Hi everybody. Let's give folks just a minute to log in. We are expecting a nice large group joining us today, but we are so happy that you're here to come and learn about the FY24 Case Insights Alumni Engagement Findings. And what I'm going to do, I'm just looking at the participant number, and when it looks like that's starting to slow slightly, then we will get started. All right, I think we are inching up now, so I know we've got a lot of great content planned for all of you, so I will kick us off. Thank you all so much for being a part of today's webinar, where we will be spending the next hour together talking all things Case Insights on Alumni Engagement. Just a couple of housekeeping items before we jump into our call today. We love interactivity. We are going to have polls, so you'll have a lot of opportunity to give us some updates about what's happening, but also I hope that as we're going through the findings, as we're sharing some of the things about what we're hearing and observing, that you'll use the chat as an opportunity to comment, to connect with each other, to connect with us, and tell us all the great things that are happening, or vent and say, you know, this is really tough and we're really struggling here. All of that is welcome. However, because particularly we have a really large group, sometimes if a question comes on the chat, we lose that. And so if you have a question for any of our fantastic speakers today, we do ask that you will use the Q&A feature and submit that so that we can make sure we get a chance to answer that question there. Oh, and last but not least, we are absolutely recording this session, and you will receive this presentation afterwards. So I think that covers the basics. I'll go ahead and kick us off with first giving special thanks to our fantastic sponsors of today's webinar. And that is CMAC, or Chris Marshall Advancement Consulting, and Give Campus for supporting this survey today. I will just add a special note that CASE relies so much on our educational partners to do the work we do. But I think with the alumni engagement metrics, particularly being such nascent metrics, we really rely on the collaboration that you all have given us and making sure that our institutions are able to capture the data, are able to build strategies around the data. And so we're so thankful for your support today and every day and making this work possible. And of course, we will be talking about our survey respondents. But spoiler alert, we inched so closer to 400. We had 394 this year. And we are so thankful for all of you because, of course, without you taking the time to provide this data, we would not have this fantastic research for you all today. So let's though take a step back and introduce ourselves. I know I've been speaking for a moment, but my name is Jenny Cook-Smith, and I lead our CASE Insights Solutions team. You'll hear a little bit more of the work of Insights Solutions in a bit, but I will just quickly say this is one of my very favorite topics. And I spent about 15 years doing annual giving research on benchmarking and trends with donor centrics prior to coming to CASE. And it was really CASE's focus and work on building out the alumni engagement metrics that brought me here. So, so happy to have a chance to be with all of you today. And as you can see, you're going to hear a lot more voices than just me. So I'm going to let my other colleagues introduce themselves, and we'll kick it off with Ann. Hi, I'm Ann Kaplan, looking a little different than my picture. And I've been directing the U.S. fundraising survey, the VSE, since before I got to CASE around 1999, I started working on it. But I've been running the alumni engagement survey since 2020. And it is a pleasure to be here. Hi, everybody. I'm Fleming Puckett, also looking a little different from my picture. But I am happy to be with you all today. I joined CASE this year as principal research faculty coming from a long stint working with lots of different higher ed institutions in particular, and focusing on advancement. So I'm really excited to be able to share this data and some of the stories and experiments that we're hearing out there in the market. So thanks for being with us today. And I'm Nick Campisi. I guess we all need updated photos. I have a lot more gray hair than my photo did. Director of data science with Insight Solutions. So just love doing deep dives into your data and understanding how do these ones and zeros fit into a larger picture or something that us humans can understand. Great. So here is our plan for today. We will talk a little bit about CASE Insights on alumni engagement and talk a little bit about how it fits into the work with CASE as well as just kind of our greater environment. Speaking of that, we'll also talk just a little bit about what we're hearing and seeing as it relates to this topic before moving into Ann's going to take us through the FY 24 key findings. And then we always like to end it with what can you do next. So Nick's going to talk about the summary benchmarking reports, which are live as of today and available for those of you that did take the survey, as well as our strategic benchmarking reports, which are our fee based custom reports that get into sort of that next level of digging into the data. So hopefully that sounds like a good plan. And as I said, we've got some polls throughout as well. Many of you may be familiar with our orbiting circles, but this is really our visual representation of the work that we do. So when we say CASE Insights, what we're really talking about is providing you all with metrics that support broad based advancement. So really starting to connect the dots all the way from brand and reputation. And that's where our marketing and communication circle comes in. We are piloting or will be piloting some metrics there. So stay tuned to our alumni engagement, of course, our focus today, and then continuing down that path to philanthropy. As you can see, our alumni engagement is our global survey. So we just have one survey on engagement. With the philanthropy data, we are looking at that regionally. And so we think of that as globally consistent and regionally relevant. And so you can see the regions where we offer the philanthropy benchmarking results with a couple of new regions in there with a pilot we've just completed with Latin America and a pilot we're just starting with our international and independent schools. And then rounding out that with our new survey, which is just about to close out on