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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
A well run reunion event offers a seamless experience to your attendees. They register once, select a few events for the weekend, receive timely reminders, check in and move smoothly from one gathering to the next. From their perspective, the whole thing only takes a few seconds and minimal effort.
Behind the scenes, however, is an enormous amount of coordination happening across teams and timelines.
For smaller gatherings, lightweight event tools may still work perfectly well. But once reunions become larger, multi-event set ups, or tied to broader advancement goals, managing registrations or ticketing is just one cog in the wheel. That’s when many alumni and advancement teams eventually move toward platforms designed specifically for reunion and alumni engagement workflows. In this blog, we’ll break down the platforms best suited for different types of reunion events, team structures, and engagement goals.
Many teams begin with the tools already available internally, like spreadsheets for guest tracking, email platforms for outreach, online forms for RSVPs, and a ticketing platform layered on top to handle payments. And that set up works well for a while too.
Most event platforms are designed to handle transactions: collect registrations, process payments, send confirmation emails. While this works just fine for one-off events, reunions call for something more.
Most advancement and alumni teams are already familiar with the friction points:
Individually, none of these problems are unusual. But together, a combination of any of these issues creates significant overhead. This holds especially true for leaner teams, when the issue becomes even more visible after the event ends. They might find themselves having to spend days cleaning spreadsheets, confirming attendance records, updating CRM systems, and piecing together engagement data that should have been captured automatically.
Reunions are complex and involve long-term alumni relationships, donor engagement, segmented outreach, multi-day programming, and post-event reporting that extends well beyond the weekend itself. They require platforms that will understand the context behind why all this needs to be connected.
For example, knowing that 400 people registered for a reunion is useful. But knowing which classes had the strongest turnout, which former volunteers re-engaged, or which lapsed donors attended for the first time in years is significantly more valuable.
The same applies operationally. Generic platforms often require teams to manage communications, reporting, and CRM updates separately, creating duplicate work across systems that don’t naturally connect to one another.
That’s why many institutions eventually move toward platforms designed specifically for alumni engagement and reunion management. It makes a huge difference to reduce manual coordination, improve data continuity, and make reunions easier to manage as part of a larger alumni strategy.
Milestone reunions sit at the intersection of emotional significance and operational intensity. These are your 10th, 25th, 50th year reunions.
You need class-year segmentation for targeted invitations, multi-day session management, integrated giving pages and CRM sync so reunion attendance feeds your donor records. Here are our recommendations:
Almabase is particularly well suited for milestone reunions because it brings event management and alumni fundraising into one place. Alumni can sign up for multiple reunion activities, contribute to a class gift campaign, and receive communication tailored to their class year, all within the same experience. On the admin side, QR code check-ins and automatic CRM syncing make it easier to track both attendance and giving, which is especially useful when reunion engagement feeds into long-term donor stewardship efforts. Custom pricing offered.
Eventbrite is a practical option for smaller institutions or volunteer-led reunion committees where the goal is mainly registration and payment collection rather than advancement integration. The platform is for free events; and fees apply for paid ticketing, which can be borne by the organizers or passed on to attendees.
Slate is a unified, enterprise-grade CRM tool built exclusively for educational institutions that manages the entire student-to-alumnus lifecycle within a single database. For institutions already using Slate, reunion data flows natively into existing student-to-alumni records with absolutely no external CRM sync needed. The platform offers heavy-duty fundraising support with dedicated giving portals, customized gift processing, and major gift pipeline management. It’s a great fit for institutions that want a complete ecosystem to bridge admissions, student engagement, and advanced donor stewardship. Base licensing starts at $30,000/year.
Multi-day reunions are a little tricky to coordinate, because they demand seamless coordination across fragmented schedules, multiple venues, and diverse participant needs. Your platform should be able to handle sub-events, inventory management for ticketed activities, provide attendees with scheduling tools so they can build their own agenda, and give organizers visibility into logistics in real time.
Almabase brings event management and multi-day scheduling into one place. This means attendees can sign-up for personalized itineraries across sessions, receive real-time updates about capacity and changes, and organizers track attendance by session and segment. Capacity management, dietary tracking, and tiered pricing (full weekend vs. individual days) are straightforward to configure. Another great feature is the CRM sync which captures which alumni attended which sessions, giving organisers a comprehensive picture of attendance.
Cvent is purpose-built for multi-venue, multi-day events with precision logistics. Its session management capabilities include capacity limits, waitlists, and real-time room changes. Attendees can even use a mobile app to build schedules; while organizers see live dashboards by session and venue. It also offers venue integration, dietary management, badge printing, and check-in workflows, which are all native to the platform. The pricing for Cvent is based on event size and features.
These are the more happening, lively events: Homecoming weekends, sports alumni reunions, performing arts gatherings, and these are usually built around movement and participation rather than a single formal gathering.
Almabase is a strong fit for institutions running reunion weekends with multiple parallel events and alumni segments. You can create separate registration flows, send targeted communication to different affinity groups, track attendance across activities, and connect participation back to alumni engagement records. It works especially well when the reunion weekend also includes fundraising or volunteer engagement initiatives. Almabase offers custom pricing.
Swoogo is best suited for highly programmed reunion weekends with complex schedules and session tracks. Teams can use the platform to build personalized agendas, move between activities, and manage multi-day itineraries through one system. Their pricing starts around $11,800 a year for a single-user license.
Whova is a useful option for highly social reunions where interaction between attendees is part of the experience itself. Features like attendee networking, live messaging, digital photo galleries, and mobile directories make it well suited for homecoming-style events. Custom pricing is offered based on requirements.
Many reunions are designed to bring entire alumni communities together, including spouses, children, volunteers, and local alumni chapters. These events usually require flexible registrations, family-friendly ticketing, and simple communication workflows.
WildApricot is a natural fit for community-oriented reunions because it combines event management with membership and volunteer coordination. Family registrations, recurring events, and simple payment collection make it particularly useful for alumni associations and smaller institutions trying to manage ongoing community engagement beyond a single reunion weekend. Pricing starts around $60/month.
Glue Up works well for alumni associations with active local chapters and recurring community events. The platform focuses heavily on member engagement and ongoing relationship management over one-off events. Custom pricing is offered for enterprise level subscriptions, while the ‘Plus’ tier is priced at $4500 a year.
Using Mailchimp and Google Forms together is a practical setup for smaller reunion teams with limited budgets. This combination makes for a nifty set up when the reunion is simple enough that teams mainly need RSVP collection, reminder emails, and attendee exports. Mailchimp is free for up to 250 contacts; paid plans start at $13/month and scale based on your chosen features.
Reunions under the five-year milestone and professional networking events for recent graduates have a different priority: career connection and networking over nostalgia. Attendees want a professional directory, session selection (panels, workshops, speaker talks), and a way to connect with people in their industry after the event.
Graduway is designed specifically for career-focused alumni engagement. Its tools are geared toward helping alumni build meaningful professional connections through mentorship programs, networking communities, alumni directories, and ongoing career engagement initiatives. The platform offers custom enterprise pricing.
Almabase is particularly useful when institutions want professional reunions to feed into broader alumni engagement and advancement efforts. Teams can segment alumni by industry or graduation year, manage multiple networking sessions, track attendee engagement, and continue communication after the event through the same platform. Custom pricing.
Built for institutional database workflows, Encompass (formerly iModules) is a great fit for professional reunions with multiple panels, workshops, or speaker tracks. Attendees can register for individual sessions, while its built-in capacity controls help manage high-demand events more smoothly. It also automatically logs attendance and engagement data back into advancement records. Pricing for the platform depends on the broader institutional enterprise license.
Not every alumnus can fly back to campus. You need virtual and/or hybrid attendance registration separate from in-person, live streaming or integration with a streaming tool, the ability to capture virtual check-ins for your CRM, and post-event recordings so remote alumni can watch sessions they missed.
Hopin is best suited for large hybrid reunion experiences with multiple simultaneous sessions and networking layers. Features like virtual expo halls, breakout spaces, and structured networking make it work more like a digital conference than a webinar being held with minimal interaction. Pricing starts at $99/month per organizer.
Airmeet is a good option if you have an interaction-heavy virtual reunion in mind. Social lounges and networking tables create smaller conversational spaces, which helps remote attendees participate more actively instead of simply watching a stream. Entry tiers start around $167/month.
As reunions have evolved over the years, so too have the platforms that they are hosted on. However, there are always new as well as persistent issues for which you will want the right features to fit your needs. Here are a few features worth looking into:
Especially when the reunion is a large one, registrations, check-ins, and RSVP management is often a big headache both for staff and attendees if not done well. When platforms aren’t built for that complexity, your staff end up having to compensate with manual work: tracking waitlists in spreadsheets, reconciling duplicate records before CRM uploads, or maintaining separate documents just to manage attendee data accurately.
A strong reunion platform keeps all of your ticketing, payments, and gifts connected in a single system, handling pricing, refunds, add-ons, as well as reporting together so staff aren’t left reconciling records after the event ends.
Reunion communication begins long before the event itself. A reunion platform should be able to keep communication connected to registration data, allowing updates and messaging to adjust automatically based on schedules, roles, and attendee preferences.
Mobile check-in reduces friction by allowing volunteers to scan QR codes, process attendees quickly, and log attendance automatically in real time.
A reunion platform becomes even more relevant for large, multi-day reunions because it keeps attendance connected directly to attendee records from the start, making it easier to understand who attended, which sessions saw engagement, and where follow-up should happen next.
Reunions offer institutions a rare opportunity to understand alumni behavior in real time. A strong reunion platform integrates cleanly with systems like Raiser's Edge NXT, Salesforce, or HubSpot so reunion engagement becomes part of the institution’s larger alumni record instead of remaining isolated event data.
Don’t start by comparing feature lists side by side. The decision usually becomes clearer once the event objectives and operational constraints are visible. Think about what the reunion is trying to achieve, who is running it, and how much of the work needs to connect back into long-term alumni data.
