Alumni Giving: Intelligent Higher Education Fundraising

Madeline Turner
07/09/2026

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Universities are crucial and transformative environments where young adults learn, grow, and begin taking the first steps toward their careers and adult lives. Alumni giving is the fuel that keeps the engine of higher education going. That’s why every higher education institution not only needs an alumni giving program, but needs a highly-functioning one that’s powered by the latest tools and best practices. This guide will cover all of the essentials your institution needs to level up your alumni giving program:

What Is Alumni Giving?: FAQ
Essential Elements of Successful Alumni Giving Program
DonorSearch and Intelligent Alumni Fundraising

Whether you’re a small, local college or a sprawling four-year state university, alumni giving is crucial for helping your institution provide for its students and reach its expansion goals. Start engaging your alumni and increasing your fundraising totals with the best alumni giving tools and tips. Let’s get started!

Why Is Alumni Giving Important?

From providing community spaces and events to excellent education opportunities, housing, dining, and unique activities for students to find their interests, funding for universities is important for the development of the next generation of adults. All of this becomes possible because of the generosity of alumni, and other donors, who understand how impactful universities can be.

University fundraising, especially from alumni, helps universities realize all of these programs, resources, and activities for their students.

How Is Alumni Giving Revenue Used?

Because universities provide so much for students, especially four-year institutions where students live on campus, there are a wide variety of uses for alumni giving funds. Some of these include:

The operating budget. A lot of alumni giving revenue goes to the general operating budget, which works to ensure that the college can afford its costs and stays running.
Scholarships to current students. Often, alumni gifts are used specifically to help current students. These alumni-funded scholarships help more students get access to a high-quality education.
Unique and meaningful programs. Alumni often recall student programs that had a major impact on their college career. From study abroad opportunities to connecting students with real-life professionals, these programs genuinely elevate the entire university experience.
Campus renovations. With alumni gifts, universities can provide libraries and learning centers full of educational resources as well as other campus facilities to optimize the learning experience.

Depending on the unique needs of your university, you may solicit donations for a specific renovation or program or just accept general alumni donations year-round that can be primarily used for your operational budget.

What Is a Good Alumni Giving Rate?

Alumni participation rate is one of the best indicators of how your alumni giving efforts are performing. The higher your alumni participation rate is, the more effective your engagement efforts are, and the more you’re likely fundraising!

To calculate your alumni participation rate, first determine your total alumni donor count. Then, divide that number by the number of overall alumni on record. For instance, if you have 100,000 overall alumni and 10,000 are donors, you have an alumni participation rate of 10%.

While there is no one definitive number that is “good,” you should be aware of your alumni participation rate and should always be working to improve it.

Each of these sections will give a brief introduction to why these are important for alumni giving and how they can be done/used to improve alumni giving.

Prospect Research

While general appeals can sometimes work to garner donations, using a more informed approach to alumni donation solicitation will give you better results for less effort. This is where prospect research comes into the picture.

Prospect research uses a combination of philanthropic and wealth indicators to identify the affinity and capacity to give of different individuals. This information helps you to send appropriate and targeted solicitations that will increase the chance of securing major gifts from your alumni.

While prospect research can be done manually, it’s not only cumbersome but time-consuming. To effectively begin identifying your top prospects, your fundraising team will be better off investing in high-quality software that can improve and automate the prospect research process for you.

A Communication Strategy

Even when you know which alumni to ask for larger donations, you still need a broader communication strategy. This can help you engage first-time donors, increase affinity to give among more hesitant prospects, and educate alumni about involvement opportunities they may not have known about before. A few simple ways to improve your communication strategy include:

Engage in multi-channel marketing. Marketing to your alumni on different channels will enable you to engage more potential donors from different age groups. Not all of your alumni are on social media!
Communicate frequently. Experts estimate that it takes between seven and 12 touchpoints to effectively engage a donor. Keep in touch with your alumni regularly so that you’re always top of mind.
Leverage your annual report. Your annual report showcases all your accomplishments over the past twelve months. Create a version that will engage your alumni and drive them to donate!
Always express appreciation. Whether they attended an event, made a small donation, or a large one, don’t pass up an opportunity to thank your alumni for their engagement with your university.

An effective communication strategy not only makes sure that your existing donors don’t forget about you but also helps you engage more potential donors who may not have interacted with you before.

Matching Gift Marketing

As alumni of an esteemed institution, it’s a safe assumption that most of your alumni who have the capacity to give are currently employed, potentially by large companies with corporate giving programs.

This is excellent news for your alumni giving program because it increases the likelihood that your alumni can get their donations matched. Not only does this instantly double their impact, but one in three donors also indicate they’d give a larger gift if a match is applied to their donation.

For both of those reasons, marketing matching gifts to your alumni and donors is crucial for increasing your fundraising totals. Many alumni may not even know that their employer offers matching gifts or how they work. Sharing this information with donors can greatly increase the chance that they donate and get their donations matched. Consider marketing matching gifts on your social media or in your next email newsletter!