CASE Insights on campaigns and looking at accountability and transparency in campaigns. And interestingly there, we do have some questions around goals outside of financial goals. And so excited as we start to pull through that data to bring that back to this group as we think about overlaying some of what we're hearing in terms of engagement and campaigns. I'll just remind you that everything orbits around our CASE global reporting standards. And that is really setting those definitions and sort of principles of practice as we think about the work we do as advancement professionals. So let's take a moment and just dig in a little bit to our CASE Insights on alumni engagement. I think some of you are tired of hearing me say this, but it's still true. And that is this is nascent data. So even though we're six years in and that feels like a really nice milestone, many of you may remember that year one was by all means a pilot. And so therefore we really have what we think of as five years of data where our true questions haven't changed. Though I would say in general we tend to look at the last two or three years because that's when we started to hear institutions say they're beginning to think about strategies in place and using this data to see how those strategies are working. I know some of you are very much still in data collection and data capture and that is really completely okay and fine too. Again, this is still pretty nascent path. As noted, this is our highest year and we do have some folks that are still getting those responses in. So at the time we analyzed this data we were at 394. And this data itself as a global survey you will see we'll look at data in the findings report which will be out this month. You will see a lot of cuts by region and I just saw Ann mouth Tuesday. I didn't want to say it specifically but it sounds like we can all say Tuesday. So you will see cuts by regions. You will see slices that look at institution type as well as by control like public or private. Today we're really going to be looking at sort of that big picture overall. And so one thing I thought that might be helpful harkening back to the standards is I think one of the critical pieces of entering into this survey was establishing definitions. We do provide these definitions on our website. They're within the survey. They are in the guidance document but I thought I would just bring it out really quickly for you to see this note that when we look at our when we're talking about alumni we are really looking at this broad definition of people that have interacted with our institutions to learn. In the survey itself you will see that there are cuts by degreed and non-degreed and in the full survey even categories that look at undergrad, graduate, multiple degreed and so forth but all of those roll up to that larger alumni category. And then when we look at legally contactable alumni which will be a term you'll hear a little bit today as we look at the data as you can see we're talking about people that are living that you can email them or mail them or call them not and but or and all of those and that there's nothing that's keeping you from contacting them like you know never reach out to me again for no reason. And so that's really the group that when we start to think about how are you engaging this base it's that group of our legally contactable alumni. And just one additional sort of definition setting slide for you as you can see when we say engagement we have a definition for that too and I will just note that to me the key words are mutually beneficial relationships and one of the great things about this work as we continue to hear stories of how you are using those metrics are really hearing those stories about not just what are the alumni doing for your institutions but also how you are enriching the lives of the alumni as well and really thinking about fueling that virtuous circle. So then as we take this definition you can see that engagement breaks out into four modes and we've got the definitions for those four modes listed here and we'll talk a bit about those throughout the session. One reminder or PSA for anybody that's here has not done the survey and is thinking maybe you'd like to do so in the future. Communication is optional and we've continued to do that because we know that that can be tricky and we do not want you actually manually counting all of the communication attempts. We really would only want communication if it's something that you're able to automate and collect that data. So with that being established then I think one last component around how we use this and that is just sharing a little bit of our philosophy and so when we released the survey it really was a big change because all the other work we'd done before was in counting and when we moved to those three non-monetary modes of volunteerism experiential and communication what we did was we're no longer counting we are measuring and as you can see here measuring really meaning this idea of how do we reduce uncertainty about the thing we're trying to figure out and being pretty upfront with the fact that we probably won't ever get everything that's happening and so this is a way of understanding well out of the information you do collect how could you start to use that for your own strategies. Also note that all we care about for purposes of this framework though for your own work I hope that you care about more than that is did they or did they not do one thing in each mode in the year so we aren't counting up you know if somebody volunteered seven times they're not seven they would just be one. So what I'd like to do as we shift forward to thinking about these results is simply mention that we I think it's helpful to frame the engagement data and what it is living in the world in 2025 and so to do that I am sharing with you just a couple of components from some research that came out from the generosity commission last September it's quite a dense report I encourage you to go take a look I've got the link here but essentially what that report found is that when we looked across sectors so much more than education is that fewer people are donating but those that are doing so are giving more and while yes this data was specific to the U.S. it does seem in talking with other regions that the findings are somewhat consistent to what we often see in other parts of the globe and I will say for purposes of this report generosity is defined as giving and volunteering and what it does is calls out you know not