In practice, the “right” platform is the one that reduces the most friction in your specific setup, rather than the one with the most capabilities on paper.
Reunions that are focused on increasing attendance depend heavily on segmentation and communication. Getting the right message to the right cohort at the right time has more impact than any individual feature in the registration flow.
For teams focused on reducing administrative load, the issue is not necessarily the event itself, but the amount of manual reconciliation required afterward. If reunion data doesn’t flow back into the CRM, the operational work doesn’t disappear but moves to a later stage in the process.
Allow your team size and structure to shape platform choice! Smaller alumni teams need systems that can be set up quickly and managed without dedicated technical support. In those environments, simplicity and speed matter more than deep configuration options, because the same person managing the reunion is often also handling communications, donor outreach, and reporting.
Larger advancement teams operate under a different set of constraints. They have larger targets tied to advancement goals which require deeper CRM integration, more structured data flows, and systems that can support multiple stakeholders working in parallel.
Data requirements are one of the main deciding factors. Some institutions need full CRM synchronization, where registrations, attendance, and gift activity flow automatically into systems like Raiser's Edge NXT.
Other teams operate with simpler needs: clean registration exports, basic attendance tracking, and manual uploads into existing systems. In those cases, lighter platforms can be perfectly sufficient without introducing unnecessary complexity.
Confusing registration flows, unclear session structures, or poorly timed communication show up quickly in abandonment rates. In case alumni have not interacted with institutional systems in years, clarity and simplicity in the registration process will go a long way.
The same applies at check-in: a smooth entry experience sets a very different tone compared to visible queues or manual lookups at the door.
What happens afterward is just as likely to determine whether the event contributes to long-term engagement or remains an isolated activity in the calendar. Attendance data, donor participation, volunteer sign-ups, and communication history all become more valuable when they can be carried forward into future outreach.
In practice, the most useful systems make post-event work feel like a continuation of the same workflow. When reunion data feeds cleanly into CRM records and follow-up communications, each event builds on the last.
Yes, particularly for institutions on Raiser's Edge NXT. Almabase covers registration, ticketing, segmented email, mobile check-in, peer-to-peer fundraising, and CRM sync in one system. The bi-directional RE NXT integration means reunion attendance flows into constituent records automatically. Request a demo to see how the event and CRM workflows connect.
They can handle basic ticketing. They can't segment alumni by class year, sync attendance to an advancement CRM, or connect the event to a giving campaign. For a small, informal reunion without advancement goals, a generic platform works. Once class-year data, giving campaigns, or donor stewardship are involved, purpose-built tools are worth it.
Mostly in how success gets measured. Institutional reunions typically include a fundraising component tracked against engagement and giving metrics in a CRM. Nonprofit reunions center on volunteer engagement and cause-based giving. The platform features that matter shift accordingly.
Not for simple events. A Google Form and Venmo can get 40 people to a dinner. The complexity scales when you're managing class-year segmentation, multi-day scheduling, tiered pricing, CRM data requirements, and post-event reporting. At that scale, doing it manually costs more in staff hours than the platform does.
Choosing the right reunion platform comes down to the goals of the event and the challenges your team is trying to solve.
For smaller reunions with simple registration and communication needs, lightweight tools like WildApricot or Eventbrite are quite enough. They work well for straightforward ticketing, RSVPs, community events, and recurring alumni gatherings without adding unnecessary complexity.
As reunions become more activity-driven or networking-focused, platforms like Almabase, Whova, and Graduway offer stronger support for multi-day programming, attendee engagement, and professional networking experiences.
For advancement teams running milestone reunions with a fundraising component, Almabase is one of the strongest options because registration, communication, check-ins, reunion giving, segmentation, and CRM sync all work together in one system. Instead of becoming isolated event data, reunion participation becomes part of the long-term alumni engagement record.
If you want to see how Almabase can power your next reunion, feel free to request a personalized demo, or if you want a self-guided look, head over to our product tour!
Top Platforms for A Successful Reunion Event
Find the right platform to host your reunion events whether it's a multi-day, professional, activity-based, or milestone reunion. Find your best fit.
Events
Anwesha Kiran
May 29, 2026
12 minutes
The annual giving campaign was once the primary window for alumni fundraising. Institutions could send a few emails with a year-end giving appeal, and still see support from alumni who felt a strong sense of loyalty to the institution.
That approach is harder to rely on today, as alumni are now asked to support many causes outside their alma mater. If the institution reaches out only during fundraising season, the appeal can feel disconnected.
Despite this, the opportunity to grow alumni donations remains strong. CASE’s latest findings show that giving to U.S. colleges and universities reached $78.8 billion in FY2025, up 4% from the previous year.
In this blog, we’ll cover how to keep alumni engaged before the ask and plan campaigns that make giving timely, relevant, and easier to repeat.
Alumni donations today depend on the relationship alumni have with the institution before a campaign goes live. Loyalty still matters, but it carries more weight when alumni hear from the institution regularly and understand why their support is needed.
Here are the shifts shaping alumni giving today:
Increasing alumni donations starts with making the ask feel earned. Alumni are more likely to participate when the institution has stayed relevant before the campaign begins.
The sections below focus on the parts institutions can improve directly.
A donation request works better when alumni already feel involved with the institution. Regular communication helps maintain that connection.
For example, a useful alumni newsletter can keep alumni connected between campaigns. It can share student stories, highlight meaningful campus updates, and point alumni toward ways to participate.
Institutions can strengthen alumni engagement by:
Teams that need more practical alumni engagement ideas can start with programs that give alumni a reason to participate before the donation ask. The goal is to make giving feel like a continuation of the relationship.
A strong campaign can still lose participation if the giving page is difficult to use. This is especially important on mobile. Many alumni will arrive from an email, text message, social post, or event reminder. If the page is slow or the form asks for too much information, the donor may leave before completing the gift.
A better giving experience should make the next step obvious:
The point is to remove friction. Once alumni have decided to give, the donation flow should not make them rethink the decision.
Alumni campaigns work better when people can see activity around them. A time-bound campaign gives alumni a reason to act soon. An event gives the ask a natural moment. Peer outreach can make the invitation feel more personal because it comes from someone alumni recognize.
Cornell University’s 2026 Giving Day shows how peer activity can strengthen a short campaign window. In 24 hours, the campaign brought together 17,011 donors and raised $11.3 million. Cornell also had 704 Giving Day champions. Their personal outreach helped bring in more than 4,037 gifts.
To build momentum, every campaign element should give alumni a reason to act:
First-time donors help institutions grow alumni participation beyond the same group of regular contributors. A first gift may be modest, but it gives the institution a real starting point for a longer donor relationship.
Institutions can encourage first-time alumni donors by:
Campaign framing also matters here. If the message only emphasizes dollars raised, smaller donors may feel their gift will not make a difference. A better approach is to frame the campaign around participation as well as revenue.
For example, instead of only saying “Help us raise $100,000,” the campaign can also say “Help us bring 500 alumni donors together for student scholarships.”
Matching gifts can make the impact of a donation easier to understand. When alumni know their gift can go further within a specific window, they have a stronger reason to act. Giving challenges work in a similar way by giving alumni a clear goal to rally around.
Good challenge structures include:
The challenge should be simple enough for alumni to understand quickly. They should know what the goal is, what their gift helps unlock, and why taking part now makes a difference.
Recurring giving helps institutions build steadier alumni support after a campaign ends. It gives donors a simple way to continue contributing without waiting for the next appeal.
Recurring giving works best when donors understand why it matters:
That message should continue after sign-up. Regular updates, thank-you notes, and impact stories help recurring donors see that their support is still active and appreciated. This gives them more reason to keep giving over time.
Alumni are more likely to give when the outcome is clear. Institutions should show how donations are used in practical terms. The more specific the connection, the easier it is for alumni to understand the value of giving.
Impact communication should help donors see what happened because they gave:
Follow-up matters just as much as the appeal. After the campaign ends, alumni should hear what happened. Share the result, thank donors clearly, and explain what comes next. This closes the loop and gives alumni a stronger reason to participate again.
Data helps institutions see how alumni are responding to a campaign. It can show where interest is building, where follow-up is needed, and which parts of the campaign are helping alumni take action.
The most useful signals often come from activity the institution already tracks. Event attendance can show which alumni are already involved. Email engagement can show which messages are getting attention. Giving history can help teams separate new donors from lapsed or repeat donors.
Digital tools make these signals easier to use. Institutions can:
Platforms like Almabase help institutions streamline alumni donations and improve visibility into donor engagement. They bring the work around alumni giving into one connected system. Teams can see engagement, event activity, and online giving in one place, which makes follow-up easier to manage.
For example, Archbishop Riordan High School used Almabase to improve its giving day experience. The team could customize campaigns with less dependence on IT and see gift activity in real time. The school reported a 550% increase in giving day donations, from $60,646 to $338,724.
A good alumni donation campaign starts before the first appeal goes out. The team needs to know what the campaign is trying to achieve. It should also be clear which alumni groups matter most and why the timing feels relevant.
Start with the result the campaign needs to achieve. A financial target sets a revenue goal, while a donor target indicates whether the campaign is increasing alumni participation.
Past campaign data can help keep both targets realistic. If one class year, department, or program performed well earlier, that group can receive a focused goal rather than being treated like the entire alumni base.
Setting clear fundraising goals helps the team decide what to measure before the campaign begins and what to improve after it ends.
A useful goal plan should answer five questions:
Segmentation helps institutions avoid sending the same appeal to every alum. The message should reflect what each group already knows, values, or has done with the institution. The question is simple: what does this group already care about, and what would make this campaign feel relevant to them?
Institutions can group alumni by relationship stage and recent activity:
The campaign format should make the goal easier to act on. A participation-focused campaign needs urgency. It also needs visible progress so alumni can see others getting involved. But if alumni attention is already close to an event, the giving ask should connect naturally to that moment.
Here are a few ways to choose the right format:
Promotion should build attention before the ask becomes urgent. Alumni may not give after the first message, so the campaign needs a steady rhythm across the full timeline.
