EverTrue & Graduway: Announcing Our Strategic Partnership

Mike Nagel
05/15/2019

Today’s a big day. We’re announcing a new partnership with Graduway, as our companies have teamed up to bring alumni relations and development closer together than ever before.

As two of the most innovative leaders in the advancement technology sector, we are committed to closely collaborating to better support our mutual customers and prospective customers.

In concert with this announcement, we’re building a new integration that will send engagement data from Graduway into EverTrue. For alumni relations leaders, this means you’ll quickly measure the results of your work and identify new volunteers and social ambassadors. And for fundraising leaders, this gives you more information about how your most-connected alumni are engaging with your institution.

We’re doubling down on the future

As we’ve grown, we’ve always looked to customers for guidance. Your feedback helped us launch the EverTrue platform — which took the user-friendly technology powering Alumni Community and added giving history, capacity indicators, and engagement information to give fundraisers powerful tools to understand every donor, build lists and audience segments, find new prospects, and manage portfolios.

We will continue to add new integrations and build tools to support your ability to strengthen relationships with current and prospective supporters. With EverTrue, you get more actionable information about every prospect and donor than anywhere else. And you can do that with the industry’s most user-friendly, mobile tools.

(Tipping our hand here… but we have a couple big announcements coming soon that you’re going to absolutely love!)

Change is coming for Alumni Community

With the launch of this partnership, we will transition all current Alumni Community customers to Graduway’s directory and mentorship platform by August 15.

We didn’t reach this decision lightly. Alumni Community launched our now-nine-year journey to help advancement teams build relationships in pursuit of a better world. For hundreds of customers, our alumni directory was your first introduction to EverTrue and we wouldn’t be here without you and your support. We remain focused on delivering the most powerful, mobile-friendly tools for turning engagement into fundraising opportunities.

We chose to partner with Graduway because they offer the most established, full-featured alternative to Alumni Community. With Graduway, your alumni will enjoy the mobile-friendly directory you’ve come to love from EverTrue while also tapping into the power of the graduate network with access to its mentorship platform.

In the next few days, we’ll introduce you to your new contacts at Graduway and start working on a plan to shift your directory to their platform by August 15.

Your Customer Success Manager will be in touch to talk about next steps or you can contact us directly at success@evertrue.com.

Let’s talk about the future of alumni relations and development

Join this can’t-miss conversation between Brent Grinna, our founder and CEO, Daniel Cohen, founder and CEO of Graduway, and James Stofen, VP of Alumni Relations at Tulane University (a mutual customer and one of the colleges leading the charge in using new technology to effectively engage alumni).

We’ll talk about adding value to the alumni experience, measuring engagement, and connecting alumni relations to development as we all work together to build meaningful relationships to support the institutions we love.

Questions?

We’re also talking to every Alumni Community customer, so if you don’t hear from us soon, please reach out: success@evertrue.com.

This is a big change for all of us. But we’re confident that this means really good things in the days ahead for EverTrue, Graduway, and — most importantly — you and the alumni you represent.

And that’s a pretty sweet combination.

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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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