just the dangers of you might have a non-existent pipeline if you've got fewer and fewer people giving but also notes that if we've got less than half the population engaging what they are really doing is not engaging as part of civic society or at least based on the data we can collect and so the engagement metrics really are a way of thinking proactively how do we stop this tide of losing alumni donors losing volunteers overall and how do we provide some opportunities to really think about how we use engagement and so what I'd like to propose as we're thinking about this data is that the engagement framework is a bit of a proactive means and leveraging changing the the trends in generosity and in some ways could be a counter narrative for us and so just some thoughts around those four modes and how that can connect to thinking about fostering generosity and I'll just share with you one metric that's a little bit tricky because we aren't counting up every single act of engagement as I noted earlier but what we did count is from those 394 institutions that provided data to us when we looked at the counts within each mode over the year. So thinking about those acts of engagement by mode, that was 14.7 acts of engagement, which I think is incredibly powerful as we think about the work that you are all doing together across our societies. So big picture thinking, but hopefully that sort of gets us inspired as we're thinking about what does this data mean and how do we use it. And on that note, one preview of something you'll see in the findings report is we did collect a couple of quotations from several of our respondents and wanted to highlight an institution that has been participating since all six years, so since that first 2019 year. And Joanne Nyland, who I think it is in the wee hours of the morning for her, so hopefully we'll be listening to this recording and not joining live, but she gave us a fantastic quote of why this is so critical for them at Griffith University that they have participated every year. And so you can see that it's really all about a useful benchmark to both look at peers in Australia, peers in other regions, but measure their own year over year progress. And I think that's so critical in thinking about this nascent data is first understanding what's happening in your own shops and your own strategies. And then it's given them, I love this last line, to gather data for purposes of submission. It allows us to interrogate our engagement on a level we might not otherwise do so, which I thought was incredibly well said and represents something that we've heard from another members overall. And so you're going to hear more about these sort of next couple of slides over the course of our time together today, but I'll just briefly say that we often like to just say, what are we seeing and what are we hearing? And so what are we seeing are some things within the data itself. And Anne's going to talk about some of the steadiness we've seen when we've looked at engagement over the last three years. We've also seen, speaking of steadiness, that now that we have two years of looking at data by graduation cohort, we really see similar behavior from our 23 to our 24 year, and you'll look at that data specifically. I will highlight that this year we did ask the staffing question a little differently, where we tried to identify direct counts of staff that roll up to a chief alumni officer, in addition to indirect counts of staff to understand people across your institution that are also working towards alumni relations, even if they don't roll up to that chief alumni officer. I will say in doing the work that we're doing to prepare for our benchmarking cohort and having conversations with folks, I think we probably still have a little bit to learn and clarify before that's a number we want to put in front of you and put out as a key finding, but I think we're getting closer to understanding that data in a way that starts to let you provide an apples to apples benchmark. And then on this last note, one of the joys of the solutions team and starting to have calls with people and having our cohort meetings and talking about how you're using this data is that we are really seeing a shift of institutions that are saying, oh my gosh, we've put these strategies in place and now we've got this report and we can see where the things we're doing are working or we have put this in our strategic plan and now we see it here. And so I think that's a really exciting shift. And Fleming's actually gonna share some specific examples of some of those in just a moment. And as we, before I pass things over to Fleming, I just wanted to also say some things we're hearing. So not necessarily in the data, but absolutely in the ethos and the environment. And the first thing is, as we're talking to institutional leaders, I'd say there's two elements of engagement that we're hearing is top of mind and that's advocacy and donor cultivation or using engagement as a cultivation tool. You may or may not be aware for those of you that are here as our US members that CASE has a brand new resource. I've got a link here on alumni advocacy and really trying to think about how do we as a whole profession enable all of our alumni together to stand up for higher education and what higher education needs to continue to be successful in this country. And so I'll just make that brief plug there. We're also hearing a lot more about, we love measuring engagement for our alumni. There are a lot of other critical groups. And so thinking about how we take these findings across to other non-alumni constituencies. CASE is currently doing research on generative AI that will be coming out over really July, so over the next couple of months. And we are seeing a number of stories around using gen AI for broad-based engagement, particularly in efficiencies and are thinking about how we transition that to really building efficacy as well and thinking about that AI usage. One of the themes as well, as we think about that generosity commission report and hearing how people are measuring their own work is we're moving from just hearing time, talent and treasure to thinking about testimony and trust as other measures that really tell the impact of our alumni when we think about our mutually beneficial relationships. And then while our framework with CASE is very much the one framework that works for everyone, we are absolutely seeing a lot of different ways that people are adopting it, which I think is really exciting as we think about