Nonprofit Insights & Giving Tips

A small school’s development office is usually one or two people, a database nobody fully trusts, and a calendar built around an annual fund that has to be raised again from scratch every year. In that environment, the alumni giving participation rate becomes either the most useful number the office has or the most demoralising. Used well, it tells you how many of your former students still feel enough connection to act on it, which is a measure of institutional health that total dollars raised can hide entirely. Used badly, it becomes a target chased with mass appeals that annoy alumni and move the figure by half a point.

For a small school, the answer usually isn’t sending more emails. It is understanding where alumni relationships are still strong, where they have weakened, and which people can help bring those relationships back. Class agents, reunion campaigns, smaller gifts, better records, and simple follow-up can all play a part. None of these needs a huge development team behind it.

What Is the Alumni Giving Participation Rate?

It is the percentage of solicitable alumni who made a gift during a given fiscal year, calculated by dividing the number of alumni donors by the number of alumni you can legitimately reach and ask. The definition matters more than it first appears, because the denominator is where most schools quietly flatter or punish themselves.

Alumni with no valid address, deceased alumni, and those who have formally requested no contact are generally excluded, while everyone else counts whether or not you actually asked them. The Council for Advancement and Support of Education publishes reporting standards and management guidelines that define how gifts and constituencies should be counted, and following them matters if you ever want to benchmark against peer institutions or report credibly to a board. A school that counts generously in private and conventionally in public ends up with two sets of numbers and no reliable trend.

For a small development office, it helps to keep the calculation straightforward and consistent from year to year. Before worrying about improving the number, make sure the team agrees on:

• Who is included in the alumni population.
• Who is considered solicitable.
• What counts as a gift during the reporting period.
• How returned mail, deceased alumni, and do-not-contact records are handled.
• Whether the same definition has been used in previous years.

This may sound like administrative housekeeping, but it can save a surprising amount of confusion later.

Why Does Participation Still Matter If the Dollars Are Flat?

Because participation measures loyalty and dollars measure capacity, and the two tell you different things about the institution’s future. A school raising two million dollars from forty donors is in a more fragile position than one raising the same amount from eight hundred, since the first depends on a handful of relationships that illness, relocation, or a single bad experience could end. Participation is also the only early indicator you have of whether recent graduating classes are forming the habit of giving at all, and habit formed within a few years of graduation predicts giving decades later far better than income does.

It carries external weight too. Foundations and corporate funders frequently ask about alumni support as evidence that the people who know the institution best believe in it, and a low figure invites an awkward question. One thing it no longer does is drive college rankings, since US News removed alumni giving from its methodology in the edition announced in 2023, which has freed schools to pursue participation for its own merits rather than for a scorecard.

There is also a quieter benefit to watching participation. It can show a problem before the annual fund numbers make it obvious. If the total raised looks healthy because a few long-time donors increased their gifts, but the number of alumni giving keeps falling, the underlying picture may be changing.

That is why it is worth looking at both numbers together:

• Total dollars: shows the financial contribution being made.
• Number of donors: shows how widely that support is spread.
• Participation rate: shows the proportion of solicitable alumni taking part.
• Average gift: provides another view of giving capacity.
• Retention: shows whether donors are continuing the habit.

None tells the whole story alone.

What Counts as a Good Participation Rate?

Context decides this, and comparing yourself against a national average is the least useful approach available. Independent day and boarding schools typically report considerably higher participation than colleges, often in the teens or twenties and sometimes far above, because the relationship is formed younger, parents are involved, and the community is smaller. Small liberal arts colleges with strong residential cultures tend to outperform large public universities substantially.

Across higher education generally, alumni participation has declined over several decades, from figures commonly cited in the high teens in the 1990s to single digits in recent years, which means a school holding steady has outperformed the sector. The honest benchmarks are your own trend over five years, your peer group of genuinely comparable institutions, and your participation by class year, since the last of those will show you exactly where the decline is concentrated and usually points at classes graduating within the past fifteen years.

A school should also be careful about treating a single year’s increase as proof that everything is suddenly working. Participation can move because of a reunion, an unusually strong class agent, a large graduating class, or even a change in the way records are counted.