Email can carry the main story. SMS can support short reminders. Social posts can show progress, and peer outreach can make the ask feel more personal.
A simple campaign timeline can include:
Stronger alumni donations come from the work institutions do before the appeal goes out. Regular engagement keeps alumni connected before the appeal. Clear campaign goals give the ask a reason to exist. A smooth giving experience helps donors complete the gift.
Each campaign should also improve the next one. Teams can look at which alumni responded, which messages worked, and where follow-up was needed. That insight helps institutions make future campaigns more relevant instead of repeating the same appeal with a new deadline.
Over time, this builds a healthier alumni giving program. First-time donors have a clearer path into participation. Repeat donors see why continued support matters. Recurring donors stay connected to the impact their gifts make possible.
Almabase helps institutions bring alumni engagement, fundraising campaigns, and events into one connected place. For teams trying to grow alumni donations without adding more manual work, that connected view makes it easier to focus on participation and results.
Book a demo today to see how Almabase can support your alumni giving strategy.
The best way to increase alumni donations is to keep alumni engaged before the campaign begins. A donation request is easier to act on when alumni already understand the institution’s priorities and feel connected to its community.
Start with regular communication that gives alumni a reason to stay involved. The message should not always be about giving. It can share student stories that show impact. It can also invite alumni into events, mentoring, or other ways to stay involved before the next campaign.
Effective alumni donation strategies give alumni a clear reason to participate. A giving day works well when the campaign needs urgency. A matching gift can help donors see how their contribution goes further. Recurring giving gives alumni a way to continue their support after the campaign ends.
Giving days work because they focus attention within a short time frame. Alumni can see the campaign’s progress as it unfolds, which makes participation feel more active and easier to join.
First-time donors are more likely to give when the ask feels approachable. A smaller suggested gift can help, especially when it is tied to a clear outcome such as student support or scholarships.
Institutions can improve participation by staying connected with alumni between campaigns. When the appeal arrives, the purpose should be clear, and the donation process should be easy to complete.
How To Increase Alumni Donations And Grow Participation
See how institutions can increase alumni donations by keeping alumni engaged, planning stronger campaigns, and making the giving experience easier.
Fundraising
Almabase
May 27, 2026
12 minutes
Giving days are a concentrated burst of community energy that, when done right, move alumni, parents, students, and staff to act together. They’re also some of the most reliable vehicles to mobilize engagement from the community, year-on-year. But what "done right" looks like isn’t a fixed answer; it keeps evolving and looks different for different institutions.
We’ve put together a few examples of successful giving days that have stood out in 2026 so far. A few shattered institution records. Some took creative risks that paid off. All of them offer a glimpse into what higher education fundraising looks like right now, and what institutions are doing differently for 2026.
The general theme of giving can be described as cautiously optimistic. According to CASE's Insights on Voluntary Support of Education report released in April 2026, giving to U.S. higher education institutions exceeded $78 billion in FY 2025: a 4% year-over-year increase. This continued growth reflects donors' sustained confidence in colleges and universities.
These numbers also paint a more complex picture of the alumni donation landscape. The number of alumni donors shrank in number even as total giving went up, which means fewer donors are giving more. This places institutions in a position where engagement, and an effort to sustain and increase it year-on-year, becomes imperative.
Giving days are one of your best tools to address this directly: they widen the donor pool, cultivate first-time givers, and create visible momentum to signal institutional health.
Findings in CASE and Almabase’s State of Giving Days white paper also support this: nearly 40% of institutions said their giving day helped them engage more alumni and boost donor participation. More than one in four reported that these single-day campaigns contributed between 11% and 25% of their total annual fundraising.
The shift we’re seeing in 2026 is in how these institutions ensure that Giving Days work, through the strategies they’re adopting. Student generated content, more sophisticated and widely present gamification features, matching pools deployed with greater precision: these are some of the trends we’re seeing in 2026. And a handful of schools are even abandoning the standard 24-hour flash format entirely in favor of models better suited to their communities. The giving days below reflect all of that.
Theme: Boilermaker Heroes: Making Victories Possible
Purdue's Day of Giving (April 29) carved out a league of its own with a staggering $95.5 million from more than 34,000 individual gifts, making it one of the largest single-institution giving day results in higher education history, the second-highest gift count in Purdue's 13-year run with this event, trailing behind only last year's national-record-setting campaign.
They had different units (campus, college, school, program, club, or student organization) participate, with Purdue Engineering tracking roughly $12 million, while the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics pulled nearly $5.2 million, at least a little bit fueled by a patriotic thread tied to America's upcoming 250th anniversary. Purdue Athletics brought in a record $16.1 million through 2,569 gifts, surpassing its own prior record of $13 million set in 2024.
What worked: Purdue has refined its gamification model over more than a decade since its launch in 2014, and it shows. They used real-time leaderboards to put colleges, alumni clubs, and student organizations in direct competition for shares of matching pools. This worked very well for the event because it essentially turned passive donors into active participants who track outcomes and are fully involved in the process.
The hourly match challenges, such as Best Photo Challenge, Best Selfie Challenge, Boilermaker Kids challenge, and the much-loved Purdue Pets Challenge, all of which included posting pictures with their hashtags ‘#PurdueConvos’ and ‘#PurdueDayofGiving’ spread word on social media to a degree that would cost far more to replicate through paid channels.
The campaign also tracked geographic state participation, giving the team a nationwide Boilermaker Pride narrative that resonated beyond campus.
The ‘social feeds’ tab on their Giving Page also documented the student and community generated content along with their campaign hashtags. They also provided a social media toolkit, complete with ready-to-use posts and images, making it much easier for supporters to show up meaningfully.
The deeper lesson here is that consistency is the gift that keeps on giving. The institution consistently repeats strategies that work for their giving days while also taking new initiatives, keeping the experience modern and fresh for attendees. Purdue's cumulative giving day total since 2014 has now crossed $697 million. That kind of institutional momentum is itself a fundraising asset.
Theme: Nature-Themed Basecamp Exploration
Cornell's giving day 2026 campaign used a custom arcade mini-game in which users avoided obstacles and collected “digital apples” on a virtual campus map. Collecting apples within the campus map gave donors an experience that felt native to the institution and introduced a layer of delight, nostalgia and interactivity that most donors hadn't seen before.
More importantly, that mechanic was tied directly to dollars: top-performing departments unlocked portions of a $2.4 million matching fund pool based on participation. The result was over 17,000 individual donors and more than 25,000 total gifts.
The institution had organised as many as 13 different events to make the Giving Day an immersive, rewarding experience for students. They could write thank-you postcards to donors, enjoy snacks, participate in giveaways and so much more.
They also leveraged peer-to-peer giving, with 704 Giving Day champions securing more than 4,037 gifts, which was record-shattering.
What worked: Cornell mixed and matched a few strategies that worked out best for them. The mini arcade game gave donors a reason to stay engaged beyond the moment of their gift. To this they tied in matching fund unlocks, essentially doubling the impact made. Finally, they also had students write thank you notes to donors, showing moments of gratitude in real time. The nature-themed "basecamp" framing also gave the campaign a cohesive visual identity that made it memorable for attendees and shareable across social channels.
Theme: Ole Miss Giving Day
Ole Miss has had a unique approach of baking institutional history into their annual giving day, which takes place every spring. This year too, the campaign window was set at exactly 1 day, 8 hours, and 48 minutes, as a callback to the university's 1848 founding year. It's a small detail, but one that declares intentionality to donors and attendees.
A leaderboard was adopted to track the number of donors from each department in real time, to increase competition among donors. They also live streamed the event for the duration it was active.
Along with this, they also added a physical element. A "Squirrel Scavenger Hunt" was designed to send participants across campus searching for hidden stuffed squirrels, with each discovery unlocking $250 in matching funds directed to the finder's chosen fund.
Donors could also "name a squirrel" for a $26 gift or sign the historic Ventress Hall turret, turning philanthropy into something tactile and campus-rooted.
Department leaderboards and live-streamed updates from university leaders kept the digital momentum going in parallel.
What worked: The Ole Miss team understood that a giving day is fundamentally a community event. The squirrel activation gave students and staff something to do and share, creating word-of-mouth momentum that is hard to replicate through any other channel. Tying the campaign window to the university's founding year added an element of storytelling that is distinctive to the institution’s identity.
Theme: Mason Now: Power the Possible
George Mason's 2026 giving day stood out for a metric that rarely makes the headline: approximately 25% of its donors were giving for the first time! That's a significant new-donor conversion rate for any institution, and it signals that the campaign successfully reached beyond its existing base.
The strategy here was to closely tie this giving day to a larger multi-year campaign. By positioning the giving day as a visible milestone within that broader arc of their Mason Now campaign, GMU gave both existing donors and first-timers a clear sense of the mission and their place in the outcome.
What worked: GMU approached their giving day as a donor acquisition vehicle rather than purely a revenue event. This influenced messaging, targeting, and put the event in perspective for everyone involved. The 25% first-time donor rate suggests the team invested in prospecting and outreach instead of a single-day fundraiser, which makes a lot of sense in context.
Theme: Make It Count for Meredith
Meredith College's giving day ran in parallel with the institution's 135th birthday; a decision that unlocked a layer of storytelling the campaign used well. The Greatest Needs Fund, which allows the college to allocate funds to areas that need it the most, secured $454,672 on its own, reflecting strong donor trust in institutional decision-making.
The most distinctive element, however, was the spread in geographic activation: 11 regional watch parties ran simultaneously across North Carolina and Washington, D.C., bringing the giving day to those who couldn't be on campus. The board of trustees, parents, and alumni groups funded 15 matching gift challenges totaling $460,000, and an "Odds vs. Evens" class-year competition ran throughout the day.
What worked: For a women's college with a deeply relational alumnae community, distributed in-person events turned a digital campaign into a series of local moments. The giving day became a reason to gather : which made giving feel like an act of belonging, not just philanthropy. The birthday framing gave first-time donors a natural reason to act: celebrating a milestone feels different from responding to a need.