some testing, which is a perfect segue for Fleming. Thank you, Jenny. Thanks for being with us today. I have had the great privilege of being able to chat recently with several of our member institutions from all the different regions that we serve on things that they are seeing, things that they're trying right now, challenges that they're facing in terms of alumni engagement. And so I thought for today, I would just give you all a sense of what those conversations are looking like right now. This is not a comprehensive list necessarily. These conversations are gonna be continuing on moving forward. So I'll be growing my list of stories and strategies and experiments moving forward, but we just wanted to give you a snapshot of kind of where we are so far in these conversations. So the first one, as you can see here, the first topic is challenges related to alumni engagement and alumni engagement staff and operations within an advancement shop. So one of the things that folks have been pointing out is the need for better collaboration within an advancement shop. So with alumni relations folks, but also with their colleagues within an advancement shop, a lot of folks, perhaps advancement managers, particularly frontline fundraisers may not necessarily see the huge benefit that they can get from working with alumni engagement folks on things like donor leads, campaign prep, and particularly messaging on key issues. That's a theme that's been coming out of alumni relations through the marketing and communications and event sort of work that they do really being in many cases, the face of the institution and the bearer in many cases of the mission of the institution. So a lot of messaging is found in the work, of course, that alumni relations folks are doing. Beyond that, building trust and partnerships across the institution in order to show the value of alumni engagement for the whole institution and looking for opportunities to collaborate further, for example, with senior institutional leaders and academics as well. As I mentioned before, gaining recognition for being kind of the frontline carrier of the institution's mission, super important right now with folks concerned in some cases about the direction of leadership within institutions, choices that colleges and universities and some schools are making as well. So going back to the mission of why we are in education, what we are trying to do in the world and for our students is more important than ever, I think, in engaging alumni and also in finding donors who are increasingly wanting to give to issues rather than necessarily to institutions. Looking at new alumni and donor behaviors, culture change, causing some complications, you might say, in terms of relationships within advancement shops with staff and then externally with students and alumni as well. And then also recognizing that even as a lot of communication engagement numbers at many places are up, which is very exciting, recognizing that in many cases that communication has been negative. There's been a lot of anger and frustration and concerns and questioning. And so these people are engaged and in many cases, it's good that they are concerned about the institution. That level of engagement shows that they care, but at the same time, they may not necessarily be good candidates for future donors. So a few of the challenges we're seeing out there. The next one is about the power of data. We're always looking for stories at Case on the use of data. So I collected a few of those. Really this need for comprehensive, good quality data to be able to demonstrate the value of alumni engagement to institutional leaders. This is especially important when we're talking about staffing and investing in the advancement function, particularly in alumni engagement. Data can be very powerful in those conversations with leaders and with boards as well. A lot of CRM conversions happening. We know that those can be like pulling teeth and can take a very long time, but the result of course is wonderful, hopefully clean and useful data that can be used in order to gain advantage in understanding our alumni, our constituents, in segmenting our communications, et cetera. So definitely worth the effort, but recognizing that it is a massive effort. Lots of folks are still working on dashboards. This is wonderful to see at the DRIVE Conference recently, we saw a lot of really interesting, interactive, amazing dashboards that allow staff across the advancement shop to gain access to some really great data on individuals and on trends and use that in order to drive strategies. And then of course, predictive modeling can come out of that as well saying, gosh, we're feeling constrained in terms of resources and staffing. We can't engage everybody. We can't turn everybody into a donor. So how do we make sure that we're using the resources we have in a targeted way? That predictive modeling work, which is growing significantly now, and it's exciting to see, can be a huge part of using our resources more effectively. And then saying, look, we really need to be a thought partner with institutional leaders as well. As they're thinking about broader strategies in the future of our educational institution, we've got great data on what folks are looking for at a college or university or a school, what they're studying, where our alumni are going after they graduate, helping us to focus as an institution and think more about who we are and what we wanna be as an institution in the future. This particular comment was about who we will be 50 years from now, really making sure that alumni engagement folks are part of that conversation. All right, and the next one is current strategies. A lot of things going on here. As I mentioned, this is not comprehensive, but I wanted to give you a sense of the sorts of things that folks are working on right now, whether it's a big kind of programmatic change or whether it's small experiments that they're trying to see how it might work with different groups of alumni or constituents. So lots of happening here, and I wanted to be able to include some of these today. Increasing efforts to tell the institution story, particularly through the voices of alumni. There are no better spokespeople for your institution than your current students and your alumni. Tapping into those stories, very inspiring, of course. Getting folks to help with enrollment challenges, particularly alumni. Lots of different things happening here, whether it's actually looking for potential students who would