to launching capital campaigns, your organization should integrate workplace giving into your alumni annual fund strategy. This is because corporate philanthropy programs, such as matching gifts and volunteer grants, significantly amplify the ROI of each contribution.
That said, not many people know about workplace giving initiatives; in fact, studies show that nearly 80% of donors are unaware of whether their company offers a matching gift program. Because of this, you must educate your investors about these programs by:
By leveraging corporate philanthropy programs, you’re shifting the giving narrative away from individual charitable donations toward larger-scale, sustainable institutional investments. In other words, you’re ensuring no money is left on the table, while maximizing the impact of your existing investor base.
As an educational institution, you’re an indispensable community asset, and your funding strategies must reflect this vital role. Transitioning from transactional appeals to a sustainable, investment-focused model ensures that you maintain long-term partnerships with alumni investors. By prioritizing data-driven stewardship and clear ROI, your future fundraising efforts will build a resilient foundation for generations to come.
Transforming Your Alumni Annual Fund for Sustainability
Transition alumni giving from transactional exchanges to sustainable investments. Discover how to rethink your alumni annual fund for long-term ROI here.
Fundraising
Brian Abernathy
July 10, 2026
12 minutes
Your university’s marketing strategies shape whether donors feel connected to you. They also determine whether a prospective student finds your institution when they start searching, or finds a competitor instead. Done well, they benefit both enrollment numbers and campaign totals. Because guess what? Advancement and admissions teams now compete for the same audience's attention, trust, and money, whether they've coordinated around that fact or not.
In this blog, we’ll go over the best marketing strategies for your university whether you're trying to improve brand awareness, grow donor participation, or get more out of your digital marketing efforts.
University marketing is the set of strategies used to attract new students, retain and engage alumni, and build relationships with donors and community stakeholders. It spans paid advertising, content, events, email, social media, and direct outreach.
Several forces are shaping how universities approach marketing right now. One of the main factors is in how students and donors find and evaluate universities is changing. A school's digital presence, its website, search ranking, social media, and reputation on review platforms all influence decisions and are questions frequently asked on AI tools.
Over 80% of students now use AI tools to research programs. They ask questions about costs, outcomes, and campus life. A university website that doesn't answer those questions effectively to help AI-assisted searches or feed Answer Engine Optimization gets skipped.
Generation Alpha in particular, who entered high school in fall 2024, grew up watching short-form videos and expect two-way conversations. They want to know what a degree leads to in more specific terms. In this case, personalized and outcome-focused communication works well with them.
For advancement teams, the same principle applies. Alumni and donors expect to feel like the institution knows who they are. When communications feel mass-produced, engagement drops, and donor participation follows.
Advancement raised money. Marketing recruited students. For a long time, those were separate jobs with separate teams. But that separation is not so clear cut in 2026.
American colleges and universities received $61.5 billion in voluntary contributions in FY24, according to the CASE VSE report. That number grows at institutions that stay visible and credible all year round, and not just between campaigns.
Here's where the connection between marketing and fundraising becomes inevitable:
Advancement, alumni relations, admissions, and communications share more goals than most universities acknowledge. When those teams coordinate around a shared consistent message, their work compounds. When they don't, they often compete for the same audience's attention with conflicting messages.
These strategies focus on how advancement and alumni relations teams can use marketing to drive donor participation and deeper engagement.
Sending the same appeal to a recent graduate, parents, and a major donor is a missed opportunity for all 3. Effective segmentation divides audiences by graduation year, geographic location, interest area, giving history, and engagement level. Start with what's already in your CRM, even basic segmentation will get you good results.
Personalization today goes far beyond using someone's first name. It means referencing their class year, their program, or the cause they previously supported. Personalized email campaigns consistently outperform generic ones on click-through rates and on conversion to gifts.
Short-form video on TikTok and Instagram Reels generates the highest engagement rates among prospective students, who will be your future donors. It’s also an effective way to invite current students to be influencers or advocates for your campaign. On the other hand, longer-form impact videos work well for alumni and donor audiences. For example, showing how a scholarship changed a student's trajectory or how funding to a particular department helped keep an important program alive. Both formats outperform text-only content for emotional response and sharing.
Alumni give more when asked by people they know. Peer-to-peer campaigns, where engaged alumni solicit gifts from classmates and community members, have consistently raised more per campaign than institution-led appeals. They also extend reach into networks the advancement office can't access.
The less scripted and more user-generated your content is (while keeping the core message intact), the better. All audience segments are starting to prefer more organic content over polished scripts. Alumni sharing their own stories reinforces the value of an institution's network for current donors and giving-day prospects.
A giving day is a marketing campaign with a deadline. The urgency mechanics that make it work are the countdown timers, matching gift challenges, leaderboards, and other gamification elements on the fundraising page. They are the same tools any timed marketing campaign uses to drive action.
Thomas Aquinas College used this approach to achieve a 45% alumni donor participation rate, raising $142K+ from more than 650 donors.
New donors and alumni nowadays often use ChatGPT, Claude, and Google's AI Overview to research institutions and causes before they give. They ask questions like "what has [university] done with donations?". Answer Engine Optimization for AI-powered search tools is now as important as traditional SEO. So, if your institution's impact content, donor stories, and program outcomes aren't structured to answer those questions clearly, you won't appear in AI-generated responses. This means writing content that leads with specific answers: how gifts were used, what changed, and what outcomes were achieved.
Mentorship platforms, alumni directories, job boards, and affinity group networks give alumni reasons to stay connected all year round and not just during fundraising campaigns. Engaged alumni are significantly more likely to donate than those with no ongoing relationship to the institution.
Illinois Tech generated 123,000+ engagement activities in a single month after rebuilding its digital engagement strategy with Almabase.
Blog posts, impact reports, case studies, and research-backed thought leadership serve multiple purposes: they improve SEO, build institutional credibility, and give advancement teams shareable material for donor outreach. Content that addresses what prospective new donors actually care about will work wonders over generic promotional material (for example: student outcomes, program impact, institutional stewardship content over generic giving day numbers)
Which email led to which gift? Which event attendance correlated with a subsequent donation? What content on which platform led to the most amount of engagement? Advancement teams that track attribution across touchpoints can plan and allocate marketing budgets toward what works, and stop spending on what doesn't.
