An Alumni Confessional

Ehren Foss
05/29/2013

Looking around the newly formed “evertoo” bay of desks, I see a number of pennants, flags, and towels tacked to the walls. At any other company you might assume these would be sports related, but at EverTrue they’re all in with alma maters.

Suddenly, I feel like a bad alumnus — I skipped my reunion, I’ve never donated, and I can’t remember the last time I logged in to MIT’s Infinite Connection. I initially couldn’t remember our fight song! The fact that I just conducted a very thorough job search but did not use my own alumni network is especially troubling.

Cosine secant tangent sine, 3.14159!

I’ve worked the past six years in #nptech. I’ve built websites, databases, gone to AFP and NTEN events, and feel like an old timer at conferences. I’ve worked with the Salesforce platform for most of that time and was recently named an MVP (woohoo!). Over the past three years I built two small startups: one focused on social media fundraising, and the other is a data hygiene tool for Salesforce. You might think I’d be a little worn out by all that self entrepeneurship, and you’d be right! After six years I wanted to have more focus, and to find a larger team and some solid mentors.

At NTC, I was also hoping to find a company ready to make a substantial impact in nonprofit technology. I have great respect and admiration for vendors and consultants who are working to close technology gaps and offer new, great tools, accessible to all sizes of organizations. However, I didn’t find anyone who had both fire in their bellies and the resources to leapfrog several long years of bootstrapping.

I had no idea EverTrue existed until some “might as well Google it” searches for Boston startups I hadn’t heard of. EverTrue – a nonprofit related startup, near to my heart – had a technical architect position listed, but while I was starting to figure out how best to get introduced, the position disappeared from the website. I did something that almost never gets you a job: I filled out the “Contact Us” form and crossed my fingers.

It worked! With thanks to some friends who knew EverTrue from TechStars, I met with Eric and Brent. We had a lot to talk about.

I think EverTrue’s approach to improving alumni engagement and fundraising technology is very smart. Schools across the land are struggling to update cranky old systems to meet the needs of modern communities. I know from personal experience that upgrading or changing CRM is no small feat. EverTrue’s clever approach is that there’s no need to supplant Raiser’s Edge, Salesforce, or another monolithic CRM when you can just add a mobile friendly, LinkedIn-enhanced layer to place on top.

I can already see what a challenge it has been for alumni officers to do their jobs in the web era. I look forward to doing what I can to help!

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.

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Expected investment return 6.0%

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Spending rate 4.0%

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Inflation rate 3.0%

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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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