be great applicants in folks' individual network, writing welcome letters to students as they're arriving. We know that there are a lot of enrollment challenges out there, even the Chronicle of Higher Ed today was talking about the trend of folks accepting an offer and even putting down a deposit and then not showing up. So engaging alumni in that can be very powerful and seriously help the institution down the road, revenue-wise in particular. Working on engaging current students, recognizing that the more engaged and involved they are as students, that will translate into more engaged and involved alumni as well. Looking at portfolios, saying portfolios are not just for frontline fundraisers anymore. Lots of conversations about what engagement portfolios can look like and how those can be used. As Jenny already mentioned, using AI and other technologies to help us to get our message out there, to do segmentation, to collect individual interests in a way that helps us be more efficient with the limited resources that we have. As I mentioned already as well, issues-based engagement, thinking about the fact that folks really now are wanting to give and be involved in things that they care about, problems in the world, issues that they care about, and creating engagement opportunities based around those issues and based on our knowledge of what they are interested in, in many cases on an individual level. Looking at engagement goals as part of campaigns, as Jenny mentioned earlier. Working to increase budgets for engagement programming. We know that over the past few years, virtual engagement opportunities have started to shrink again. So what virtual opportunities are still inspiring folks to show up and participate in, and what are people looking for today in terms of getting back to more in-person events, which we know are once again, the vast majority of programming that we're putting out there. Increasing collaboration across an institution to get better data on who's showing up for things. We know people are volunteering, but there's such a thing as a ghost volunteer who shows up and does something at least before we, as an advancement shop, even know they're there. How do we get that information? Preferably beforehand. And also event attendees and registrations. Those often live on different databases in units across an institution. And how can we get those databases to talk to each other? In some cases, if places aren't there yet, they're saying, well, let's have a committee whose job it is at least to keep track of the different events and who's attending so we get better data because we know that these are our most engaged folks and great candidates for converting to donors in the future. Mentorship programs are fantastic ways of engaging our alumni and also creating a sense of gratitude for our students who gained career knowledge, skills, et cetera, through these kinds of relationships. Looking at connecting engaged alumni with giving opportunity who are our best opportunities for converting folks into donors based on their particular interests. And then the last one on this list, again, many more to come, but looking particularly at our volunteers as a great source of potential new donors down the road. Lots of things people are thinking about and trying out these days, and it's exciting to see that. And I hope that you all will add more to these strategies and stories and experiments down the road. We love hearing from you all. So with all of that in mind, I do have a poll that I wanted to put out there to give you all a chance to chime in on the things that you are working on. Obviously fewer things on this list than on what I just shared, but the themes are all there. So what's top of mind for you all? Is it about CRM and technology? Is it about campaign? Is it about student success and career readiness? Demonstrating the ROI of engagement or something else? Obviously lots of other opportunities. So if you choose something else or other, please add some more information in the chat if you wouldn't mind. Also, if it comes to CRM or technology, feel free to add more there as well. If there's something specific you wanted to mention that you all are working on. Again, we really appreciate you all letting us know what's top of mind for you all, where your strategies and experiments are happening right now. And so thank you for sharing. I'll be quiet for just a second and let y'all fill this in, and then we'll see how it comes out. Nice, okay, that is quite a spread. So I love that. Okay, so looking at ROI, huge theme in the conversations I've been having recently, student success and career readiness, fantastic. Obviously a huge opportunity to make an impact on students' lives. Looking at campaigns, wonderful. And as Jenny mentioned, I would love to hear more about the campaigns that you're planning or campaigns, in fact, that many of you might be closing out, seeing what your themes and experiences are there. Lots of folks working on technology and CRM, so bless you all for going through that process. We know it's a big one. And then other, as I mentioned, would love to hear what you all might be working on in the chat as well. And please feel free to add more detail to any of those responses. We love hearing from you all. I will be back in a little bit, but for now I'm gonna hand things over to Anne. Thanks, y'all. Hi, so I'll be reviewing some of those sort of higher level key findings from this year's study. As was mentioned earlier, it will be posted on the case website. Tuesday is our target date. So unless there's a nationwide collapse of the internet or something, it should be there then. The first thing that I'll mention is that communication is the most common mode of engagement. And you can probably imagine why that would be. And these are not communications that are communications about philanthropy, like asking for a gift. Everything has an element of communications. It's communication per se. And then we have experiential engagement, and that would be attending events, just as one example. Philanthropy, that's fairly strong. And volunteering, one of the reasons it's a low percentage is that we're talking about formal volunteer roles. You can't have, as you know, if you manage formal volunteers, you can't just open the floodgates to that kind of activity. There are plenty of people who volunteer at an event who are not really formal volunteers. So we're talking about formal volunteer roles here. And that should be low. So I looked at the 240 institutions that