Most alumni and prospective donors open emails, visit giving pages, and register for events on their phones. Giving pages and event registration forms that aren't mobile-optimized see higher abandonment rates. Test the entire donor journey on a phone before every campaign launch.
Digital-only or mail-only campaigns never consistently outperform integrated approaches. A direct mail followed by a personalized email, or a social ad retargeting someone who visited your giving page but didn't donate, will outperform either channel working on its own. The next section covers the data.
According to the M+R Benchmarks 2026 report, direct mail revenue grew 9%, online giving revenue grew 15%, and email revenue grew 16% in 2025. Digital is growing faster, but direct mail is holding its own.
According to the same report, the average direct mail gift was $120. For every dollar raised online, nonprofits in the study raised $0.66 through direct mail. That's a channel that still drives real money and not one in decline, especially with donors who already know your institution.
But digital channels do bring different strengths to the table: lower costs, wider and more accurate targeting, real-time data, and the ability to reach alumni whose mailing addresses have long since changed.
The truth is, the right mix depends on your audience, budget, and your data quality. Older alumni tend to respond better to direct mail. Younger alumni and recent graduates engage more through digital. That's not a reason to run two separate campaigns. You can let channel selection be driven by the audience segment rather than what’s been the norm.
Generic goals like "Increase alumni engagement" are too broad to act on. Create clear and practical goals such as "Increase donor participation rate among alumni who graduated between 2015 and 2022 by 10% before our March giving day" which is actionable.
Here are some common goals you can include:
Different audiences need different messages, channels, and timing. Know who you're talking to before you decide what to say or where to say it. Typical higher ed audiences usually include:
Most universities lead with what they're proud of. Rankings, facilities, research output. But for some that might already be common knowledge and in any case, that's not always what your audience is there for.
A prospective student is curious about the costs involved, the campus life, and whether the degree will open doors for them. A donor wants to know if their last gift made a difference and if this one will too.
Build the message around what your audience is asking, not based on internal priorities or what your institution wants to say.
Channel selection should always follow your audience and your goal, not over team familiarity. Ask yourself,
A giving day campaign has vastly different channel needs than a graduate program recruitment campaign, and marketing is heavily dependent on choosing and making the most out of the right channels for each objective.
Based on what we’ve already discussed above, you'll need a combination of:
A smart team builds a measurement before launch. Set up A/B tests where volume permits and track which channels, subject lines, and messages are actually driving the outcomes important to you, not just opens and clicks, but registrations, gifts, and engagement activities.
Use your analytics tools during and after each campaign to review and carry the findings forward.
Your marketing strategy will continue to improve through several iterations. For longer campaigns, a team that collects data and iterates on the go tends to see better results.
Here are some common pitfalls that you or your team may want to avoid while marketing your university.
A 23-year-old recent graduate and a 60-year-old major donor share almost nothing as an audience. Generic communications that try to speak to everyone end up reaching no one. Basic segmentation by graduation year and giving history alone will improve your campaign performance.
A lot of advancement teams pour everything into a giving day and then go quiet for months. Donors who give once and hear nothing back are less likely to give again. A newsletter, an alumni spotlight, an event invitation, or impact stories - low-pressure touchpoints between campaigns keep the relationship warm.
High follower counts and strong open rates feel good. But they don't always translate to gifts. Track what actually matters: donor participation rates, year-over-year retention, cost per gift, and lifetime donor value. Track the entire journey, from first impression, to gift, to retention.
Donors want to know their gift made an impact. Show them, specifically: "Our endowment grew by X%" tells a donor little to nothing. "Here's a student whose scholarship changed what was possible for her" tells donors their impact.
A slow-loading giving page, a confusing registration process, or a broken confirmation email does more damage than a weak campaign. Donors who hit friction don't often come back. Walk through your own giving journey multiple times and fix on the go.
Some teams default to direct mail because that's what they've always done. Others go fully digital because it's cheaper. Both channels work. The best results come from using them together and letting your audience segment guide you.
Give current students, recent alumni, and active donors moments and opportunities worth sharing, since organic awareness grows when people with a genuine connection to your institution talk about it publicly. Build on that momentum through consistent content marketing across every channel and paid social advertising in your target markets.
Neither of them win out categorically. Both channels work and the right balance changes from one institution to another. Most modern approaches use them together, as in a direct mail piece followed by a personalized email to the same person lets each touchpoint build on the last and reinforces your message.
For undergraduate programs, Instagram and TikTok see the highest engagement. RNL's 2025 research found that social media mattered most for 56% of students when they first started thinking about college, and students tend to follow college accounts for organic student life content, application information, and major-specific content. For graduate and professional programs, LinkedIn usually performs better. You’ll want to pick two or three that match your audience and invest in them.
Define what ROI means for each campaign first, because it changes with the goal. A giving day might be measured by total revenue raised, cost per gift, or donor participation rate, while admissions might look at applications per dollar spent or yield improvement. Track the full funnel rather than the single channel that drove traffic, asking which touchpoints in what sequence led to the outcome you wanted. UTM parameters reveal which email, ad, or post someone clicked, CRM attribution reporting shows which touchpoints led to a gift, and A/B testing tells you which subject lines, messages, and formats perform best.
University Marketing Strategies: 12 Proven Tactics for Higher Ed
Whether it is to attract admissions, donations, or simply to raise your institution's brand, university marketing plays a big role in your institution's engagement strategy.
Alumni Engagement
Prajnya Yelamali
July 8, 2026
12 minutes
For decades now, fundraising galas have been at the forefront of philanthropic events, and with good reason. It’s a format that combines formality, cause and accessible fun very effortlessly.
The best part about a fundraising gala is that it doesn’t have to follow specific guidelines; you can customise it however you want according to your needs and your donors. It can include just about anything ranging from live entertainment, food, presentations to auctions and awards.
