Engage Alumni
Alumni Haven’t Stopped Giving. They’ve Stopped Giving to Us.
March 20, 2026
Over the course of a 20-year career at the intersection of alumni engagement and philanthropy, I've watched the same tension play out at institution after institution: generous, civically engaged alumni who simply aren't giving to their alma mater,while advancement teams redouble efforts that weren't quite working to begin with.
The 2026 National Alumni Survey — the largest study of its kind, with 82,252 responses across 31 institutions — makes something undeniable that our field has treated as a theory for too long: alumni aren't disengaged from generosity. They're disengaged from their universities. That's not a pipeline problem or a messaging problem. It's a structural one.
Structural problems require structural solutions.
What Three Years of Data Are Telling Us
82% of alumni
are philanthropic — they give money or time somewhere
35% of alumni
gave to their alma mater last year
42% of alumni
don't see their institution as a philanthropic priority
59% of Gen Z graduates
don't consider their alma mater a giving priority
Read that again: the same alumni who aren't giving to higher education are actively giving elsewhere. Two-thirds of alumni who have never donated to their institution are supporting other causes. So are 86% of lapsed donors. The generosity is there. The connection to their university isn't.
This pattern has held across all three years of the survey. In 2024, only 27% of alumni donors reported giving to their alma mater — dropping to 13% among recent graduates. Each year, the data confirms the same conclusion. As co-authors Howard Heevner and Sarah Kleeberger wrote in the 2026 report: “Declining participation is not a lack-of-generosity problem; it is a trust problem. We have to earn alumni trust. We can no longer assume it.”
The Connection Gap Is the Giving Gap
One of the most powerful findings across three years of surveys is the relationship between connection and giving.
Alumni who feel very connected to their institution are 24 times more likely to donate than those who feel very disconnected. Those who feel very connected (81%) and very informed (75%) rank their alma mater as a top philanthropic priority.
And yet: 40% of alumni report feeling disconnected. 48% feel ill-informed, despite receiving communications from their institution regularly. Universities are sending the messages. Alumni aren't feeling them.
The 2024 survey added important historical depth: alumni connection has been declining decade over decade, with a 25-point swing toward “disconnected” among the most recent cohorts. Alumni of color feel this most acutely with 42% reporting feeling disconnected, compared to 27% of white alumni. That’s not a marginal finding. That’s a structural failure to build meaningful relationships with the fastest-growing segments of the alumni base.
Alumni Don’t Feel Known — And That’s Costing Institutions More Than They Realize
74% of alumni
say their personal interests are not known at all
68% of alumni
say their career and life stage is not well known
13% of alumni
say their philanthropic priorities are very or extremely well known
The 2026 survey introduced a new question: do alumni believe their institution knows who they are? The results listed above are striking.
Here’s why this matters: alumni who believe their philanthropic priorities are known extremely well average $500,774 in lifetime giving. Those who feel not known at all average $3,732 — a 134x difference driven entirely by whether an alumnus feels seen as a person, not a record.
Institutions track graduation year, degree, and employer. But career paths evolve, interests change, and philanthropic motivations mature. Alumni who feel known aren’t known because their institution has better data — they’re known because they’ve been engaged in ways that build a dynamic, living picture of who they are today.
Volunteering Is the Structural Solution We’ve Been Overlooking
If there’s one data point I’d put in front of every advancement leader, it’s this:
- $180,768 average lifetime giving for recent volunteers
- $13,002 average lifetime giving for those who have never volunteered
Recent volunteers are also 3x more likely to have given to their alma mater last year, 8x more likely to feel very connected, and 5x more likely to feel very informed. Volunteering is the mechanism through which institutions build the relationships the surveys keep showing us are missing.
And yet only 10% of alumni volunteered with their alma mater in the past year. The 2025 survey revealed a significant reason why: many alumni simply don’t know opportunities exist. Among more than 10,000 open-ended responses about volunteering, one of the most consistent themes was basic awareness — alumni willing to help, uncertain where to start.
There’s also a generational opening in this data that institutions should not overlook. Gen Z is the only generation that volunteers at a higher rate (47%) than they give financially (40%). Universities that can convert that volunteer energy into lasting engagement are well-positioned for the decade ahead.
Institutions that treat volunteering as a pipeline — not a side program — see it in the lifetime giving numbers. The gap between $180K and $13K is a strategy, not just a statistic.
Younger Alumni Haven’t Checked Out — They’ve Raised the Bar
Younger alumni aren’t disengaged from philanthropy. They’re giving differently — and to different things. In 2026, 37% of Millennial and Gen Z donors gave to individuals through GoFundMe-style campaigns, compared to 24% of older alumni. Higher education ranks 11th on their philanthropic priority list, behind social services, civil rights causes, and direct individual giving.