completed the survey for three consecutive years. And as you can see, this is the percentage engaged in any mode. And it really has not changed much. I would say this is virtually unchanged, which is actually a good thing because it shows that I mostly study philanthropy and a steady rate of engagement or participation shows stability rather than lack of growth. And another thing that I should mention is that of course, and I'll say more about this later, percentage engaged has two factors to it. We'll just put a pin in that, we'll come back to that. So the other thing is that it's not even. When you have an average like that or a median, there's always variety within it. So in that cohort, 55% reported that engagement went up from 2023 to 24, and then 45% reported that it declined. And when we look at that from, obviously, because we are looking at any mode when we talk about engagement, but within that, our four distinct modes, we thought it might be useful for you all to know that what really happened is that our non-monetary modes, the gains in that, essentially offset decreases in philanthropy or monetary mode. So essentially, on the whole, though you can see what we're showing is the percentage that reported increases. On the whole, those three modes, particularly communication, you are seeing increases. Only about a third of institutions seeing that increase in philanthropy. I don't know if our friend Shalanda Martin from Pomona is on, but earlier this week, she asked what institutions actually had increases in all four modes, which was really well-timed because we thought, huh, other people are probably curious about that as well. So you can see, it is very rare to increase in all four modes. So if you're looking to give yourself an A-plus and you fit in that category, congrats. You will also see only 87 actually increased in those three non-monetary modes. So even though we saw some mixing, it really was sort of in different elements at different times, we know, which is often based on your own focus and strategy. Thank you. Well, as long as we're touching on experiential engagement, we've been looking at the types of events offered and then the way in which alumni attend them. So the majority of events that have been offered in the past year were in-person events followed by virtual or hybrid. But as you can see, the interest in attending an event virtually among alumni is fairly high. That's close to a third, right? So, and of course you can accommodate more people in a virtual event and you may be accommodating different types of alumni virtually than in-person. So even though it's a smaller percentage of events are offered virtually, that should not sort of mask the fact that there's quite a demand for those. And in some segments of your alumni base, it might be even higher than a third. So I said earlier, the alumni engagement rate, percentage engaged is made up of two parts. The numerator is the number of alumni who participated in at least one of the four modes. And at the bottom, the denominator is the number of legally contactable alumni this year. I don't know how many people had been calculating alumni engagement using the fundraising survey. And in 2018, Sue Cunningham announced that this was an obsolete metric for a number of reasons. One of them is that the number of legally contactable alumni rise, which is the denominator, continues to rise. So let's see the next cut on that. So the number of legally contactable alumni in our cohort here that did the survey, 87.1% reported that the denominator is rising, which means the percentage engaged is going down, right? Unless you had a commensurate rise in the number engaged, but it's much easier to get a record than an engagement. A very low percentage reported that they had a lower number of contacts. So I just like to emphasize that the denominator here is driving a lot of the statistical findings. So another thing that we looked at was the percentage of alumni engaged in any of the modes, but also I'm focusing now on this slide on philanthropy. Right after people graduate, about 2.8% of them in our sample made philanthropic contributions, but 51 years and on, that percentage rate rises to 11%. So let's look at the next slide. What you can see here is that, first of all, communication is very high early, close to graduation, declines for a while, and then rebounds. The same for experiential, and that makes a lot of sense as well. We've got these, volunteering is relatively flat. It's a very small percentage anyway. And philanthropy tends to start out low and then get higher. So several takeaways from that. One, if you were at a certain age, you become, and this is a generalization, of course, but you become more able to make charitable gifts. You are more confident in the security of your family and your immediate community, which you've been spending all these years, years, let's say six through 30, working on. And that is when you can expand to care for a greater community. I mean, that's true in so many different arenas, and it's definitely true in fundraising. There is a time in life where philanthropy just becomes more predominant. Thing is, if you get to that point and you're not engaged with the institution, then you'll still be philanthropic, but it's gonna go somewhere else. So it's very important to maintain forms of engagement that are not philanthropic, even though that might be your ultimate goal. I would also add, there's an advantage to these other modes outside of philanthropy or whether they ever lead to philanthropy. I mean, some of the things you'd be looking on that the new case area of the website that's about alumni supporting their alma maters, they can lobby for you. They can send their offspring there. There are so many things they can do that go way beyond philanthropy. And then again, if you want the philanthropy, you need the engagement. All right, so I am back briefly, and just wanted to have a quick look at the generational differences that we're seeing out there and giving you all a chance to chime in on these as well. Here you can see the different generations laid out here. On the previous slide, you could see that we were looking at graduation cohorts in kind of different age buckets or length of time since graduation bucket. So you'll see some of the overlap here from generations and where those different graduation cohorts actually fall. But really a lot happening here to try to understand how we can engage these different generations, both in terms of the engagement opportunities that