Theme: UCA Ready to Grow
UCA's March 13 sprint deliberately moved away from broad-message capital campaign marketing toward hyperspecific, fund-level storytelling. Rather than deploying universal matching pools, the team created tailored mini-milestones for individual initiatives: a new Aviation Academy pilot training module, an Athletics Championship Resource sub-pool, and specific tracks for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
This meant donors weren't giving to the larger "UCA", they were funding a specific program they could see and name.
What worked: Segmented, cause-specific fundraising isn't new, but it was used as the one specific strategy by UCA. By making each fund feel like a distinct campaign within the larger day, they reduced donor fatigue and increased the sense of direct impact. Donors who care about education gave to education. Donors who care about aviation gave to aviation. The $1.2M result across more than 3,100 donors reflects both breadth across different causes and genuine engagement.
Theme: Going Above and Beyond for Students
Creighton's giving day took a grassroots-first approach, centering community voting as the mechanism through which challenge dollars were awarded. Student-led coalitions : including the Street Medicine program, which provides direct healthcare to underserved populations in Omaha : competed for popular vote tallies, with winning coalitions receiving earmarked challenge grants. The top voted club earned a $2000 gift.
Additionally, there were stickers and socks given out to donors, and the campus therapy dog, Ella, was present in the event for a short duration, adding to the delight factor.
What worked: Incorporating voting into the event gives non-donors a reason to participate in the campaign, creating a layer of supporters who become familiar with individual programs before they give. It also adds a layer of credibility from the voters’ perspective. With the freebies, the socks, coffee, snacks and the free hugs, it is clear that Creighton's $1.11M result from nearly 3,000 donors reflects how participatory design expands reach and impact by considering the experience offered to the attendees.
Theme: The Power of Opportunity
St. John's ran one of the more creative low-barrier engagement strategies on this list: small-dollar gift thresholds unlocked on-campus experiential perks. A $10 gift gave donors access to an on-campus food truck dessert ticket; $20 unlocked a full lunch voucher. The campaign was centered on low-income financial aid and the university's Vincentian community mission.
What worked: By pairing small gifts with immediate, physical rewards, St. John's reduced the psychological friction of giving, especially younger alumni who may not have deep giving habits yet. The approach is replicable, and the results suggest it worked.
Theme: Bridge to the Future
Queens' Giving Day runs as a 36-hour online fundraising drive which is already a departure from the standard 24-hour format most institutions use. The 2026 campaign closed with 588 donations and £650,778 raised.
Donor-count challenges were front and center in the campaign: hitting 400 donors unlocked £4,000, and reaching 500 unlocked a further £5,000. Because these were participation thresholds a donor who gives £10 counts the same as one who gives £1,000 toward unlocking those challenges. This framing lowered the barrier to entry and gave smaller donors a reason to act. A final-hour challenge sweetened the close: raise £25,000 in the last 60 minutes, unlock another £25,000. Both mechanics were fully unlocked by the end of the day.
A matriculation decade leaderboard ran throughout, ranking donor participation by the era alumni graduated; the 1970s cohort led with 106 donors, followed by the 1980s at 94. It's a simple touch, but it works: class-year competition creates identity-driven motivation.
What worked: The 36-hour window gives the campaign breathing room for alumni across time zones to participate without the pressure of a midnight cutoff. Paired with a "give early" feature that let donors contribute before the official window opened, Queens' essentially extended the campaign in both directions without diluting the urgency of the final-hour challenge.
This strategy paired with proven ones like a matriculation leaderboard, the choice of funds given to donors and the donor-count challenges, added to lowering the barrier for participation even further. This campaign was engineered to give itself the best shot.
The result is a campaign that felt inclusive globally but still had a hard close that drove action.
Theme: OneGW
GW's 2026 Giving Day ran for just over 24 hours on April 7 and 8 and raising more than $2 million from over 3,800 donors: the largest in the university's history, surpassing a 2025 campaign that had itself set a then-record. Back-to-back records in consecutive years is a sign that they’re doing several things right!
The campaign covered every corner of the university: scholarships, student organizations, athletics, academic programs, and research, and drew support from all 50 states and even overseas, with the farthest gift coming from Singapore. That geographic spread tells you the campaign is tapping into an alumni network that's genuinely engaged, not just locally loyal.
The "OneGW" framing ran throughout the day, with challenge mechanics and peer storytelling as the primary engagement levers. GW has positioned Giving Day as a signature university tradition since its 2021 launch which means donors now come into the campaign with some familiarity and expectation, and the institution matches those expectations through consistency.
What worked: With five years in the game, each year's record becomes the baseline expectation for the next, and GW has proved that this pressure leads to sharpened execution. The geographic reach suggests the team has gotten better at outreach beyond the DC metro area. And the "OneGW" identity, spanning Foggy Bottom and the health system campus, gives the campaign breadth without losing cohesion. The consecutive record years are the clearest signal that GW has figured out the basics and is now building on top of a solid foundation.
Several threads run across this year's standout campaigns.
UCA and Creighton are the clearest examples, but it's visible across the institutions on this list, one way or the other: donors respond to named programs instead of simple department name drops. "Fund the Aviation Academy" seems to generally perform better than "Support UCA's Growth."
Ole Miss's squirrel hunt, Meredith's regional watch parties, and St. John's food truck perks demonstrate that the most engaging giving days create something to do offline that can be shared online. These are the trade-offs being made in place of the more traditional donation link. It may be more effort intensive but the effort pays off.
George Mason's 25% first-time donor rate won't be the last we hear of this kind of tracking. As CASE's latest data shows, institutions are navigating a narrowing high-capacity donor base, which makes these entry points more valuable.
Meredith's regional watch parties, Ole Miss's campus squirrel hunt, St. John's food truck perks: all of these activities would feel forced at a different institution or a different community. The schools that did the most interesting work in 2026 designed for their own communities, which goes to show how well they know who shows up for them. When the experience itself is worth showing up for, the giving follows.
If you're looking at these results and thinking about what your institution's next giving day could look like, we’ve got some great free resources to help you get started!
The 2026 giving day season isn't over, so we will be seeing more great examples of giving days in the coming months. But even this early snapshot tells us something about the direction of higher education fundraising.
Giving days are getting more intentional and community oriented. The institutions that understand their communities deeply enough to design a day that feels specific, meaningful, and worth showing up for will be the ones driving the best results.
If you are looking for the perfect partner to help you bring success to your next giving day, feel free to book a personalized demo and we’d love to talk!
Top Giving Days That Stand Out in 2026 (So Far)
Discover the top 10 higher education giving days of 2026, the strategies that drove record results, and key trends shaping alumni fundraising this year.
Fundraising
Anwesha Kiran
May 26, 2026
12 minutes
For years, advancement teams have been trying to answer the same question:
Why are alumni participation rates declining even when alumni still seem to care deeply about their college experience?
The 2026 National Alumni Survey, built on responses from 82,000+ alumni, offers a pretty clear answer:
This isn’t a “people care less” problem. It’s a relationship problem.
Alumni haven’t stopped valuing education, giving or wanting community or purpose.
What’s changed is how they expect institutions to show up in their lives.
A lot of traditional advancement strategy was built for a different era, one where institutional loyalty was almost automatic. You graduated, stayed connected, attended reunions, and eventually became a donor.
That path is much less linear now.
Today’s alumni are asking harder questions:
And honestly, those are fair questions.
The survey surfaced a few patterns that feel especially important right now. Not just as “trends,” but as signals of how alumni expectations are evolving.
This was one of the most interesting tensions in the survey.
Many alumni still see their degrees as incredibly valuable. They’re grateful for the opportunities, friendships, and career outcomes that came from their education. But that appreciation doesn’t automatically translate into an ongoing relationship with the institution itself. And if we’re being honest, a lot of alumni engagement still assumes it does.
For many alumni, graduation quietly became the end of the relationship, except for the occasional fundraising email or event invitation. There’s very little in-between. For example, there’s no consistent sense of community and no feeling that the institution understands what life looks like for them now.
That gap matters more than institutions sometimes realise because people rarely give to institutions they feel disconnected from, even if they once loved their college experience.
What the data shows: According to the 2026 National Alumni Survey, 40% of alumni feel disconnected from their institution, and nearly half feel ill-informed about what it's doing. This isn't minor dissatisfaction — it's a structural gap that shows up directly in engagement and giving rates.
💡 Concordia College built a relationship-first digital strategy specifically to close this gap. Rather than defaulting to campaign-driven outreach, their approach centred on helping alumni feel connected to the institution's ongoing story, not just its fundraising calendar. The result was a community that stayed engaged between asks, not just during them. (Read the Concordia case study →)
One thing advancement teams often interpret as “declining generosity” is actually a shift in where generosity is going.
Alumni are donating to mutual aid funds, local nonprofits, climate initiatives, scholarships, community organizations, and causes they interact with regularly.
In other words, the willingness to give is still there, but institutions are no longer competing only with peer universities. They’re competing with every organization that communicates impact clearly and makes people feel emotionally invested.
That’s a very different landscape than the one advancement teams operated in even 10 years ago. And it also explains why vague institutional appeals don’t land the way they used to.
For example, "Support the annual fund” feels abstract.
Change: “Help first-generation students access emergency grants during finals week” feels real.
What the data shows: The 2026 National Alumni Survey makes this stark: only 13% of Millennial and Gen Z alumni gave to higher education in the past year, compared to 32% of older alumni. Meanwhile, 37% gave to individuals through GoFundMe-style campaigns, 34% gave to civil rights and social justice causes, and higher education ranked 11th on their list of giving priorities. They aren't ungenerous — they're directing generosity toward causes where impact feels direct and personal.
💡 The University of North Carolina School of the Arts ditched the "one fund fits all" model and expanded their Giving Day to 40+ donor-choice funds — letting alumni direct gifts toward causes they actually cared about. Participation and giving both climbed. When alumni can see themselves in the cause, they show up.
