Campus Dance and Brown Alumni Connect Launch in Providence
Brent Grinna
Over Memorial Day Weekend, EverTrue and the Brown Alumni Association launched Brown Alumni Connect in conjunction with Brown’s annual reunion and commencement activities. One of the great things about working with schools is learning about different traditions at each.
A highlight of Brown’s reunion weekend is Friday evening’s “Campus Dance”. The description from the Brown Alumni Association website reads: “One of Brown’s best-loved Reunion and Commencement traditions, the Campus Dance brings over 11,000 people to Brown to dance the night away under a sky lit with over 600 paper lanterns. The evening joins together graduating seniors and their families, alumni of all ages, and Brown faculty and staff.”
Todd Andrews, VP of Alumni Relations, and Dorcey Baker, Director of Alumni Relations Communications & Planning, spent countless hours preparing for the weekend. They also worked closely with the EverTrue team in support of what we believe is the first alumni relations-sponsored iPhone app in iTunes. Alumni feedback was very positive and we’ve begun to receive excellent suggestions about features alumni would like to see in future versions.
I’ve included a photo of the neat sign the BAA made to promote the launch. Let us know what you think!
Ever True!
Brent
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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.
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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.
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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:
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:
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Dedicated endowment management software keeps your organization compliant while freeing up the time your team once spent manually managing spreadsheets.
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Additional Resources
To learn more about managing your endowment and other ways that technology can help your organization, check out these additional resources:
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.