they might be looking for, maybe the giving opportunities and the issues that they're responding to, but also how to communicate with them. This is why we've seen some growth in recent years, particularly a lot of growth in the kind of digital gift officer role or the donor experience officer role. Somebody who is sending out lots of different communications on different subject matter areas, but also using different media in order to try to find out not only what people are interested in subject matter wise, but also how they want to be communicated with. And what we found in many cases is that it's not one of these sort of linear relationships where older folks are just wanting handwritten notes and younger folks just want you to talk to them on TikTok or whatever it might be. There are a lot of differences there. And sometimes graduating classes that are way out there are great with social media and prefer to communicate that way. And in some cases even give that way. And lots of the younger folks get really excited when you send them something that's on paper. So it's really important to be able, again, to collect that information, in many cases on an individual level to understand not only the issues they care about and the events and sorts of engagement opportunities they're looking for, but also how they want to be communicated with. So I know we all are doing a lot of work in this area and I wanted to give you all a chance to chime in with another poll. Thank you, Leah, for launching that. You can see some different options here for biggest challenges when it comes to generation. So is it looking at their preferences? Is it looking for the types of experiences that they're wanting? Is it just trying to reach out with limited staff and resources? Are you maybe have some shortfalls in data that are making it more difficult for you to do the segmentation that you'd like to do? Or are there other things going on as well that you'd like to report? Same as before, if you choose other, please give us some more information in the chat. We'd love to hear about some of the nuances of what you're working on. Also, for example, with generational preferences, there might be a lot of different nuances there, particular things that you're trying to work on and work out. So please give us some more information in the chat as well if you'd like to share some of the themes, things that y'all are working on. So once again, I'll stop talking for just a sec and we'll see how this poll comes out. I'm loving all of the above responses. We probably should have given that. Yeah. There you go. Okay, so once again, quite a spread. A lot of the focus being on traditional and innovative experiences. And something I mentioned earlier, right? Trying to think about what engagement opportunities need to look like these days, particularly to engage different graduation cohorts, et cetera. So thank you for responding. It's always wonderful to hear what you all are working on and please continue to put information in the chat. I love the conversations that are happening there. So thank you for that. And I will send things now back to Ann. Hi. So I'm gonna get back to a little bit of what I was talking about earlier. I looked at 330, these are US institutions that participated in the Voluntary Supportive Education Survey and in the Alumni Engagement Survey. So it had to be, they had to have done both for me to have looked at them. And I looked at percentage engaged, even though it's an obsolete metric now. And I looked at percentage, so percentage who gave on the VSE, the percentage who gave as reported on the alumni engagement. I'm happy they were, they're after decimal place, they're not exactly the same, but if they had been wildly different, we have a problem with the surveys because it's measuring the same thing, right? But one of the things that we were saying as we noticed, and this goes back more than decade, that participation in the traditional sense, the percentage of alumni of record who give had been declining and declining and declining. And one of the reasons is we're getting so good at getting that denominator up. The more contacts you have, the lower your participation rate is going to be. And we knew, and it had come up in discussions that this is gonna happen on the alumni engagement survey as well, because it's the same denominator. And that will continue to rise, not just because of technology, although that, but because say people attend more than one college now. So now there's one person, but that person is now two alumni, right? So there are a lot of reasons why that denominator is going to grow faster than the numerator can possibly hope to keep up with. So this is why we wanna do deeper dives. When you see a participation rate go down, is it because number of record went up? And very often it is. And then the other thing to note is that if we just look at engaged in any mode, so we're not limiting it to philanthropy, engagement is much higher. And at least if you're going to use one of these fractions that has this denominator, let's count all the ways people are engaged. Giving is not the only way, and it's not necessarily the ultimate way, right? We also looked at the percentage engaged in each of the modes who are also engaged in philanthropy. This is not surprisingly, I'm gonna move to the right first. If you're a volunteer, if you're a formal volunteer, you're very likely to be a donor because these are formal volunteer roles. They require great commitment of time and energy, and I would say affiliation with the institution. Those who are engaged experientially, about 25% of them also made gifts. And communications, don't forget, is extremely large and it has kind of a low barrier to entry. So you're gonna see a lot of communication engagement and 15% or so making gifts. And so really one last thing I wanna note before we pass things over to Nick to talk about really what you can do, but this is a great segue, and that's I'm sharing a model from University of Toronto. And in fact, we loved this idea so much, we put it into our strategic reports. And I'll just note that that's one of the great things about having these great conversations with you all is we're taking your ideas and then we're putting it in a nice, pretty report fashion so you can take action on it. But essentially, when we look, what we're visualizing here are the global averages. But essentially, when we think about your population, we already talked about essentially almost 20% are engaged. Well, that means that 80% are