For a long time, alumni engagement relied heavily on nostalgia. Such as campus memories, school pride, and traditions. And those things still matter, but they’re rarely enough on their own anymore. Especially for younger alumni.
People stay engaged when they feel connected to something ongoing, not just reminded of the past.
One thing that kept coming up in conversations with advancement professionals this year was that engagement seems to grow when alumni feel like participants, not audiences.
That could mean mentorship, career communities, regional meetups and volunteer opportunities. Digital spaces where alumni can genuinely interact with each other.
The strongest engagement strategies today should feel more like community-building.
💡 Illinois Tech invested in a digital-first strategy — directories, job boards, mentorship, and affinity groups — giving alumni ongoing reasons to show up year-round. The result: 123,000+ engagement activities in a single month. That's a living, active community.(Read the Illinois Tech case study →)
A lot of advancement strategy is still optimized for alumni behavior that no longer exists.
Younger alumni don’t automatically respond to long email appeals, formal institutional messaging, or generic engagement asks. And honestly, that doesn’t mean they’re disengaged. It usually means the experience feels impersonal or outdated.
Younger alumni are used to personalization everywhere else in their lives, from media platforms to shopping experiences to online communities. So when every alumni email feels identical, it creates distance immediately.
They also expect more flexibility in how they engage. Not everyone wants to attend a formal event. Some people want short virtual interactions or mentorship opportunities. Some want to volunteer skills instead of donating money, and some simply want to stay informed without constant asks. The idea that there’s one “correct” alumni journey is starting to break down.
What the data shows: 43% of younger alumni give via digital wallets like Apple Pay or Venmo, compared to just 14% of older graduates. Nearly one in three younger alumni give on an "as-needed" basis — responding when a cause needs support right now — while only 17% give on a regular schedule (vs. 38% of older alumni). Annual fund cycles and fiscal year deadlines simply don't map to how this generation thinks about generosity.
💡 Calvert Hall optimized their Giving Day for mobile and added digital wallet options — and saw donations increase 2x over three years. As Joe Baker, Director of Advancement, put it: partnering with Almabase made their annual giving day more successful than ever before. (Read the Calvert Hall case study →)
A quiet theme running through the survey was this: Many alumni don’t feel confident their contribution actually matters.
Not because they distrust institutions entirely, but because impact often feels vague or invisible. And recognition isn’t just about donor walls or public acknowledgements anymore. It’s about feeling seen or remembered or the feeling like participation matters at every level.
A lot of alumni communication still unintentionally feels transactional: “We need support", “Here’s our campaign.”, “Please donate before the deadline.”
But trust is built in the moments between campaigns. Through transparency, consistency, and storytelling. And showing alumni the outcomes of engagement.
💡 Loma Linda University School of Medicine Alumni Association tied every campaign to real outcomes and real beneficiaries — so donors could see exactly who their gift helped. The result: over $1 million in gifts, driven by genuine confidence that their contribution would matter. (Read the Loma Linda case study →)
This isn’t new, but the expectation is much stronger now. General fundraising appeals used to work because institutional trust was higher by default.
Today, alumni want clarity. They want tangible outcomes. They want to understand the direct connection between contribution and impact. And clearly, this shift is healthy.
The institutions doing this well are getting extremely specific:
Specificity creates emotional connection because people can actually picture the impact.
What the data shows: In the 2026 National Alumni Survey, alumni consistently cite specificity as a deciding factor in whether they give. Vague asks like "Support the annual fund" land differently from "Help first-generation students access emergency grants during finals week." The latter creates emotional connection because people can actually picture the impact.
💡 Boyd Buchanan built clear, specific giving opportunities tied to outcomes alumni could understand and rally behind. Combined with leaderboards, donor segmentation, and goal thermometers, they surpassed their giving goal by 201%, brought 60% of alumni onto the platform, and saw a 5x increase in engaged users within five months. (Read the Boyd Buchanan case study →)
Debt absolutely shapes how younger alumni think about giving. But the survey suggests something important: Debt alone doesn’t fully explain disengagement.
Many alumni with financial pressure still choose to engage in other ways when they feel connected to the institution. Meanwhile, some financially stable alumni remain disengaged because the relationship itself feels weak. That distinction matters. Because it shifts the conversation away from "Young alumni can’t give.” Toward: “Have we created enough value in the relationship for them to want to engage at all?”
Those are very different questions.
What the data shows: 77% of alumni burdened by student debt still give to other organizations. The barrier isn't financial capacity — it's relevance and trust. This reframes the entire conversation. The question isn't "Can young alumni give?" It's "Have we created enough value in the relationship for them to want to engage at all?"
💡 The Almabase blog on younger alumni giving makes a practical recommendation that gets at this directly: acknowledge debt without making it awkward. Frame giving as collective action rather than individual sacrifice. Show alumni what the group can achieve together, and recognize every contributor regardless of gift size, as part of something larger. Institutions that make small gifts feel meaningful see stronger participation among younger alumni, even those carrying debt. (Read the blog here →)
This stood out as one of the most practical takeaways from the survey. A lot of institutions still treat giving as the primary indicator of alumni engagement. But many alumni are far more willing to give time before money.
They’ll mentor students, speak at events, offer internships, join panels, and help build regional communities. And in many cases, those experiences become the foundation for long-term donor relationships later.
The mistake is treating volunteering as secondary instead of seeing it as relationship-building. Because often, it’s the first meaningful interaction alumni have had with the institution in years.
💡 Merchant Taylors' built their advancement strategy around non-financial engagement first — volunteer and mentorship pathways that connected alumni to the institution and its students. Giving followed naturally, as a product of the relationship rather than a response to a campaign. (Read the Merchant Taylors' case study →)
A personalized subject line isn’t the same thing as meaningful relevance.
Real relevance looks like:
The institutions doing this well don’t just “segment audiences"; they build experiences around alumni needs and interests. And alumni can feel the difference.
💡 Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) shifted from broadcast messaging to relevance-based digital engagement using interest data and engagement history to match alumni with the right opportunities at the right time. The result: alumni stopped feeling like they were on a mailing list and started feeling like part of a community. (Read the RISD engagement story →)
If there’s one thing the survey makes clear, it’s this:
Advancement is more about relationship quality.
Alumni are still open to engagement, to giving, and still looking for connection and purpose. But expectations have changed. People want authenticity, relevance, transparency and community. And they want institutions to earn attention the same way every other organization now has to. That can feel uncomfortable for advancement teams because it requires moving away from long-standing assumptions. But it’s also a huge opportunity.
Because institutions that adapt early have the chance to build stronger, more resilient alumni relationships than before. These relationships are built on actual value.
The full report explores:
Whether you're making the case internally for a strategy shift or looking for specific benchmarks to anchor your next planning cycle, the full report gives you what you need.
2026 National Alumni Survey: 9 Trends Reshaping Alumni Giving & Engagement
Explore 9 key trends from the 2026 National Alumni Survey shaping alumni engagement, donor participation, and advancement strategy today.
Alumni Engagement
Sanna Bara
May 26, 2026
12 minutes
Homecoming events often start with a clear plan, but as timelines tighten, things quickly get complicated. Suddenly, you’re managing different parts of the event at once, from logistics to outreach and follow-ups.
Without a structured approach, it’s easy to miss critical tasks like tracking RSVPs in real time, coordinating volunteers, or maintaining consistent communication across channels.
That’s exactly why we have created this step-by-step homecoming checklist guide, from early planning timelines to day-of execution and post-event follow-up. It gives you a clear framework to plan ahead, assign responsibilities, and execute every phase without second-guessing what’s next.
Most homecoming plans break down when teams lose track of timelines, ownership, or dependencies. A timeline-based homecoming checklist is what turns planning into execution. Instead of managing everything at once, it helps you focus on the right tasks at the right time, while keeping dependencies and ownership clear.
Here is a structured homecoming planning checklist broken down by phases.
This phase decides how predictable the rest of your planning will be. If goals, budgets, or formats are unclear here, every later phase turns into rework.
At this stage, clarity matters more than execution.
With the foundation in place, the focus shifts to building the experience and preparing for outreach.
Many teams underestimate the importance of segmentation. Treating all alumni the same often leads to lower engagement later.
This is where execution starts gaining momentum. Promotions go live, and registrations begin to build.
This is usually where turnout starts taking shape. If registrations slow down here, the issue is rarely the event itself. It’s usually that the right alumni groups haven’t heard a relevant enough reason to attend yet.
Now the focus shifts to coordination, reminders, and closing gaps.
Teams that track registrations in real time are better positioned to respond while there’s still time to influence turnout. For example, if registrations from a specific batch are low, targeted reminders or alumni ambassador outreach can help close the gap before the event.
This is the final stretch where execution needs to be tight and coordinated.
During homecoming week, every update should reduce uncertainty. Attendees need to know where to go, volunteers need to know who owns each task, and staff should not be answering the same logistical questions repeatedly.
Execution on the day depends on how well systems and teams are prepared.
When check-in and attendance data are visible in real time, teams can spot bottlenecks early, whether it’s long queues at entry or sessions running over capacity.
This phase is often overlooked but plays a key role in long-term engagement and future planning.
A structured timeline like this ensures that nothing is rushed at the last minute, and every phase contributes to a more organized, engaging, and successful homecoming event.
But even with a solid checklist, certain high-impact areas often get overlooked. Let’s break down what organizers tend to miss and how to get it right.
Most homecoming plans cover the basics, but gaps usually show up in execution, when certain elements tend to get overlooked. These aren’t always visible during planning, but they’re the ones that create friction on the day of the event or limit participation.
Here are the areas where most homecoming plans fall short, and what to pay closer attention to.
Most teams remember the obvious logistics: venue, agenda, vendors, and catering. What often gets missed is the handoff between those pieces. For example, registration data doesn’t just sit in one place; it needs to flow into check-in, capacity planning, and follow-up communication after the event.
Here’s what works better in practice:
If attendees spend their first 20 minutes figuring out entry, it affects their entire experience. But when logistics are tightly managed, everything else runs more smoothly, from sessions to networking to fundraising.