What motivates them when they do give to their university? Not the annual fund. Scholarships, mental health services, first-generation student support, and emergency funds resonate far more than generic institutional appeals — a finding that has been consistent across all three years of this survey. The 2025 data confirmed it again: purpose-driven, specific, impact-visible campaigns consistently outperform broad appeals with younger cohorts.
They also give differently: 43% use digital wallets like Apple Pay, Venmo, or PayPal. Nearly one-third give on an “as-needed” basis — responding when something moves them, not on a fiscal-year schedule. The giving mechanisms we’ve built were designed for a different donor.
And the stakes of failing to meet them where they are compound over time. Younger alumni represent nearly half of the living alumni base but contributed roughly 6–7% of alumni dollars in recent fiscal years. Silents and Boomers represent about 17% of the living alumni base and continue to carry an outsized philanthropic load. That imbalance won’t sustain itself, particularly as institutions compete for the philanthropic attention of alumni set to inherit an estimated $85 trillion over the next two decades.
Recognition and Trust Gaps Are Structural — Not Incidental
One of the more sobering findings across the 2025 and 2026 surveys is the degree to which recognition gaps fall along demographic lines. In 2026, only 41% of alumni of color feel appreciated by their institution, compared to 52% of white alumni. Confidence that gifts are used effectively drops to 48% among alumni of color — the lowest of any cohort measured.
This matters not just as an equity concern but as a sustainability one. Alumni of color are among the fastest-growing segments of the alumni base. If institutions don’t build trust and demonstrate recognition with these alumni now, the giving pipeline doesn’t just stall, it narrows precisely at the moment it needs to broaden.
The same pattern holds for women and recent graduates, both of whom report lower levels of recognition and weaker confidence in institutional stewardship than their counterparts. These groups aren’t disengaged from giving, instead they’re disengaged from loyalty-based appeals that don’t reflect their experience. They respond to passion, personal connection, and visible impact. That’s not a harder bar to clear. It’s just a different one.
What This Means in Practice
When I look at this data alongside what our partners are building with PeopleGrove, the alignment is clear. The problems the survey identifies including connection gaps, alumni who don’t feel known, volunteering underutilized, younger and more diverse alumni underrecognized — are exactly the problems that intentional, values-aligned engagement platforms are designed to address.
Alumni who engage through mentoring, affinity communities, volunteer opportunities, and career programming give at dramatically higher rates than those who don’t. Some institutions see 3x the national average in alumni giving among their platform-engaged populations. The reason isn’t that the platform asks alumni to give. It’s that it gives alumni reasons to stay connected to their university — and as every year of this survey confirms, connection is what precedes generosity.
A few principles the data consistently points toward:
Lead with connection
Alumni need reasons to feel connected to their university before they’ll consider giving to it. Mentoring, career programming, and affinity communities build the kind of relationship that eventually produces a gift and a donor who gives again. At the University of Illinois, a 51% year-over-year increase in online alumni engagement didn’t happen because the team sent more solicitations. It happened because they built meaningful reasons for alumni to show up.
Treat volunteering as a strategic pipeline
The volunteer-to-donor pathway is real and quantifiable. The gap between $180K and $13K in average lifetime giving is the gap between alumni who have a hands-on relationship with their institution and those who don’t. Making opportunities visible, flexible, and discoverable, particularly asynchronous options like mentoring and career panels, is the first step to activating it.
Make alumni feel genuinely known
Static records don’t build relationships. Dynamic engagement such as AI-matched mentoring, interest-based communities andcareer milestone recognition creates a living picture of who an alumnus is today. The 134x lifetime giving gap between alumni who feel known and those who don’t isn’t a data curiosity. It’s a strategy.
Match asks to what alumni actually care about
First-gen student support, mental health services, emergency funds, and career access are specific, impact-visible opportunities the survey data shows resonate, especially with younger and more diverse alumni populations. Affinity-based communities let institutions surface exactly those opportunities to exactly the right people.
Earn trust across every demographic
Recognition gaps that fall along racial and generational lines aren’t going to resolve themselves. They require intentionally designed engagement models that reflect the lived experiences of today’s alumni, not the expectations of a previous era. Institutions that get this right don’t just improve their participation rates. They build a more sustainable and representative philanthropic community.
Three years of national survey data have told a consistent story. Universities haven’t lost alumni goodwill — they’ve lost their default claim on alumni generosity. The path to reclaiming it runs through connection, recognition, and relevance. Not more volume. More listening.
Sources
2026 National Alumni Survey Annual Report, NAS / CMAC / Washburn McGoldrick / Parisleaf (Heevner & Kleeberger)
2025 National Alumni Survey, RNL — Ruffalo Noel Levitz (Heevner & Kleeberger)
2024 National Alumni Survey, RNL — Ruffalo Noel Levitz (Heevner & Kleeberger)
PeopleGrove platform impact data, 2024
Unlocking Alumni Engagement: 5 Key Takeaways, PeopleGrove / University of Illinois Alumni Association, April 2025
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