And that’s also why the distinctness of your particular gala is all the more important. We’ll take a look into how these events are planned, and some unique ideas that you can adopt to engage your donors.
Galas have been a philanthropy event mainstay for a long time now, but it begs the question of whether they still provide ROI or just function as a general networking event.
The data on this leans towards the former. Overall, in 2025, about 77% of organizations met or exceeded their fundraising goals. The ones that organized purely in-person events or mixed it up with virtual/hybrid events were the standout performers.
But there’s more. Here are a couple of interesting takeaways from the same study:
This gives us two important takeaways: one being that events in general continue to be a crucial part of philanthropy. Secondly, galas meet both the criteria of being an in-person event as well as an event that can incorporate virtual or hybrid events (or purely any of the three).
All that is to say that galas continue to meet the preferences of donors as well as the innovations of fundraising teams, giving us an easy answer to our question above: Yes, galas are definitely worth it in 2026 and will in all likelihood, continue to be in the foreseeable future.
With events involving so much of spontaneous conversation, recreation, chance sign-ups, and curating experiences, it can be quite hard to see how extensive the benefits are and the areas they influence:
As you might know, a successful fundraising gala sometimes takes months and months of preparation. Coming up with plans and goals is easy enough, but with the amount of moving parts, keeping track of progress across all fronts can be confusing. The step-wise approach outlined below ensures you don’t leave any stones unturned.
Clearly define every team’s roles and responsibilities. A few key roles to include are:
It’s important to make sure you have enough event volunteers to pull the gala off without a hitch. You will inevitably need help with minor problems and logistics hurdles during the gala itself.
Go through past event data to set a realistic goal. Refresh your lists and segments, check ticket sales from previous galas, and take into account all the revenue sources. The key here is to have goals centered around net revenue, not total cashflow. Setting goals using the SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) can help a lot.
Getting this right is crucial, as your fundraising goals are directly dependent on the gala budget. Be as extensive as you can, and categorize expenses to track them better. Separate fixed costs (like venue, catering) from variable costs (merch, printing, staff) and compare it against projected revenue from all the different sources like tickets, donations, and auctions. If your expenses are greater than the potential earnings, reduce costs wherever possible without taking away from the core experience itself.
You don’t really have restrictions as fundraising galas can be held at any time of the year. So decide the date and venue based on your donors’ availability and proximity. You can gauge this through surveys/forms or analyzing participation data from previous events.
Depending on projected footfall, choose a venue that has enough space to comfortably accommodate everyone. Before you book it though, gather information on AV capabilities, official capacity, catering conditions, and Wi-Fi speed. Visit the venue in person and take note of power sources, layout, and parking as well. Evaluate the venue based on the participant’s convenience.
A good way to land on a feasible ticket price is to work backwards from the total cost of hosting the gala. A simple yet useful formula for calculating ticket prices is as follows:
(Total event cost + fundraising goal) / paid attendees = minimum ticket price
On average, gala tickets are usually in the $100 - $250 range. Of course, you also have to account for platform fees if you’re using ticket management software.
There’s really no need for all tickets to be the same price. There are also options like the pay-what-you-want model if you want to provide more flexibility to your attendees. Introduce tiered prices offering different perks. Give discounts to families, students, etc. Early-bird offers are actually great to get some initial ticket sales and momentum going.
Identify your event host early. Finding a good orator who is familiar with your organization, and does a good job of engaging the crowd, can take time. Create an inventory tracker and source equipment for entertainment (speakers, lights, stage props and the like).
If you’re running a live auction, then contact and book an auctioneer a few months before the event. Set procurement targets for auction items and include 3 or 4 premium ‘big-money’ items that bidders will contest over (like unique art, travel packages, etc.)
Prepare a full-fledged agenda for attendees to refer to and for you to plan around with.
Getting the right sponsor can not only reduce expenses, but also add to your marketing efforts. Depending on the scale of your gala, choose between local businesses and corporate sponsors. Having a company whose mission aligns with yours (creating affordable health-monitoring devices, for example) can provide a big boost in trust.
Have a tiered system for sponsorships, and clearly outline the different levels of visibility and recognition that your sponsors get like social media shoutouts, speaking slots, banners, and so on.
After you have your list of prospects, promote your gala in as many channels as you can. This means multiple teams with their own responsibilities. You’ll have to create email sequences, a social media post schedule, landing pages on your website, and visual media like billboards and posters. Marketing starts months before the gala. Start off by providing sneak peeks, and gradually reveal details as the event draws closer. Building anticipation takes time.
For your more affluent donors, send out personalized invites through their preferred mode of communication.
Open registration around the same time you send out invites. Collect key information such as meal preferences, payment methods, and additional guests to ensure a smooth experience during the gala. Save-the-date emails can be sent a couple of months prior.
Your registration process should only ask for necessary information and should be fairly easy to complete. As the event date approaches, send targeted reminders to certain segments.
Fundraising galas are heavily customizable, making it easy for you to incorporate themes and programs catered to your organization and its donors. Here are a few gala ideas that can create fun, memorable experiences that inspire your donors to contribute.
Silent auctions can be a great alternative to conventional ones as they don’t involve crowding, too much competition, or loud announcements. You’ll have to decide on a bidding app and pay a lot of attention to how the items are presented, but it is well worth the effort.
Combined with a cocktail party, this creates a really nice environment for interesting conversations, some friendly competition, and generates good interest for items in the auction. Attendees can bid at their convenience without the stress of time running out or the pressure of matching someone else’s amount on the spot.
This one changes the energy of the room entirely. Instead of a seated program with a single fundraising moment, guests rotate between blackjack tables, roulette, and poker throughout the evening, with chips that convert to charitable contributions at the end.
It's also one of the easier formats to get sponsors involved with. Each table can be presented by a different sponsor, giving them more visibility without cramping the experience. You could layer it with a James Bond or Las Vegas theme, but it’s entirely optional, the format holds up even without the extra theatrics.
Note: Check your local regulations on charity gaming events before you start planning as the rules vary quite a bit by state.