unengaged. And so looking at these various segments, taking the unengaged, you can think about, well, how do we just get them to do something? We then take the 15% that are doing something, but not giving and thinking about strategies for that group. And then if you look at the slide that Anne just shared, when we talk about those that are engaging and giving, you see that that's a very small percentage of your alumni base overall, only about 3% and 2% that are engaged only. But by taking it and putting in these four boxes makes it a nice, easy way to start to strategize how you're going to do it and what you're going to plan for each of those groups. And with that in mind, I am going to pass things over to Nick. Thank you. Yeah, I just wanted to take a few minutes here at the end to kind of wrap up and remind everybody all about your case number benefits. So we understand that partaking in the case alumni engagement survey, it can be a huge lift. There's never really a good time to do deep dives into our databases and that usually ends up being a black hole anyway. So for us, we want to make sure you're getting the value back for all that hard work you put in last fall and winter to let us do things like present this webinar or write up our findings report or do other high level research. And so as part of that, Jenny mentioned at the beginning, we have something called our summary benchmarking reports. And this is really just a thank you for participating in the survey. Here are some interesting KPIs that would be helpful for you understanding your performance and how you are making that impact with your alumni in the most recent year. And then we also have the opportunity, our strategic benchmarking reports to do those data deep dives. And that's really kind of my bread and butter in talking through all of those things. So can you go to the next slide, please, Jenny? So this is just a quick screenshot of your summary benchmarking report. You can download those today in our survey platform. I just put the link in the chat. So I encourage you to go in, download that and store it away. It's useful if you don't have time to look today, to look tomorrow or look next week. But this is a benefit of taking the survey and being a case member. And it's our big thank you for, again, contributing to the betterment of the whole industry. Next slide, please. When you do download this and when you look at it, you'll see that we've created some quick reference points that are interactive, much like a dashboard to keep that same feel. And so we pack a lot of information and data underlying what seems to be a pretty straightforward chart, but lets you kind of dig around and get that foray into understanding, okay, how did my trends compare to the rest of my region, to other similar institutions or the global trends at large? Next slide, please. And then I mentioned briefly our strategic report. So that's where all of these ideas that have been flowing around in the chat, I've been watching a lot of these good ideas and noting some of them down. That's our opportunity to hear those from you, talk those through with you, with your data in front of you, to understand, okay, well, what were the big wins? What were the big challenges that we had to overcome during this last fiscal year or during the last five years? And how can that set us up strategically for the next five years? How do the data inform the strategy, but then also how can we use that strategy that we're inheriting to do those data deep dives? And with our strategic benchmarking reports, that's really, like I said, the opportunity for you to talk with CASE about one-on-one, about what this means for you and your institution. You get to pick your own peers for benchmarking from other survey respondents, so you can dig into what everybody else has also contributed. But then lastly, we try and give you as much back in those reports. Pretty much every question that we ask in the survey goes back into your hands, goes back into your hands for benchmarking. I'm seeing a lot of people are getting their access denied. I'm also going to put the link for, if you're interested in a strategic report and having those conversations with us, please fill out our form. And then probably most importantly, I'm just going to put my own email in there and we're going to get that sorted out. So please check again later. We just made them live this morning. We'll have to go double check them, but if you're, that's the wrong email. If you're still having problems later, please feel free to email me and we will get you sorted. Like I said, it's important that we get these member benefits back in your hands. Thank you. And then this is my last spiel, but I'm going to, I've already said most of that. So I'm just going to pass it back to Jenny and get us wrapped up. Great, thank you so much, Nick. And I do hope you all tell us what you think about your summer reports. We are so excited once you get access for you to get in there. So let's just wrap it up with what can you do next? Well, first and foremost, we really want you to take access on going in and seeing the data and checking out your summer reports, as Nick just noted. Those key findings will be out Tuesday and those will absolutely be on our website. I do see, we will be sending out the slides from today as well. And then essentially your link to this presentation becomes the recording link. And you'll always be able to go to our learning management system on the case website and see this recording at any point. And then finally, we do hope you consider building some solutions with case. And we talked about the strategic reports. I'll also just plant a seed that we're going to spend the next couple of weeks out on the road doing benchmarking cohorts. And it's not too early to think about doing that with your FY25 data. So if you want to keep these great conversations going like we're seeing in the chat and talk with each other face-to-face about how to use data, consider taking part in one of our cohorts for the next year. So thank you, thank you, thank you all so much. Thank you to my amazing co-presenters and to Shalia Prince who makes it all happen magically behind the scene. And most of all, thank you to our fantastic sponsors, CMAC and to Give Campus. And thank you all for being an amazing audience today. Everybody have a great rest of your day.

alumni engagement

CASE Insights

FY24 report

communication

philanthropy

volunteerism

data analytics

benchmarking

experiential roles

strategic alignment