2025 National Alumni Survey - Insights from more than 50,000 alumni on giving preferences and connection

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Fahsai

2025 National Alumni Survey compiles insights from 51,000 alumni across 21 higher-education institutions to examine giving preferences, trust, and the evolving relationship between alumni and their alma maters. The foreword discusses a shift from loyalty-based, efficiency-first fundraising toward more relational, values-based engagement. It highlights declines in alumni donor counts, rising concerns about the donor pipeline, and the need for authentic connection, technology-enabled infrastructure, and trust-building giving experiences.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages17

Reading Time43 min

AccessFree to download

Foreword

Howard Heevner

RNL second annual research study

Donor pipeline concerns

Loyalty vs values-based relationship

2025 National Alumni Survey Insights from more than 50,000 alumni on giving preferences and connection Foreword By Howard Heevner Annual Giving Professional for more than 25 years Recently, I have been reflecting on my start in fundraising when I was a substitute student caller at the University of Iowa—not a role you find anymore. As a “sub,” I had to convince other students to take the day off in order to work. I quickly found I truly loved the work—the chance to create opportunities for others. The chance to use my abilities for something more than personal enrichment spoke to me and sparked decades of passion. In those days, we talked about “dialing for dollars” and “smiling and dialing.” Those experiences were formative to my understanding of fundraising. We were mostly tactical in our approach, cycling through records to reach the next prospect as quickly as possible so we could convince them to give. It was the start of giving relationships with minimal emphasis on the relationship. We focused on efficiency and effectiveness. The more people you reached, the better you were—the goal was to move as quickly as possible. It was a necessity due to the medium, and I found a lot of success with that mentality through the years of my career, but there was a cost. It’s become clear that I was learning the wrong lesson, learning to be in a volume business, which is still the basis of many of our current annual strategies. Today, I feel closer to what fundraising should be, but it’s still a process of leveraging human behavior to generate an outcome in an analytical way instead of a relational one. We have along way to go with building a relational business model for the many. It will take investments in technology and infrastructure. It will require us to be informed by the needs of our alumni and to act on those needs. These will be important changes as our alumni are telling us what they want—but are we able to hear them? As part of RNL’s second annual research study, we are again sharing the collective wisdom of 51,000 alumni representing a broad spectrum of higher education. The opportunity to provide a conduit for these voices tobe heard is an honor, and along with the team at RNL, we are excited to share the feedback of these alumni from 21 institutions. “Today, I feel closer to what fundraising should be, but it’s still a process of leveraging human behavior to generate an outcome in an analytical way instead of a relational one.” In higher education, we often spend our time looking inward or looking at other institutions instead of turning to those we wish to connect, engage, and inspire to be in a closer relationship with our institutions. For decades, we have been able to rely on an expectation of loyalty from our alumni because that’s how it’s always been. However, so many factors have changed the nature of that relationship and those expectations. Among them are the rising costs of education, the implied and often explicit promise that degree achievement will provide you with a pass to greater opportunity, and the increasing mistrust of institutions and higher education. There is a growing concern about our donor pipeline. Over the past three decades, we have seen a dramatic decrease in alumni donor counts across the United States. These trends pre-date the pandemic but seem tobe exacerbated post-pandemic. Many schools are struggling to acquire new donors and are searching for new methodologies to do so. However, it seems most often that we are taking the fractured giving structures that brought us here and bringing those into these new strategies. Maybe the issue isn’t our tools or strategies but our ability to authentically connect with our alumni. © 2025 RNL | 2025 National Alumni Survey 2 In reviewing two years of this survey data, I reflected on the fundamental disconnect in our loyalty-based solicitation strategies when compared to alumni saying they want a more values-based relation

FAQs

这份调查的样本与覆盖范围是什么？

调查汇总了来自51,000名校友的反馈，覆盖21所高等教育机构，属于RNL的第二次年度研究。

文中认为传统年度募捐策略存在哪些问题？

文中指出，机构往往依赖由校方领导签署的高信任度通用募捐信息，但当校友群体多样化且对领导缺乏信任时，这类策略难以获得回应。

作者建议如何改变募捐方式以提升成效？

作者强调应将捐赠视为影响世界的媒介，提升与非捐赠校友的真实与公平关系，同时每天建立慈善体系的信任，并把前几次捐赠视为“trust-building”捐赠。

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Fahsai