Commission local artists to create work live during the event. Guests watch the pieces come together over the course of the evening, and it goes up for auction towards the end of the night when emotional investment is at its peak.
It works particularly well because it gives people something to gather around and talk about, rather than just passive participation. Art is an important subject of interest for a lot of wealthy donors. But do keep in mind that the work should be compelling enough that guests actually want it, not just feel obligated to bid. Vetting the artists beforehand is not something to skip over.
A strong theme does something a generic gala dinner can't – it gives guests a reason to get excited before the event even starts. A masquerade or a black and white affair creates a strong visual identity perfectly suited for social media. They’re also extremely conversation friendly, with plenty of compliments and ice-breakers being thrown around.
The key is committing to it properly. Half-hearted theming, like placing a few props in a standard hotel ballroom can sour things. The decor, music, dress code, and even the menu should all ideally have the same aesthetic. For healthcare organizations especially, a well executed theme can shift the tone away from the clinical and toward something your donors look forward to all year.
If you’re stuck on deciding a theme or are looking for some inspiration, check out this list by the American Fundraising Association.
Keeping track of outreach sequences, responses, and registrations while simultaneously planning for event logistics can end up being messy and stressful. Almabase gets some weight off your shoulders by bringing together engagement, giving, and event planning under one roof.
Especially with a gala involving auctions and sponsorships, you’ll need varying registration forms and workflows. With the built-in event builder module you don’t have to worry about losing track of different groups of attendees and the relevant forms. Almabase can also accommodate complex tiered ticketing structures, which you will need to tackle for a large fundraising gala with multiple sub-events.
With Emily AI, you don’t have to take painstaking effort to manually personalize outreach for every segment of attendees. The context-aware AI drafts subject lines and event emails which you can further tweak to your liking.
During the gala itself, ground operations can be hard to manage even with enough volunteers. QR check-ins, payments, and on-site registrations are all automatically synced to your CRM when using Almabase. Additionally, seating assignments and name tags are easy to arrange.
As for tracking and collecting event data, you can do away with spreadsheets (well, most of them). Almabase lets you see registrations, revenue, attendance, and engagement data all at the same place. If you’re selling merch, tracking order count ensures that you’re prepared with just the right amount of stock next time around.
Fundraising galas inject some much needed spectacle and celebration when it comes to giving. They’ve been a mainstay in philanthropy for many decades, and will continue being so long into the future. Hopefully, you’ve gained some helpful pointers in planning one of your own and drawing people to your cause.
If you’re on the lookout for tools that could help your team and wish to learn more about Almabase, we’d suggest booking a personalized demo. Happy planning!
How To Plan a Fundraising Gala + Gala Ideas
The perfect blog for planning your next fundraising gala. We go over the essential steps to planning your next fundraising gala as well as creative ideas you can use.
Events
Hari Govind
July 7, 2026
12 minutes
A decade ago, a university fundraising campaign was judged mainly by how much it raised. Today, donors care just as much about what that money actually does. According to the FY2025 CASE Insights on Voluntary Support of Education survey, 81% of all donations to higher education went toward specific purposes like student success, financial aid, and research.
The same CASE study found that while total alumni giving rose 10.9% in fiscal 2025, the number of alumni donors actually shrank, pushing the median gift per alumni donor up to $1,895. Institutions are now leaning on a narrower, higher-capacity donor base to keep their fundraising afloat.
That tension between deepening loyalty and widening the circle of who gives, is the real story of university fundraising in 2026. In this article, we'll explore how university fundraising programs are structured, the trends influencing higher education fundraising, and the strategies institutions are using right now to grow sustainably instead of just riding a good year.
There are many trends and even more moving parts shaping university fundraising at any given time. For the purpose of this blog, we’ll boil it down to four key trends that might prove vital for the next few years to come.
For years, the health of an alumni program was reduced to one number: what percentage of alumni gave back, and that number was built into university rankings for decades. Then, in 2023, U.S. News & World Report updated its methodology and removed alumni giving as a ranking indicator.
What does this mean for university fundraising?
Without a vanity number forcing every program toward "more donors, any donors," institutions can now build toward something sturdier: fewer transactional asks, more genuine relationship-building, and metrics that actually track whether someone feels connected to the place, not just whether they wrote a check this fiscal year. Building these holistic programs will also give institutions insights into retention tracking, lifetime value, and how many touchpoints, volunteering, mentoring, and events happen before anyone gets asked for money.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, effective for the 2026 tax year, shook up things this summer. Starting this year, non-itemizers can claim a new above-the-line deduction for cash gifts, up to $1,000 for single filers and $2,000 for joint filers. That's a real, if modest, incentive for exactly the broad-based donor pool that giving days and annual appeals are built to reach.
Itemizers got the opposite treatment with a new floor that disallows deductions on the first 0.5% of AGI given (that applies to every itemizer, regardless of income) plus a cap on the value of the deduction once a donor is in the top bracket. None of that kills major giving, but it does change the math around timing; bunching multiple years of giving into a single tax year now makes more sense for a donor who used to spread gifts evenly.
Recent CASE findings reported increases in bequest intentions, realized bequests, and unexpected estate gifts, an encouraging sign for institutions investing in long-term donor relationships.
This could be a significant and possibly unanticipated outcome of the ongoing Great Wealth Transfer. These findings point to a more comprehensive understanding of potential beneficiaries for these transfers, which goes beyond simply passing money from one generation to the next within a family to include possibly greater advantages to younger generations through gifts to institutions.
For advancement teams, it’s a powerful reminder that stewardship isn't all just retaining donors for the next campaign but about building relationships strong enough to become part of an institution’s legacy.
University fundraising is bringing in record levels of support, but the donor base behind that giving is becoming increasingly concentrated. According to the FY2025 CASE Insights on Voluntary Support of Education survey, 89% of funds raised came from just 2% of donors.
Major gifts will always play a critical role in university fundraising. But long-term fundraising health depends on more than a handful of generous supporters. To shift this donors-to-dollars imbalance trend, institutions need to think beyond the next campaign and focus on building a broader pipeline of engaged donors.