A common gap in homecoming planning is assuming that sending invites equals engagement.
In reality, participation depends on how relevant the event feels to different alumni groups. A general homecoming invite doesn’t carry the same weight as a reunion tailored to a specific batch or a networking session tied to career interests.
What works in practice:
When engagement is built around relevance and familiarity, participation becomes more organic and often requires less effort to scale.
Homecoming promotions start strong and then lose momentum over time. Teams often send an initial round of emails but don’t follow through with consistent reminders or varied messaging. As the event gets closer, visibility drops and registrations slow down.
A more effective execution looks like:
The difference isn’t just about sending more messages. It comes down to maintaining visibility and reaching people through the channels they actually respond to.
Student involvement is often treated as support, not as a core part of planning. This leads to last-minute coordination issues, volunteers unclear on roles, overlaps in responsibilities, or gaps during execution.
Here’s what works better:
When more people are involved, coordination becomes easier, and the experience feels more inclusive.
Fundraising during homecoming is often added late, usually as a standalone appeal or announcement. This limits participation because it feels disconnected from the event experience.
A stronger approach is to integrate it early into the flow:
When fundraising is built into the experience, it doesn’t require separate effort later.
Budget planning is usually done early, but ongoing tracking is where things can slip.
Changes in vendor timelines or payment schedules can quickly impact costs, especially closer to the event. Make sure you:
Good coordination here prevents last-minute surprises and keeps the event on track financially.
These elements often look straightforward during planning, which is exactly why they’re easy to underestimate. But in execution, they’re where most friction shows up. Getting these right is what shifts your homecoming from a well-documented plan to a well-run event, where everything works together the way it’s supposed to.
The following steps help turn the plan into a working system, so every team knows what to do, when to do it, and how to measure progress.
Homecoming planning usually starts with dates and venues. But the stronger starting point is clarity on what the event needs to achieve.
If attendance is the only goal, you might fill seats but still see low alumni participation or limited post-event engagement.
Teams that define success more precisely tend to execute differently.
For example, if your goal is to improve alumni participation, you’ll prioritize targeted outreach and reunion formats over broad promotion. That decision shapes everything that follows.
Most coordination issues come from unclear ownership.
Instead of having everyone involved in everything, it helps to define ownership by function so teams can spend less time aligning and more time executing, especially in the final weeks. This breaks down to:
The key is assigning a single owner for each area with clear deliverables. When responsibilities are shared with ownership, it reduces delays, missed follow-ups, and last-minute escalations.
When registrations, communication, and reporting sit in different tools, teams spend time stitching together updates instead of acting on them. As the event approaches, this shows up as delayed follow-ups, inconsistent outreach, and limited visibility into who’s actually engaging. This is where a connected event platform like Almabase becomes useful.
With Almabase, teams can manage registrations and check-ins in a way that keeps event tracking connected in one system. Instead of pulling data from separate tools and reconciling it manually, everything stays connected. This reduces last-minute coordination issues and gives teams a clearer view of participation.
In practice, this helps teams:
If you want to see how registrations, check-ins, communication, and reporting stay connected without manual coordination, explore Almabase’s event management suite to see how it brings these workflows together in one place.
Most homecoming promotions rely on email, which creates uneven reach. Some alumni respond early. Others don’t see the message until it’s too late. Without reinforcement across channels, visibility drops as timelines tighten.
Communication works best when it evolves with the timeline. Early messages drive registrations, mid-phase updates build interest, and the final stretch creates urgency.
Adding channels like SMS helps close the gap in the final stretch, especially for reminders that need immediate action. The goal is to stay visible across touchpoints without overwhelming your audience.
The biggest execution gap is waiting until after the event to evaluate performance. By then, the only takeaway is what could have been done differently. Tracking in real time changes how teams respond. Instead of guessing, you can see:
This allows you to act while there’s still time, whether that means pushing reminders to specific groups, adjusting messaging, or increasing visibility on certain channels.
For events with a fundraising component, this also extends to tracking donation activity during registration or throughout the event, making it easier to identify high-intent participants and follow up effectively.
Planning homecoming without missing anything comes down to alignment, clear goals, defined ownership, connected tools, consistent communication, and real-time visibility. When these pieces stay aligned, execution becomes far more predictable.
If you want to go a step further and manage registrations, check-ins, communication, and reporting without manual coordination, explore how Almabase brings these workflows together. Book a demo to see how teams are managing event execution end-to-end.
A homecoming checklist should cover the entire planning cycle, starting with planning and continuing through execution and follow-up, ensuring teams can manage each phase without missing critical dependencies.
Homecoming planning typically begins 6 to 12 months in advance, especially for institutions managing multiple events or large alumni bases. Early timelines help secure venues and define goals, while later phases focus on outreach, coordination, and ensuring everything is ready for execution.
The most common challenges include fragmented communication, unclear ownership across teams, and limited visibility into registrations or engagement. These issues often surface closer to the event, when timelines are tight, and teams are managing multiple dependencies without a unified view.
To increase homecoming attendance, segment your audience, promote relevant events to each group, use multiple channels for reminders, and make registration simple. Alumni are more likely to attend when the event feels relevant to their class year, interests, or relationship with the institution.
Effective tracking requires real-time visibility into who is registering and how different segments are responding. Using a centralized system helps teams monitor trends, identify gaps early, and adjust communication or outreach strategies before momentum slows down.
Fundraising works best when it is part of the event experience rather than a separate effort. This includes enabling donations during registration, aligning campaigns with participation goals, and using key event moments to encourage contributions and improve overall engagement.
Complete Homecoming Checklist to Plan and Run Your Event
Use this homecoming checklist to plan, promote, and execute your event without missing key steps from start to finish.
Events
Almabase
May 25, 2026
12 minutes
Spring fundraiser ideas are campaigns and events that institutions run between March and June to raise money, grow donor participation, and bring their community closer together. Spring is one of the strongest fundraising windows of the year, and the reasons go beyond good weather.
Some of the best spring fundraiser ideas include:
In this guide, we’ll break down 25+ proven ideas across different formats and audiences. The goal is to help you identify ideas that align with your campaign goals and translate into measurable participation and fundraising outcomes.
Before we get into the details of each idea, it helps to understand why spring works so well for fundraising in the first place.
Spring is the perfect time for fundraising campaigns because donors are more willing to give, the institutional calendar is full of engagement moments, and the weather makes it possible to run event formats that other seasons cannot support.
Donors show up differently in spring. They are more social, more optimistic, and many have just received tax refunds. That is a hard mix to find at other times of the year. And because spring also lines up with graduation, reunions, homecoming, and end-of-year giving pushes, the ask lands when people already feel connected to your institution.
The weather plays a role, too. Outdoor events, hybrid formats, and in-person gatherings are all easier to pull off. That means your team can reach donors through real experiences instead of relying on emails and social posts to do all the heavy lifting.
The data backs this up. According to the 2024 CASE Insights Alumni Engagement Survey, 51.8% of institutions reported increased alumni engagement. A lot of that growth is tied to seasonal programming that gives people a concrete reason to show up and participate.
This is also why many advancement teams are starting to build spring into their annual giving strategy as a dedicated campaign window. When engagement is already high, pairing it with the right giving tools and campaign infrastructure can turn participation into actual donor growth. Almabase’s ‘planning a giving day’ ebook offers a guided explanation to plan a successful giving day and is a good place to get started with a spring fundraiser.
When it comes to planning, most teams start with a basic question: What format works for us? Can we do something outdoors? Should it be virtual? How much budget do we actually have?
Here are spring fundraiser ideas grouped by format to help you figure out what fits.
Outdoor fundraisers are some of the most popular spring fundraising event ideas because the weather finally lets you bring people together in person. And when people show up, they tend to give more.
Here are a few that work well outdoors:
The most important thing with outdoor fundraisers is making sure donations do not depend entirely on who shows up. If you pair your event with an online giving page, you can collect gifts before, during, and after the event. A registration-to-donation flow helps here. The person who signs up is already interested enough to give.
Cloud County Community College did this well. Their annual scholarship auction raised $67,000 and drove 3X click rates on alumni emails because event promotion and the giving ask were connected from the start. If you want to see how event and fundraising workflows can work together, the Almabase events platform is a good reference.
Virtual fundraisers take the venue and the weather out of the picture entirely. They cost less to run, they are easier to scale, and they often reach donors who would never show up to an in-person event.
Here are a few virtual spring fundraising ideas worth looking at:
With virtual fundraisers, the donor experience on the other end decides how well the campaign performs. If someone taps a link on their phone and the giving page takes too long to load or feels clunky, you lose them. The checkout needs to be quick, work well on mobile, and feel the same on every device. Teams using Almabase run their virtual campaigns by giving pages built around this kind of fast, clean checkout experience.
The other piece that matters is social sharing. When a donor can share their gift with one tap and tag someone else to give, the campaign starts reaching people your team would never have contacted on its own.
Not every spring fundraiser needs a big budget or a large team. Some of the most effective ideas are simple ones that can go from idea to launch in a few days.
Here are a few low-cost spring fundraiser ideas that are easy to get off the ground:
These ideas are a good fit for small teams with limited budgets who need to get something going quickly. The main challenge is that even simple campaigns create manual work when your team is handling receipts, tracking gifts, and following up with donors by hand.
Automating those steps changes the math. When gift receipts, thank-you emails, and donor tracking happen on their own, your team spends less time on admin and more time running the actual campaign. The Almabase eBook on eliminating inefficiencies goes deeper into how fragmented tools create extra work and what it looks like when you bring everything into one place.
Format is one way to choose a spring fundraiser. But the right idea also depends on who you are trying to reach, which is what we will cover next.
The best spring fundraiser idea for your team depends on who you are trying to reach. Schools do well with campaigns that get students and parents involved together. Colleges and alumni programs need campaigns that work across geographies and class years. Nonprofits lean on mission-driven storytelling. Sports teams and clubs benefit from the shared identity their members already have.
Here is how spring fundraiser ideas break down by audience.