The more useful questions are often quite simple:

• Is participation going up or down over several years?
• Which class years are giving?
• Are recent graduates starting to give?
• Are first-time donors returning the following year?
• Are some classes responding particularly well to peer outreach?

Those answers give the development office something it can actually work with.

How Does the Class Agent Model Work?

A class agent is a volunteer alumnus who solicits their own classmates, usually by personal email, letter, phone, or increasingly by text and social message, on behalf of the school. The model works because a request from someone you shared a dormitory with carries weight that an institutional appeal cannot, and because the agent knows which classmates have drifted away and why.

Recruiting agents is the limiting factor rather than their effectiveness, and the schools that run this well treat it as a volunteer management programme with real support rather than an email list. That means recruiting agents in the final year before graduation while enthusiasm is highest, giving each one a manageable list rather than an entire class, supplying them with a clear ask amount, a short script they can personalise, and current data on who has already given, and checking in with them several times a year rather than once. Agents who are left alone with a spreadsheet in October and chased in June generally do nothing in between.

The relationship with the agent matters almost as much as the ask itself. Volunteers are giving their time, and they should know what happened with the campaign rather than disappearing after the deadline.

A small school can make the job easier by giving agents:

• A short and natural message they can adapt.
• A clear campaign deadline.
• Regular updates on class participation.
• Simple instructions on how to follow up.
• A named staff member they can contact when they have a question.
• A genuine thank-you when the campaign is finished.

The aim is not to turn alumni into professional fundraisers. It is simply to make it easy for someone who already cares about the school to reach out to people they know.

Why Do Reunion Campaigns Produce Outsized Results?

Because they combine a deadline, a social occasion, and peer visibility, which is the most effective combination in fundraising. A milestone reunion gives alumni a concrete reason to engage at a specific moment rather than at some point during a twelve-month fiscal year, and the presence of classmates introduces a gentle accountability that no appeal letter can manufacture.

Schools that treat reunions as fundraising campaigns rather than as parties typically see reunion-year classes give at substantially higher rates than the same classes in non-reunion years, often producing a visible spike in the participation data. The practical design elements that make the difference are a class-specific goal expressed in participation rather than dollars, a committee of classmates doing the asking, recognition that is visible at the event itself, and a timeline beginning twelve to eighteen months ahead rather than three.

Giving the class something tangible to fund, such as a named scholarship or a specific project, converts better than an unrestricted ask, though unrestricted use should remain the default where possible.

A reunion campaign can also create useful momentum outside the event itself. Alumni who have not spoken to the school in years may update their contact details simply because they are reconnecting with classmates. Others may attend an event first and make a gift later.

For the development office, a reunion therefore creates several opportunities at once:

• Update alumni contact information.
• Recruit new class volunteers.
• Reconnect lapsed alumni.
• Encourage first-time gifts.
• Bring younger alumni into the wider community.
• Create a natural reason for follow-up after the reunion.

The campaign does not have to be huge. In a small school, even a modest group of highly involved alumni can make the reunion feel personal rather than like another institutional fundraising drive.

Should You Chase Small Gifts to Lift the Number?

Yes, provided you understand what you are buying. A ten dollar gift costs more to solicit and process than it returns in that year, so measured against immediate revenue it looks irrational. Measured against what it actually buys, which is a donor record, a habit, and a relationship that may upgrade over decades, it frequently makes sense.

The research across the sector consistently shows that first gifts are usually small and that major donors almost always began as modest ones, often years earlier. The mistake is pursuing small gifts through mass appeals that treat the donor as a number, since a donor acquired by a discount-style appeal and then never thanked properly rarely gives twice.

The better approach is to set a low but dignified entry point, make the ask personal through a class agent, thank promptly and specifically, and then steward that donor toward a second gift, because the second gift is the one that predicts long-term behaviour. Retention of first-time donors is a weak point at most small schools and a better place to invest than acquisition.

That last point is easy to overlook. Once someone has made a first gift, the development office has already done the hardest part: turning an alumnus into a donor. The next communication should not always be another request.

A simple follow-up might include:

• A personal thank-you from a class agent.
• A short update showing what alumni support helped make possible.
• An invitation to an alumni event.
• A student story connected to the annual fund.
• A later, appropriately timed second-gift request.

Small gifts should therefore be viewed as part of the relationship, not simply as numbers added to a spreadsheet.