That work starts early. Today's student volunteer, reunion attendee, mentor, or first-time donor could become tomorrow's major donor, planned giver, or campaign champion. The challenge is creating meaningful opportunities for people to stay connected long before they're ready to make a significant gift.
By investing in engagement, stewardship, and community-building, universities can strengthen both donor participation and long-term philanthropic support.
With the trends established, let’s walk you through some best practices to adapt to what is shaping modern university fundraising:
Before launching a new campaign, planning a Giving Day, or investing in new technology, ask yourself a simple question: how confident are you in your donor data?
Outdated records, duplicate profiles, and incomplete engagement histories can quietly undermine fundraising efforts. When advancement teams don't have a clear picture of who their supporters are, personalization becomes difficult, and opportunities slip through the cracks.
A periodic data audit and clean-up may not be the most exciting fundraising project on your list, but it often delivers some of the highest returns. Clean data makes it easier to segment audiences, identify engaged supporters, and build stronger donor relationships over time. In fact, it forms the foundation of any successful fundraising strategy.
Let's be honest. Alumni don't attend events because they're fundraising events. They attend because they see value in them.
The value could be to connect with classmates, mentor students, celebrate milestones, engage with campus life in meaningful ways, or simply for the opportunity to feel connected to a community they care about. The fundraising often follows naturally because the relationship comes first.
The goal is to create experiences that alumni want to talk about long after they're over. When you build momentum through social media campaigns, alumni ambassadors, peer-to-peer outreach, challenges, and gamification elements that encourage participation and friendly competition, it encourages your alumni to take part. Institutions that follow this approach to plan their Giving Day turn their fundraising events into a community-wide effort rather than a one-day transaction.
Donors today don't just want to know that their contribution was received. They want to know what happened because of it. Did a student receive a scholarship? Did a research project move forward? Did a new program launch?
The challenge, of course, is making that impact visible at scale.
A thank-you email is a good start, but the strongest institutions go beyond acknowledgments and find ways to bring their impact to life:
Not every donor interacts the same with content. Some will watch a short video. Others will open an email, browse social media, attend a webinar, or listen to a podcast featuring alumni and faculty.
The institutions breaking records lately aren't relying on a single channel and hoping it scales. They're stacking peer-to-peer storytelling, short-form video, text alerts, and live updates throughout a campaign, so a donor encounters the ask in more than one place, in more than one format. Text messages alone still see open rates above 98%, genuinely underused for the urgent, time-bound moment a Giving Day creates, while a platform like TikTok carries video storytelling in a way a static email never will.
The goal is to meet a donor in whichever channel they're paying attention to, rather than asking them to come find you in yours. It works best since it allows institutions to meet supporters where they already are while reinforcing the same message across different channels.
Imagine a donor is ready to give.
How many clicks does it take? Can they donate from their phone? Support multiple funds in a single transaction? Set up a recurring gift without jumping through hoops? Complete the process in under two minutes?
As fundraising programs become more sophisticated, even small inefficiencies can create challenges for both donors and advancement teams. That's exactly what Elon University experienced. For years, the institution relied on an in-house Giving Day platform and faced setbacks. After moving to a purpose-built platform, the result wasn't just a smoother Giving Day. It was a record-breaking one.
For the first time in its Giving Day’s history, it removed a kind of friction that had nothing to do with money and everything to do with decision fatigue. Mobile-first, frictionless, and flexible aren't three separate features. They help you get out of the way of a donor who's already decided to give. When donors can give easily, and advancement teams can spend less time troubleshooting systems, everyone can focus on what matters most: building relationships and inspiring support.
We’d like to also briefly go through some of the common challenges currently faced in university fundraising before we move on.
University fundraising continues to benefit from generous major donors. But relying too heavily on a small group of supporters can create long-term risk.
According to the FY2025 CASE Insights on Voluntary Support of Education survey, 89% of funds raised came from just 2% of donors. That's an impressive testament to the impact of major gifts, but it also raises an important question: How to set right this imbalance?
The instinct is usually to ignore and lean harder into the major donors already giving. The better move, and the one a lot of programs skip, is paying real attention to the low- and mid-value donors who are the ones actually holding up your giving rate when you zoom out. Building a healthy donor pipeline takes time. Alumni don't become major donors overnight. They are built through years of engagement, participation, volunteering, mentoring, and smaller acts of support.
Fundraising has become much more sophisticated over the past decade. Advancement teams are expected to manage Giving Days, alumni engagement programs, donor stewardship, digital communications, events, major gifts, planned giving, and increasingly complex reporting requirements. At many institutions, however, team sizes haven't grown at the same pace.
As a result, many advancement professionals find themselves balancing competing priorities while trying to deliver personalized experiences at scale.
The institutions navigating this challenge most effectively aren't necessarily doing more. They're finding ways to focus their time where it matters most and using technology to eliminate unnecessary administrative work.
Your alumni nowadays are receiving fundraising appeals, event invitations, newsletters, volunteer requests, and Giving Day campaigns not just from your institution, but from every cause and organization that has information about them.
Even highly engaged supporters can begin to tune out when every message competes for their attention. The resulting problem (or situation) is that more communication doesn't always create more engagement.
If every interaction feels like an ask, supporters may begin to disengage. That's why many advancement teams are shifting their focus from communication frequency to communication value. Are you giving alumni enough reasons to stay connected when you're not asking for a donation?
Sometimes the most meaningful message isn't a fundraising appeal at all. It could be a student success story, an invitation to mentor, an exclusive alumni event, or an update on a project they helped support.
Most institutions report a positive view of AI in fundraising, and plenty have already deployed it somewhere in donor communications. According to CCS's 2026 data, staff rating their knowledge of AI as mostly or fully knowledgeable doubled to 20%, yet 65% of organizations report no AI training. It flags the gap underneath that enthusiasm: limited training, unclear governance, and weak coordination across teams are slowing how much value institutions actually get from it. The risk isn't that advancement teams adopt AI too slowly. It's that they adopt it without anyone deciding who owns it, what it's allowed to say to a donor, or how two officers are supposed to use the same tool without stepping on each other.
