Raise More Money, Faster

Alumni identity (how each alumni views their university experience in shaping their self-concept) has been shown by current research to be one of the most important factors that affect giving. Despite the value to be gained by understanding alumni identity, uncovering this information across tens or hundreds of thousands of alumni is a daunting task for advancement professionals. Leverage technology and the power of AI to generate individual alumni identity reports.

Fortunately, when alumni share stories on CueBack, your alumni relations and advancement professionals can easily understand the experiences, people, and traditions that were meaningful to each graduate. When alumni voluntarily share meaningful, long-form content on CueBack, they give your university a powerful insight into their personal identity. Your university can then harness the most memorable components of alumni’s college experience to improve asks, appealing to fundamental principles of identity to encourage giving.

The education provided by your university and the connections made there helped your alumni further their careers.

By using targeted prompts such as “How did your degree help you in your profession?” you encourage older alumni to share valuable advice with younger generations, while simultaneously reminding them of how their time at your university impacted their career.

Younger alumni will benefit from their older counterparts’ professional advice, as well as opportunities such as mentoring that can be provided within the site. At the same time, older alumni will appreciate the opportunity to share their wisdom with younger generations.

For example, a custom prompt could be displayed to a specific subset of alumni that asks “How did Professor Ikeda’s class impact your professional life?” The responses garnered by this prompt could be used for a purpose-driven fundraising campaign. For example, alumni who responded that Professor Ikeda had a meaningful impact on their life could be targeted to donate to a scholarship in Professor Ikeda’s name.

In another example, a 50 year anniversary event for a college radio station included a celebration of the life of an influential member of the station who had recently passed away. Alumni who shared memories of this person on CueBack in the lead up to this event are higher probability prospects for giving back to the radio station in his name to continue his legacy.

By discovering what is important to your alumni, your university can maximize the effectiveness of its giving campaigns.

As your alumni move through their personal and professional lives, their priorities change. A recent graduate will prioritize external values such as internships, networking, and career connections, and seek out such opportunities from your institution. However, as your alumni get older, they experience a crucial shift from external to internal priorities. For example, Baby Boomer alumni will care little about connecting with your university for career advice. Instead, older alumni look to engage in ways that meet their priorities for internal and emotional fulfillment.

If your university wants to maintain engagement with these older, high-value alumni, it needs to offer them the benefit of meaningful emotional connection. Seeing an old photograph or a memory shared by a long-lost college friend will elicit the kind of positive emotion that is treasured by your alumni—and remind them of the value of your institution.

Almost all alumni databases have problems with missing, incomplete, or inaccurate data. Obtaining quality information about older alumni is often the biggest challenge because they graduated before the widespread adoption of email and CRM systems.

According to Kevin MacDonnell of Dalhousie University, the percentage of valid emails retained by a university for people who graduated from 2007-2011 is 80%. On the other hand, the median percentage of known emails for alumni who graduated between 1970 and 1977 is only 48%---leaving 52% of that potential donor cohort uncontactable.

The problem is compounded because your older alumni are also the most valuable---they have a greater capacity to give financially and to contribute more to your university’s brand equity. They may be lost, but all is not lost. It is possible to reconnect with those high-value alumni.

Employ the power of crowdsourcing, by tapping into your alumni rather than paying a third party. Not only does having friends on the site encourage more alumni to use the platform, but the information they provide will be invaluable to getting back in touch with your alumni base.

In business it is often said “It’s not what you know, but who you know”. Uncover which alumni are connected to each other and how, and use that knowledge to develop highly effective cultivation strategies.

For example, universities see many alumni with a high capacity to give—touting a substantial income and an impressive job title—who inexplicably have not given much to the university in the past. In such a scenario, your university could run a report to see if one of these alumni is connected with any of your top donors. If you see that the alumni and a top donor are friends from their time on the college football team, you can gift a VIP game seat to your top donor and ask them to invite their less-engaged counterpart.

Getting a potential high-value alumni to return to campus and attend a spirited event could do wonders in reminding that alumni of what your university gave them. By uncovering and leveraging the power of social connection, your university will speak to alumni on a personal level, increasing giving in the process.