Your CRM may know an alum’s graduation year, former major, student activities, event attendance, and giving history. It may also track every email they have opened and every appeal they have ignored. Put all of that together, and you have a detailed history of their relationship with the institution — but how much does that history tell you about what matters to them now?
The 2026 National Alumni Survey found that only 8% of alumni felt their personal interests were known very or extremely well. Alumni who felt their interests were known extremely well reported an average lifetime giving of $481,228. More than half felt their interests were not known at all, and their average was $8,092.
The survey can’t tell us whether feeling known makes someone more likely to give, especially since major donors may receive more personal attention in the first place. But institutions may be putting their most personal relationship-building efforts toward alumni whose financial value is already clear. Over time, that can reinforce a pattern in which known donors continue to receive personal attention while alumni the institution understands less well remain in broad outreach.
Your CRM reflects what the institution has chosen to notice.
The fields in a CRM reflect decisions about what the institution considers useful. Advancement teams have spent years building systems that help them identify donors, track participation, and decide where to focus their time. That makes sense, given the work those teams are responsible for, and it also means that the clearest picture tends to form around alumni who engage in familiar, measurable ways.
Once these patterns become part of the day-to-day process, however, they can influence who receives personal attention and who continues to receive broad outreach. The system is helping the institution make decisions, and those decisions can narrow the number of ways that an alum is seen.
A quiet record does not always mean an inactive person.
The 2024 RNL National Alumni Survey found that 68% of alumni had made a charitable gift to a nonprofit, and only 20% considered their alma mater a top giving priority.
For advancement teams, this offers a different way to understand someone’s lack of giving. An alum may already be giving regularly and with real purpose. Institutions are asking to become part of a person’s charitable life, which means the connection between the institution and the causes that individual cares about has to be clear. Affinity for an alma mater does not automatically make it a giving priority.
Personalization can scale the wrong assumption.
Once an assumption becomes part of a segment or campaign, it can shape communications for hundreds or thousands of alumni at once. People within those groups receive similar stories, invitations, and asks because the system has organized them together — based on information that may no longer mean much to them. If they don’t respond, that behavior becomes new data that might seem to confirm the original assumption. The institution can end up repeating the same approach because each round of outreach appears to support the previous one.
Use what alumni tell you.
Breaking that cycle requires new information from alumni, but only information the institution is prepared to use. Start with a few pieces that could change a real decision. That might include the causes an alum cares about, or whether they’re interested in mentoring, or how they would like to participate. Decide how that information will be collected, who will keep it current, and where it will show up in future outreach.
Then follow through. Someone who expresses an interest in mentoring should eventually hear about a mentoring opportunity. An alum who cares about a particular cause should see how the institution is contributing to it. When people can recognize their own priorities in what the institution sends next, they have a reason to keep sharing, and the institution has a way to keep learning.