Reading through this blog, you might have noticed something. None of the strategies we've discussed are particularly controversial. Most advancement professionals already know they should steward donors better, engage young alumni earlier, personalize communications, and make giving easier. The challenge is execution, and this is where the right technology earns its place.
With Almabase, universities can:
Almabase was built for advancement teams that want to spend less time stitching together spreadsheets, exporting reports, and managing disconnected systems, and more time focusing on strategy, engagement, and fundraising.
Whether you're running a Giving Day, building alumni communities, managing events, or tracking engagement, now may be a good time to evaluate whether your current fundraising approach and the tools supporting it are helping you get there.
Book a personalized demo to learn how Almabase helps advancement teams engage alumni, streamline fundraising, and build stronger donor relationships.
University Fundraising in 2026: Strategies, Trends & Best Practices
A look into the strategies and trends shaping university fundraising in 2026 and the best practices that will allow your institution to stand out.
Fundraising
Sharada Koti
June 29, 2026
12 minutes
In FY2025, philanthropic giving to U.S. colleges reached $78.8 billion. However,institutions are becoming increasingly reliant on a smaller pool of generous donors. With alumni expecting more relevant communication, and meaningful events than ever before, it’s the perfect time to try something new to bring new donors to the table.
With this blog, we want to give colleges a fresh set of ideas for their fundraisers. We’ll share 22 fundraising ideas for college students, clubs, sports teams, campus groups, and alumni teams.
This section is for student groups that need to raise money without turning fundraising into a full-time job. Many clubs are paying for travel, event supplies, speaker fees, or day-to-day operations with small teams.
A themed trivia night works well because it gives people a clear reason to attend beyond donating. Charge a small team entry fee and host it in a familiar campus space. Pick a theme that matches your audience, such as pop culture, sports, campus history, or academic departments. To increase turnout, ask local businesses to donate prizes. This keeps costs low and makes the event easier to promote.
Illinois State University’s College of Business hosted Trivia Night as part of Business Week 2026. The event invited students and staff to form teams of five to eight people, with a $40 team registration fee. Net proceeds supported the College of Business Pay It Forward student fund, which helps students with professional development needs.
A talent show gives students a reason to participate and invite their own circles. Sell tickets in advance and allow optional donations at checkout. You can include music, comedy, dance, spoken word, or fashion. The benefit is reach. Every performer becomes a promoter because they have a personal reason to share the event.
Yale School of Management hosted Star Search on March 26, 2026, as an annual talent show benefiting the Internship Fund. The Arts & Culture Club and Internship Fund brought the SOM community together for bands, singers, musical theater pieces, and other performances. The fund helped students pursue social impact internships by reducing financial barriers.
A battle of the bands works best when the event feels like a campus experience rather than a donation request. Invite student bands to compete, sell tickets, and let the audience vote for the winner. Sponsorships can add another revenue stream if local businesses want visibility with students. This is one of the stronger campus fundraising ideas when your goal is attendance, energy, and social sharing.
The University of Alabama’s 2025 Battle of the Bands raised $21,000 for the Joe Espy Needs-Based Scholarship. The campaign combined ticket sales, business sponsorships, student organization sponsorship packages, T-shirt sales, an IFC cup event, and an Instagram bingo card Venmo drive.
A campus carnival works when several small activities come together under one clear cause. Clubs can charge an entry fee and sell game tickets for booths, food stalls, prize tables, or vendor spots. The format spreads work across many volunteers. It also gives students a reason to stay longer, which can increase both participation and total giving.
Duke Physician Assistant Class of 2026 hosted an on-campus carnival called At Last. The class organized the event in honor of DPAP graduate Adam Cady and connected it to his health equity nonprofit. The carnival raised $1,373, which went toward the organization’s work with underserved athletic communities.
This section is for new clubs, small student groups, and individuals who need to raise money without a large starting budget. These cheap college fundraising ideas work because they rely on simple setup, quick promotion, and easy participation.
A QR tip jar turns spare-change giving into a digital campaign. Create a donation page, generate a QR code, and place it where students already spend time. Add a leaderboard by dorm, department, class year, or club to make giving visible. This keeps the ask small while still creating momentum. It works especially well for fundraising ideas for college students because people can give in seconds from their phones.
NC State’s Wilson College of Textiles led the university’s Day of Giving 2026 leaderboard. The college raised $8,709,476 from 549 gifts and earned the top university-wide spot. Its challenge wins and leaderboard award added $8,990 in extra support for the Dean’s Textiles Innovation Fund.
A bake sale still works when the pricing is simple and the purpose is clear. Set a low price per item so students can participate without thinking too much about cost. Place the table in a high-traffic building and accept digital payments. This removes friction for students who do not carry cash. You can still invite supporters to add an extra donation at checkout.
Drexel University’s MCH Student Organization held a fall bake sale fundraiser on November 19, 2024, in Nesbitt Hall Lobby. The group sold baked treats from noon to 4 p.m. and accepted cash and Drexel UStore payments. Funds were directed toward upcoming MCHSO events.
A thrift swap is low-cost because the inventory comes from student donations. Ask participants to donate gently used clothing, books, accessories, or shoes before the event. Then open a pop-up shop where students pay a small entry fee or buy additional items. It works well for student fundraising ideas because it connects affordability with sustainability. The format also gives the club a visual event that is easy to promote on social media.
Texas Woman’s University’s Asian Student Association hosted ASA Thrift Swap on March 3 and 4, 2026. Students brought gently used items like clothing, books, shoes, accessories, stationery, and unused products to donate or exchange. The group charged a $3 entry fee and allowed up to 10 swapped items, with extra items priced at $3 each.
Candy grams are easy to run because the product is small, affordable, and tied to a clear occasion. Set a simple price per gram and let buyers add a recipient name with a short message. This works especially well around Valentine’s Day, finals week, or move-in season. It also gives student groups a fundraiser that feels personal without needing a large venue or complex planning.