Schools have a built-in advantage when it comes to spring fundraising. Parents are already involved, students are easy to rally around a shared goal, and the school calendar gives you natural moments to build a campaign around.
Here are a few that tend to do well:
School fundraisers work in the spring because students and parents are both engaged at the same time. When both groups are active, participation tends to take care of itself. Adding gamification, like progress bars and class rankings, gives people something to track and talk about.
Archbishop Riordan High School saw this play out at scale. After switching to a mobile-friendly giving experience with real-time campaign tracking, their giving day donations grew by 550%, going from $60,646 in 2017 to $338,724 in 2018. A big part of that was social giving, 20% of gifts were influenced by donors sharing their contribution and encouraging others to do the same. For more school fundraising ideas, this Almabase guide goes deeper into what works.
Spring fundraising for colleges and alumni programs looks different from school-level campaigns. Your donors are spread across geographies, they graduated at different times, and their connection to the institution varies. The campaigns that work here are the ones that make giving feel personal and tied to something specific.
A few ideas that fit this audience well:
The execution side matters a lot with alumni campaigns. Segmenting your audience by class year, location, or past giving behavior helps you send the right message to the right group. And peer-to-peer fundraising pages give your most engaged alumni a way to bring others in without your team having to do all the outreach.
Boyd-Buchanan School is a good example. Their first giving day on Almabase surpassed its goal by 201%. What made it work was that 60% of alumni signed up on the platform before the campaign even launched, and engaged users grew 5X within five months. When alumni are already active, the giving day becomes a moment to convert that activity into actual gifts. The Almabase annual fund page covers how this works in practice, and the State of Giving Days report has benchmarks from over 150 institutions.
Nonprofit fundraising in spring is less about institutional calendar moments and more about mission. Your donors give because they believe in what you do, so the campaigns that work best are the ones that make that connection feel real.
Ideas that tend to land well for nonprofits:
Storytelling is what ties all of these together. Donors want to see the impact of their gift, so building your campaign around a specific story or outcome makes the ask stronger. Reaching donors across more than one channel helps too. Running your campaign across email, text, and social at the same time gives you more chances to land the message. The Almabase multi-channel bundle is built around this idea, helping teams run coordinated outreach without managing each channel separately.
Sports teams and clubs have something most other groups do not: a strong shared identity. Members already see themselves as part of a team, which makes fundraising feel less like an ask and more like a group effort.
Ideas that work well for this audience:
Peer-to-peer fundraising is the strongest tool here. When each team member has a personal page and shares it with their own network, the campaign reaches far beyond the team itself. The competitive nature of sports also helps. Leaderboards showing which player or group has raised the most tend to push people to do more. Teams running campaigns through Almabase can set up these personal pages and leaderboards within the same system they use for tracking gifts and donor activity.
Choosing the right idea is one part of it. The next step is figuring out how to pick the best option for your specific goals and audience.
Picking a spring fundraiser idea is easier when you start with two questions: what are we trying to achieve, and who are we trying to reach?
Before picking an idea, get clear on what success looks like for this campaign.
The right idea also depends on who you are reaching and when they are most available.
Once you have the right idea picked out, the next step is making sure your campaign is set up to perform.
A high-performing spring fundraising campaign comes down to four things: a giving page that makes it easy to donate, a peer-to-peer structure that spreads the campaign beyond your team's reach, promotion across more than one channel, and tracking that shows you what is working while the campaign is still running.
Let's break down each of those.
Your giving page is where the campaign either converts or loses people. If it loads slowly, looks generic, or asks for too many steps before someone can complete a gift, donors will drop off.
A few things that make a real difference:
Almabase's giving platform is built around this kind of setup. Branded pages, fast mobile checkout, flexible gift types, and clean CRM syncing so advancement teams can focus on running the campaign instead of fixing data after it ends.
Your team can only reach so many people directly. Peer-to-peer fundraising solves that by turning your most engaged supporters into campaign ambassadors.
What that looks like in practice:
The numbers back this up. St. Ignatius College Preparatory saw an 80% increase in giving day donations by leaning into social giving, peer-to-peer fundraising, and personalized outreach. When donors can see others giving and share their own gift easily, the campaign builds momentum that your team could not create through direct outreach alone.
Email alone is not enough as most emails go unread. The ones that do get opened are generally competing with dozens of other messages in the inbox.
The campaigns that perform best use more than one channel to get the message across:
Teams using email, text, and video together through the platform have seen 3X the impact compared to running email-only campaigns.
Once your campaign is live, you need to see how it is doing while it is still running. Waiting until the campaign ends to look at the numbers means you have already missed chances to adjust.
What to keep an eye on:
Almabase gives advancement teams real-time reporting across engagement, events, and donations within the same platform. That means your team can track performance and act on it without pulling data from separate tools into a spreadsheet.
With the right idea, the right audience, and the right campaign setup in place, the last step is putting it all together.
Spring gives you a window where donors are more open, the calendar is on your side, and the format options are wide. The ideas are the starting point. The results come from picking the right campaign for your goals, reaching the right audience, and having the tools to execute it cleanly.
Whether you are running a giving day for alumni, a walkathon for parents, or a peer-to-peer challenge for students, what matters most is how easy you make it for people to give and how well you track what happens after they do.
If you want to see how that comes together in one system, book a demo with Almabase to see how it would fit your setup.
Giving days with matching gifts, auction events, and crowdfunding campaigns tend to bring in the most revenue. These formats create urgency and attract larger gifts, especially when paired with a clear goal and a deadline.
Read-a-thons, bake sales, classroom competitions, and dress-down days are easy to set up and run. They need minimal budget, get students and parents involved quickly, and can go from idea to launch in a few days.
Start by setting a clear goal, whether that is participation, revenue, or donor acquisition. Then pick a format that fits your audience and budget. Set up a branded giving page, plan your promotion across multiple channels, and build in tracking from day one.
Virtual 5Ks, online auctions, digital giving days, and livestream fundraising events all work well as virtual spring fundraisers. They cost less to run, scale easily, and reach donors who would not attend an in-person event.
Use peer-to-peer fundraising so your supporters spread the campaign through their own networks. Add leaderboards and challenges to create friendly competition. Promote across email, text, and social instead of relying on one channel alone.
Look for a platform that covers giving pages, peer-to-peer fundraising, event management, multi-channel promotion, and real-time reporting in one place. CRM integration matters too so gift data stays accurate without manual entry.
25+ Spring Fundraiser Ideas That Actually Work in 2026
Explore 25+ spring fundraiser ideas for schools, colleges, nonprofits, and clubs. Includes ideas by format, audience, execution tips, and campaign tools.
Fundraising
Almabase
May 22, 2026
12 minutes
With donors more virtually active than ever, a successful digital fundraising strategy today does more than just getting the word out.
Your digital fundraising strategy now plays a large part in connecting the right donors to the right causes, and making the giving experience from first gift to repeated gifts as convenient as possible. For new and younger donors especially, digital modes are becoming the more obvious choice.
So what is digital fundraising exactly? How do you create a digital strategy for schools and nonprofits? How do you measure and track success? We’ll cover all that and more in this blog.
A digital fundraising strategy is your institution or nonprofit’s plan for for your online channels and tools to identify, engage, solicit, and steward donors. In advancement work specifically, it sits alongside (and increasingly integrates with) traditional fundraising pillars like major gifts, annual giving, planned giving, and corporate/foundation relations.
In terms of visibility, think of the following channels: email, social media, search, video, mobile, and LLMs nowadays.
Beyond visibility, it also means having digital interfaces that provide the right data for your analytics, and of course, your donor’s digital user experience from their first solicitation email all the way through to their giving and post-giving communications.
Many of the steps for any digital fundraiser such as setting financial goals, targeting segments, and performance reviews rely on the integrity of data, so this should be your first priority.
To start off, decide the fields associated with alumni or donors that are important to your organization and campaign goals. Some non-negotiables for universities and schools are program details, graduation year, giving history, geography, and contact information. Nonprofits might focus on age categories and volunteering preferences instead of program/graduation details.
Finally, add workflows inside to track activity automatically for each prospect ranging from email opens to donations to a particular cause.
Tips for schools/universities
Tips for Nonprofits
"Raise more money online" doesn't really help you decide whether to invest in paid social or hire a content writer or finally fix your giving page. A specific goal such as “$850,000 in digital-attributed gifts this fiscal year, with 30% from new donors” forces every downstream decision to justify itself against that target.
Always start off by reviewing past performance data for similar events. This would involve looking at old emails, attendance, campaign reports, and the like. It can lead you to many insights on the best event formats, messaging styles that worked, effective outreach channels, speakers that your audience resonated with, and so on.
Now that you have clean, dependable data, building different segments of alumni or donors based on a variety of factors is the next natural step.
Different prospects sympathize with different causes, prefer different methods of contribution, and have to be targeted accordingly.
For schools, that usually means current parents, alumni by decade, grandparents, past parents, and faculty/staff. For nonprofits, it's often first-time donors, recurring donors, lapsed donors (12-24 months), mid-level donors ($1K–$10K), and event attendees who haven't given.
A working digital fundraising stack nowadays usually include:
This is just the bare minimum and you and/or your team will likely realize how many moving parts have dedicated tools as you build your strategy.
As for choosing the tools themselves, we usually see teams go for either an integrated platform that touches the entire donor journey, or a set of specialized tools to tackle each stage separately.
Ultimately, your mileage WILL vary even against similar teams but we recommend that all teams ask themselves these four questions:
Your website serves as the hub for all your digital efforts both for fundraising and beyond. Strong narratives, beneficiary accounts, and campaign updates give donors the context they need to feel connected to what they're funding. Other aspects such as donor testimonials or visible fundraising progress bars give them the confidence to act on it.
Closing the loop is just as important. Donors who can clearly see where their money went are significantly more likely to give again. Dedicated fund pages, impact summaries, and project updates go a long way toward building that transparency.
