Rethinking Engagement: Data-Informed Strategies for a Changing Advancement Landscape-Presentation

Presentation

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The presentation, “Rethinking Engagement: Data Informed Strategies for a Changing Advancement Landscape,” focused on how institutions can use the CASE Alumni Engagement framework to measure, compare, and act on alumni engagement data.<br /><br />Speakers from the University of Florida, CASE, and Georgia Tech explained the core definitions: alumni include graduates and others with prior academic relationships, and legally contactable alumni are those who are alive, reachable, and not marked as no-contact. Alumni engagement is defined broadly as mutually beneficial activities that strengthen loyalty, reputation, support, and mission advancement.<br /><br />CASE’s framework measures engagement across four binary modes: philanthropic, volunteer, experiential, and communication. The session emphasized that measurement should reduce uncertainty, and confidence in non-philanthropic data varies by mode. FY25 results showed that globally, communication, experiential, and volunteer engagement increased, while about 16.3% of legally contactable alumni in the US/Canada were engaged in any mode, compared with lower medians in other regions.<br /><br />A key takeaway was segmentation: most contactable alumni are unengaged, while smaller groups either give only, engage non-monetarily, or both engage and give. Institutions are using the framework for strategic planning, benchmarking, institution-wide alignment, prospect identification, and demonstrating impact.<br /><br />Examples from Georgia Tech and others showed practical uses of the data for outreach prioritization, stewardship, volunteer recruitment, and campaign strategy. The presenters highlighted that engaged alumni tend to have stronger contact rates, pledge rates, and average gift values. The session concluded with a vision for future use, including engagement scores, personas, volunteer segmentation, and constituent portals, and encouraged institutions to participate in benchmarking cohorts and CASE resources.

Keywords

alumni engagement

CASE framework

engagement metrics

data-informed strategy

benchmarking

philanthropic engagement

volunteer engagement

experiential engagement

communication engagement

advancement planning