The University of Alabama’s New College Council ran a Valentine Candy Gram Fundraiser in February 2024. The group charged $1 per candy gram and used the Valentine’s Day timing to make the offer easy to understand. The low price point helped students participate without much planning or expense.
Athletics fundraising has a different kind of pressure. Team travel, equipment, tournament fees, training needs, and program costs come back every season. That is why college sports fundraising ideas need to create reliable income, rather than depend on one-off bake sales.
An a-thon pledge campaign turns athletic effort into a fundraising hook. Athletes collect pledges based on laps, miles, reps, goals, or minutes completed. This works well because the ask feels tied to the team’s actual work. It also gives donors a simple reason to support the program. The format can run in person while donations are collected online, which helps parents and alumni participate from anywhere.
The University of Rhode Island Club Swim Team held its first Swimathon on October 30, 2024. Team members swam as many laps as possible for one hour. Donors pledged mostly around $0.50 per lap. The team completed 4,311 laps, swam 107,775 yards, and raised $2,500 for competitions and a nationals trip.
An hour-a-thon works when a team needs fast results from direct outreach. Student-athletes prepare donor lists in advance, then spend one focused hour texting or calling supporters. The short window creates urgency. It also helps coaches turn fundraising into a team activity instead of a task assigned to one person. This is one of the more practical fundraising ideas for college sports teams because it works across multiple programs.
Chowan University Athletics ran an Hour-A-Thon fundraiser in September 2024. Student-athletes contacted potential donors during a one-hour fundraising blitz for their specific programs. By September 26, the department had raised $67,000 from 788 donors across 16 programs, with funds supporting travel, program purchases, and improvements.
A signed merchandise auction works well when a team has access to items people cannot easily buy elsewhere. This can include signed jerseys, team gear, experience packages, or sports memorabilia donated by supporters. Run the auction online or at an athletics event to widen access. The benefit is clear: a single high-interest item can raise more than many small sales.
Skagit Valley College hosted its 21st Annual Athletic Auction on February 3, 2024. Auction items included a Matty Beniers autographed jersey, a Julio Rodríguez autographed jersey, travel packages, and team experiences. More than 275 attendees participated, and the event raised over $143,000 for student-athletes and athletics operations.
A sports giving day works best when athletes and alumni help drive the ask. Give each advocate a personal fundraising page, a clear team goal, and easy messages to share. Add mini-challenges during the day to keep energy high. This blends peer-to-peer fundraising with school pride, which is useful for teams that need support from alumni, parents, and fans beyond campus.
Boston University highlighted Kevyn Garcia as a Giving Day advocate for the BU Women’s Volleyball team in 2024. She coordinated with the team, set small giving goals, used social posts, and kept supporters updated through a group chat. In 24 hours, she raised 217 gifts and $6,270.
Some college fundraising events work because people want to share them. These ideas are visual, easy to join, and built around participation. That makes them a strong fit for Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and student group channels.
A balloon pop fundraiser works because it turns giving into a quick campus activity. Place small prize notes, challenge prompts, or donation amounts inside balloons. Students pay to pop one and win whatever is inside. You can run the same idea as a table game during a larger giving day or campus fair. It draws attention fast and creates short video moments that students are likely to share.
Indiana State University included games like Balloon Pop during Give to Blue Day 2025. The Student Philanthropy Organization also helped run campus events such as Cash Cab and Party at the Fountain to engage students in philanthropy. The 24-hour campaign raised $1,506,090 from 1,937 donors across all 50 states and five countries.
A hashtag challenge gives people one simple action to take online. Ask students, alumni, faculty, and friends to post a photo or short video tied to the cause. Then connect the post to a small gift or a nomination prompt. The benefit is reach. Each post puts the fundraiser in front of a new audience and makes social media fundraising feel more personal than a general campaign post.
Eastern Mennonite University ran LovEMU Giving Day 2024 on April 10. The campaign asked students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends to share what they loved about EMU using #EMUGivingDay and #StrongerTogether. The 24-hour effort raised $340,512 and unlocked more than $125,000 in challenge-match funds.
A faculty vs. students competition works because it adds a familiar campus rivalry to the fundraiser. Choose a format that is easy to watch and simple to explain. Trivia, games, academic challenges, or department contests can all work. The value comes from participation. Students show up to support peers, faculty bring their own networks, and the event gives campus channels a fun story to post.
Purdue University’s Society of Physics Students ran a Faculty vs. Students Fundraiser in 2025. Students competed against professors in physics-related challenges to raise money for the TechPoint Foundation for Youth. The event supported STEM learning opportunities for underserved and underrepresented students in Indiana.
Digital-first fundraising is now essential for college fundraising because one campaign often needs to reach students, parents, alumni, faculty, and friends at the same time. Online giving tools make that possible without limiting participation to people who are on campus.
Peer-to-peer fundraising works by giving trusted supporters their own role in the campaign. Student ambassadors, alumni volunteers, faculty, or team captains share personal links with their networks. This makes the ask feel warmer than a general email from the institution. It also helps colleges reach people who may not follow official channels but will respond to someone they know.
Cornell Giving Day 2024 used nearly 600 student and alumni Giving Day Champions to drive personal outreach. Champions shared campaign links, encouraged their networks to give, and helped create momentum beyond Cornell’s central channels. The campaign brought in 18,692 donors in just over 24 hours.
A giving day or crowdfunding campaign works best when the goal is specific and the timeline is short. Choose a funding priority that students and alumni can understand quickly. Add a donation page, campaign updates, and a visible progress tracker. The benefit is focus. A clear deadline gives people a reason to act now instead of waiting for a later appeal.
UNLV promoted Rebels Give 2026 as a 24-hour crowdfunding tradition supporting scholarships and programs across campus. The campaign invited donors to support causes that mattered to them through one coordinated giving window. Since 2018, Rebels Give had inspired more than 13,000 gifts and raised over $3.2 million.
A virtual giving day becomes stronger when donors can see progress in real time. Use leaderboards by college, class year, department, or team to make participation visible. Add matching gifts and time-based challenges to create extra urgency. This works because donors are not only giving to a cause. They are helping their group reach a public goal.