Website features to consider for schools and colleges:
Web features to consider for nonprofits:
A content calendar will naturally be a huge strategic checklist for your team. However, you might want to go one step further with a content engine (or at least a content strategy aimed long-term)
Both terms might seem synonymous but we do notice that many teams go from campaign to campaign, event to event, with only a few common threads between each other. The institutions and organizations that consistently raise money online have a small number of strong narratives that they tell in many forms across many channels. A research university might have three or four flagship stories per year and those stories show up as long-form features, short videos, Instagram carousels, email appeals, and giving day rallying cries. For teams without a dedicated video production resource, an ai video generator can help turn those stories into polished, shareable videos quickly without needing a full production budget.
With donors becoming more selective than ever, you’ll need a content engine that unifies your storytelling across different channels, feels like communication worth listening to, and conveys your message at the right time to the right people.
Most fiscal years have natural high points such as year-end giving, giving days, spring appeals tied to graduations or mission moments, and fiscal year-end pushes in May or June.
When shaping your content engine, build the calendar around those anchors first. Layer in mid-level cultivation campaigns, recurring giving acquisition pushes, and lapsed donor reactivation between the peaks.
Leave room for reactive moments such as a news cycle that connects to your mission or a milestone that deserves a campaign. The best strategies don’t miss out on featuring a remarkable story
Beyond your institution or organization’s usual high and low points, also look at your year-on-year online traffic, event attendance, and giving patterns to surface potential yearly opportunities that you might have missed in the past. Together, these checks should give you a great idea of when you’ll want to push hard and how to go about it.
Vanity metrics will eat your strategy alive if you let them. The metrics that matter are:
Build a quarterly review rhythm where these numbers and their underlying causes get discussed honestly to constantly improve your digital fundraising strategy . While the strategy document you wrote in Q1 will remain useful, the tweaks you make in Q3 might be the turning point for years to come.
The sheer variety of data tools and metrics is a double-edged sword for advancement and nonprofit teams. Tracking way too many things at once can be counterproductive, so we’ve put together a table with the most helpful or insightful data points. Pick what’s needed based on your event formats, goals, and current capabilities.
| Category | Metrics to Track |
|---|---|
| Revenue | Total online revenue, average gift size, revenue by fund/designation, recurring vs. one-time revenue split, revenue per donor segment |
| Donor Growth | New donor count, first-time donor conversion rate, reactivated donor count, cost per acquired donor, channel attribution for new donors |
| Donor Retention | Year-over-year retention rate, lapsed donor rate, recurring donor retention rate, average donor lifespan, churn by segment |
| Engagement | Email open rate, click-to-open rate, event attendance rate, social media reach and shares, peer-to-peer participation rate |
| Conversion | Donation page conversion rate, form abandonment rate, CTA click-through rate, mobile vs. desktop conversion rate, average sessions before donation |
| Campaign Performance | Revenue per campaign, fund-specific revenue, giving day donor count, matching gift utilization rate, peer-to-peer revenue contribution |
| Email Health | List growth rate, unsubscribe rate, deliverability rate, bounce rate, revenue attributed per email send |
| Recurring Giving | Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), recurring donor upgrade rate, failed payment rate, recurring donor conversion rate from one-time donors |
| Fundraising Efficiency | Cost per dollar raised, fundraising cost ratio, return on ad spend (ROAS), staff hours per campaign |
| CRM Health | Duplicate record rate, missing or invalid email percentage, outdated communication preferences, untracked gift sources, data entry lag time |
Achieving high conversion rates boils down to one key aspect – providing a smooth, frictionless experience for the donors. Having said that, there are some common pitfalls teams might run into while organizing digital fundraising campaigns, highlighted below.
About 60% of regular donations were made through mobile. That’s a lot!
Forms, pages, and sites are often clunky, on a medium that offers the most convenience to donors. This often results in prospects dropping out at the last stage, after all the effort that went into convincing them. Make sure your pages are well-optimized for both desktops and mobile devices.
You might not be a fan of long screen times, but you can certainly take advantage of them.
People have grown accustomed to completing payments, big or small, through a single tap. They expect the same convenience here; donations are no exception.
Offer a good mix of payment options. Including credit cards, netbanking, and mobile-friendly options like digital wallets or text-to-give features means you won’t be missing out on the smaller donations especially.
The easier it is to donate, the more gifts you receive.
Whether it’s on your site, email campaigns, giving pages, or socials, having clear, concise messaging is extremely important. Get straight to the point, and avoid dumping jargon. Doing so might cause the prospect to lose attention and the interest to contribute.
Using simple, engaging language helps build trust and clarity. The objective, beneficiaries, and the importance of your campaign is all that matters, the rest is fluff.
Nothing is more annoying than processing fees, convenience charges or other unexpected components to show up out of nowhere on the final step. More often than not, this just leads to abandoned carts and you losing a potential donor.
Always be upfront about all the costs involved during a transaction, or better yet, absorb them if you can.
Digital fundraising involves multiple teams and operations, often running concurrently. Scattering them across too many platforms is a recipe for chaos; a good platform should offer almost all the essential tools for online giving, while integrating seamlessly with other necessary software.
Almabase, in combination with a fundraising-focused CRM, is a powerful tool through which your team can frame and execute the strategies mentioned in this article. We can broadly classify the features under three important digital fundraising pillars:
If you’d like to explore Almabase’s capabilities more, it doesn’t get much better than a comprehensive tour of the platform. Book your demo here.
8 Step Digital Fundraising Strategy for Schools & Nonprofits
Your digital fundraising strategy decides which donors give, how often, and how much. Here are 8 steps schools and nonprofits can act on today
Fundraising
Hari Govind
May 21, 2026
12 minutes
Do you remember the first time you volunteered? I do.
It was for an NGO where I volunteered to teach kids at a school that was running low on staff. I remember walking into that classroom for the very first time, taking my first-ever class, and feeling a sense of connection I had never felt before. It genuinely felt like I had made a difference. And as I continued over the years, giving back to that organization financially became the easiest decision I ever made. Not because anyone asked me the right way, but because I had seen the work firsthand. I believed in it. I was part of it.
Through that experience, I also built something I hadn't expected: lasting friendships and a network of people who were equally passionate about making a difference. When that organization makes an ask today, I don't think twice.
That's a personal story. But when you extrapolate it, volunteering is a life-changing experience for many. No matter the form it takes. From participating in a small fundraiser to serving on an advisory committee, volunteering quietly paves the way to some of your most loyal and generous donors.And most institutions are leaving this pathway almost entirely untapped.
This isn't based on feeling alone. The 2026 National Alumni Survey, led by Howard Heevner and Sarah Kleeberger and co-sponsored by Almabase, surveyed over 82,000 alumni across 31 colleges and universities. The findings on volunteering are striking.
Alumni who recently volunteered with their alma mater are, simply put, a different category of donor.
The connection isn't coincidental. Volunteering builds the exact conditions that make giving feel natural: emotional investment, awareness of impact, and a sense of belonging. Alumni who volunteer don't give because they're asked well. They give because they care deeply, and they care deeply because they showed up first.
💡RISD’s “Life after RISD” initiative, for example, created flexible ways for alumni to mentor students, participate in career conversations, and support networking communities. [Learn More]
The honest answer is that most volunteer programs were designed for a different era. Traditional offerings like alumni events, leadership committees, and reunion committees were built around older models of engagement that assumed alumni had the time, proximity, and interest to commit to open-ended roles.
Today's alumni, particularly younger ones, don't see themselves in those formats. They want flexibility. They want to contribute a skill, not fill a seat. And critically, they want to see the impact of what they do. Not months later in an annual report, but in a way that feels immediate and personal.
When those conditions aren't met, volunteering quietly falls off the list. And with it, so does the pathway to giving.
The shift doesn't require a program overhaul. It requires rethinking what "volunteering" means and who it's designed for. Here's where to start:
Short, virtual, time-bound engagements like a one-hour career conversation, a Giving Day ambassador role, or a single mentoring session lower the barrier dramatically for younger alumni and first-time volunteers who aren't ready to commit to standing roles.
💡Pacific Northwest University, featured in CASE Insights on Giving Day 2026, expanded Giving Day participation beyond donations by introducing opportunities like mentorship, admissions support, and preceptor roles, reinforcing the idea that engagement often comes before giving [Read More]
Career advising, project-based consulting, and issue-focused advocacy align closely with how many alumni want to contribute today. Findings from the 2026 National Alumni Survey suggest that alumni interests vary across communities and lived experiences, with some gravitating toward career-focused engagement and others toward service-oriented involvement. Offering multiple pathways allows institutions to meet alumni where they are.
After every volunteer interaction, close the loop. Share what happened as a result. Connect their contribution to a student outcome, a program milestone, or a real story. Volunteers who see their impact are far more likely to return and to give.
Once an alumnus has volunteered and seen the work, the transition to giving should feel like a natural next step, not a separate ask. Design the journey intentionally, from first engagement to first gift.
💡Institutions like Concordia College have focused on creating more continuous and accessible alumni engagement experiences through digital communities, events, and ongoing participation opportunities. The result is a stronger sense of connection over time, where fundraising becomes part of an existing relationship rather than a one-time campaign ask. [Read more]
Timely, personalized acknowledgment matters more than formal recognition programs. Peer shoutouts, digital acknowledgment tied to specific impact, and authentic storytelling go further than plaques and event mentions.
The 2026 National Alumni Survey makes one thing clear: alumni haven't disengaged from generosity. They've simply redirected it toward causes and organizations that make them feel connected, informed, and like they genuinely matter.
Volunteering is the fastest, most human way to create that feeling.
Your best future donors may not be donors yet. But there's a good chance they're willing to show up, if you give them the right reason to.
👉 Explore the full 2026 National Alumni Survey findings on how volunteering shapes donor behavior.
How Alumni Volunteers Become Donors
Learn how alumni volunteering drives alumni giving, strengthens engagement, and builds long-term donor relationships according to the 2026 National Alumni Survey.
Fundraising
Sushmitha
May 19, 2026
12 minutes
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