Grab Grads Early to Keep Them Giving

In our quest to stabilize and inch up our alumni participation rate, we didn’t want to negatively impact our strategy to increase unrestricted dollars raised for the university. So we conducted some research and analyzed our data for the 10 most recent graduating classes, which confirmed that this segment of our solicitable base made up 24 percent of our overall pool of prospects. Given that we have alumni still living who graduated in the 1920s, this was an astounding number. Even more daunting was that only 25 percent of this particular population was contributing annually, while our overall alumni participation rate held steady at 37 percent. The 10 youngest alumni classes essentially were lowering our overall participation rate by nearly 3 percentage points.