Virginia Tech’s 2026 Giving Day used leaderboard competition and time-based challenges to drive participation across colleges, teams, and programs. More than 25,000 Hokies gave during the campaign, raising over $17 million. The result set a new participation record and showed how visible competition can push a virtual campaign beyond a standard online appeal.
Alumni fundraising works best when the ask builds on an existing relationship. Advancement and alumni relations teams are not just raising money for one event. They are building long-term participation. These ideas are designed to activate alumni through shared history, visible impact, and peer-led giving.
Alumni giving increased 7.5% in FY2024, making alumni one of the most important sources of support for higher education, while also showing that relationship-led campaigns still have room to grow when the ask feels personal.
Project-based crowdfunding works well when alumni can choose a student program they care about. Build a campaign around specific funds, clubs, research projects, scholarships, or student services. Then ask alumni advocates to share those projects with classmates and affinity groups. The benefit is relevance. Donors can support a priority that feels personal, instead of responding to a broad institutional ask.
The University of Montana’s 2025 crowdfunding campaign invited alumni, parents, friends, and community members to support 15 campus projects. Donors could also sign up as advocates to share the campaign through personal networks. The campaign focused on student-led and campus-based priorities, which made alumni giving feel more direct and project-specific.
An annual fund day of giving works when alumni can see what their participation makes possible. Build the campaign around a clear institutional priority and use ambassadors to extend reach. Add student thank-you moments so donors feel the connection between their gift and the people it supports. This format helps annual giving teams bring urgency to a fund that needs consistent support.
UVA Darden’s Day for Darden 2025 raised a record $1.37 million from 1,570 donors for the Darden Annual Fund. The campaign showed visible student gratitude through thank-you cards and donor appreciation moments. The result connected alumni giving to student experience while strengthening participation in a core annual fund campaign.
A race-to-reunion challenge builds urgency before alumni arrive on campus. Set a deadline before reunion weekend and ask eligible classes to raise participation or dollars by then. Use class standings to keep momentum visible. The benefit is timing. Alumni are already thinking about their college experience, which makes the giving message feel more connected to the moment.
Fordham University’s Rise to Reunion 2026 invited reunion-year classes ending in 1 or 6 to join a friendly giving challenge. Alumni were encouraged to support the Fordham Fund before reunion. The campaign used class-year identity and reunion timing to increase annual fund support while keeping the ask simple and easy to understand.
A reunion giving challenge ties fundraising to class identity. Invite milestone classes to compete on participation, total gifts, or progress toward a class goal. Count gifts to any eligible fund so alumni can support the area that matters most to them. This format works because it gives alumni a reason to reconnect with classmates while helping the institution grow annual giving participation.
Houghton University’s 2026 Reunion Giving Campaign invited classes celebrating five-year anniversaries to take part in a reunion giving challenge. Gifts to any area of the institution counted toward each class total. The campaign used class-based competition to encourage participation and gave reunion-year alumni a clear reason to give before gathering.
Also read → 20 best middle school fundraising ideas in 2026 | 15 proven fundraising ideas for schools that work in 2026 | 25+ spring fundraising ideas for teams in 2026
Once a college fundraiser moves beyond a small campus activity, coordination becomes the hard part. Teams need donation pages, peer outreach, segmented communication, matching gifts, progress tracking, and reporting to work together. Almabase helps advancement teams manage those moving pieces in one higher-ed-focused platform.
With its university giving day platform, colleges can run large-scale giving days with peer-to-peer pages, college-level sub-campaigns, real-time leaderboards, and flexible matching gift configurations. This helps teams create urgency while giving different schools, departments, and affinity groups their own space to participate.
Almabase also supports:
Minnesota State University Moorhead deployed Almabase to improve both fundraising performance and post-campaign operations. After switching from Blackbaud NetCommunity, MSUM raised over $750K on Giving Day and grew donations 44% year over year. With TrueSync for Raiser’s Edge NXT, the team cut gift reconciliation from 4 weeks to 4 days, saved 128+ hours per campaign, and reinvested that time into stewardship that generated $40K in follow-on gifts.
For teams evaluating fundraising platforms, Almabase helps advancement and alumni relations teams run fundraising campaigns that are organized, scalable, and built around the relationships that make long-term giving possible.
If you’re ready to run fundraising campaigns with more structure and less manual work, book a demo with Almabase and find out how it can support your college fundraising strategy.
The best fundraising ideas for college clubs include trivia nights, restaurant profit-sharing partnerships, peer-to-peer giving pages, silent auctions, and branded merchandise campaigns. The right choice depends on the club’s audience, budget, volunteer capacity, and how quickly the funds are needed.
QR tip jars, study snack-grams, coffee pop-ups, and campus clothing swaps are strong zero- or low-cost options. Digital peer-to-peer fundraising pages can also work well because they do not require inventory, venue costs, or upfront spending when the right platform is in place.
Use a clear campaign hashtag, short videos, peer sharing through personal fundraising pages, and real-time progress updates. Peer promotion usually performs better than general broadcast-style posts because the ask comes from someone the audience already knows.
Good fundraising ideas for college sports teams include pledge-a-thons, alumni vs. current team games, local business sponsorship packages, and crowdfunding campaigns tied to travel or equipment needs. The strongest campaigns make the fundraising goal specific, so donors know exactly what their gift supports.
Alumni fundraising is more relationship-driven and usually needs segmentation, multi-channel outreach, and a clear impact story before the ask. Student fundraising is often more event-driven and works well when there is peer energy, campus visibility, and a short deadline.
A successful college fundraiser needs a specific goal, a hard deadline, visible progress tracking, and genuine peer promotion. These elements make the campaign easier to understand, easier to share, and more urgent to support.
22 College Fundraising Ideas for Students, Clubs, and Alumni in 2026
Explore 22 college fundraising ideas for clubs, sports teams, students, and alumni, with real examples and tips to run stronger campaigns.
Fundraising
Almabase
June 24, 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
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