When it comes to managing alumni giving from identifying top prospects to creating robust profiles and securing donor data, there is no better partner than DonorSearch. DonorSearch has the next generation of fundraising tools that utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning to help you fundraise more successfully than ever before.

DonorSearch’s advanced AI and machine learning technology has incredibly accurate prospect prediction capabilities that can make a huge difference in your alumni stewardship. Some of the predictions include:

Who’s going to donate in the next 30 days
Non-donors most likely to make their first gift
Donors who are most likely to donate again
Donors who are most likely to give over $250
Donors who are most likely to respond (engagement score)
The best way to reach out to a donor

Not only will you have superior prospect prediction, but the longer you use DonorSearch, the better the algorithm will become at making predictions due to DonorSearch’s machine learning capabilities.

AI and machine learning are the future. DonorSearch can allow your higher education institution to take the next step forward for automated and accurate donor prospecting.

Alumni giving is an essential part of raising money for your higher education institution.

See how DonorSearch can help you improve fundraising.

Endowment Spending & Growth Calculator

Enter your fund's current value and adjust the return, spending, and inflation sliders to see how its value in today's dollars changes over time.

Starting fund value

Expected investment return 6.0%

0%12%

Spending rate 4.0%

2%7%

Inflation rate 3.0%

0%8%

Duration (years) 10

5 yrs25 yrs

Value in 10 years

In today's dollars

4. Continue to Steward Donors

Your relationship with the donors who give to your endowment doesn’t end when you secure their gifts. Because your endowment exists to make a difference in the long term, your supporters will want you to keep in touch about its progress. Ongoing stewardship means keeping donors updated about your endowment’s performance and impact. A report that strengthens your relationship with donors should cover:

The fund’s balance at the start and end of the year
Spending amounts and allocations
How the fund’s returns compare to your investment targets
A short narrative detailing the specific impacts the endowment achieved

Create a report for each endowment rather than sending an identical document to everyone. A donor who endowed a scholarship wants to hear about the students it supported, while a donor who endowed a building fund wants updates on construction projects.

5. Upgrade Your Endowment Management Tools

Your endowment management tools should make applying your spending policy across every fund easy. Investing in dedicated software is especially useful as your endowment grows. Handling unitization in spreadsheets might work for a few funds, but as you begin to manage dozens or hundreds of gifts, dedicated software can save your team time spent manually calculating gains and losses for each one.

Why Nonprofits Need Dedicated Endowment Management Software

Dedicated endowment software brings accuracy and consistency to every part of the management process, from tracking individual funds to improving security. See how these solutions compare to a spreadsheet-based approach:

nfographic table outlining the information below.

How These Methods Compare:

In managing your endowment with traditional spreadsheets, you may see:

High administrative burden: Manual entry across disconnected systems
Limited security and audit footprints: Reduced version control and audit trail visibility
Difficulty with donor transparency: Spreadsheets provide only static data that is difficult to turn into custom results.

By using dedicated software, you are likely to find the following improvements:

Lower administrative burden: Automated fund tracking and calculated allocations
Enhanced security and audit footprint: Audit-ready reconciliation with clear tracking
Greater donor transparency: Connects with reporting platforms

Dedicated endowment management software keeps your organization compliant while freeing up the time your team once spent manually managing spreadsheets.

Secure Your Endowment with Balance by EverTrue

Effective endowment management begins with excellent accounting. Balance by EverTrue handles unitization, applies spending rules, and produces audit-ready reports, so your team can spend more time on the donor relationships that built the fund in the first place.

Turn your data into a clear picture of long-term impact. Combine accurate fund accounting with donor reporting that showcases impact.
Connect with the tools you already use. Pair Balance with Impact by EverTrue and ODDER by EverTrue to create and deliver compelling digital endowment reports that you can send to donors with ease.
Know where every fund stands in real time. Check market values, gift history, and available spending for any fund. Then, share view-only versions with your team, so everyone stays informed.

With Balance, your team can stop spending all your time on manual management and instead add balance to your endowment workflow.

Additional Resources

To learn more about managing your endowment and other ways that technology can help your organization, check out these additional resources:

Webinar: Building a Seamless Relationship Between Endowment Finance and Advancement. In this webinar, we cover the keys to un-complicating your institution’s financial endowment reporting process. Explore how building a connection between your finance and advancement teams can lead to happier donors and happier staff.
The Best Alumni Management Software Solutions in 2026. Alumni management software allows your university to maintain an active community that supports your school in a number of ways. Review top software solutions.
Donor Segmentation: How Organizing Donors Boosts Retention. What is donor segmentation, and how can you use it to boost retention? Learn the need-to-know information in this guide from EverTrue’s fundraising experts.

Less stress, higher endowment funds. Discover how Balance provides the organization, security, and accuracy your endowment needs. Request a demo.

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