Advancement Tips and Tech for Alumni Engagement in 2025

If your advancement org is typical, you’re faced with the challenge of making donor and alumni engagement more effective with technology that you may have used for 10, 15, or even 20+ years. It lacks the features and functionality you need to deepen connections and provide a more modern donor and alumni experience.

So, how can you prepare your org for the tech changes it needs to keep up?

Common Challenges for Advancement Teams

Here at Heller Consulting, we see some common themes. Advancement teams are asking themselves:

• How can we provide a more personal and cohesive online experience for our alumni and donors, and engage with them more effectively?
• What technology solutions are available to support modern fundraising practices and evolve with us into the future?
• What can we do now to start moving away from our legacy fundraising system to something that supports more modern fundraising and engagement practices?

What to Look for in Higher Education Tech

These three things will help your advancement team address common challenges and transform alumni engagement.

1. Software built specifically for higher education advancement—There are multiple fundraising solutions on the market that offer modern tools for fundraising and donor engagement. But they typically target the general needs of nonprofits, not the specific needs of higher education advancement.
   It is useful to look for software built specifically for higher education advancement. Such solutions will help to ensure your team has the features and functionality needed to support your team’s unique needs.The tools we often recommend are built on the Salesforce platform specifically for advancement and constituent engagement. Platforms like Kindsight’s ascend can handle complex advancement needs that extend beyond the capabilities of typical fundraising software to address things like multiple gift designations, extensive relationship management history, prospect development, patient prospect development, gift processing, and having a donor-facing portal with extensive alumni/donor data (allowing alumni and donors to access their giving and activities history and update contact information).
2. A solution that keeps up with innovation—If you do all the work of moving to a new system, you don’t want to discover in a few years that it’s already out of date!
   Choose a product that’s built on a platform like Salesforce that is constantly updating capabilities like workflow automation, advanced security permissions, and role-based views into data. Additionally, you’ll want to make sure the product is committed to innovation of its own, so you can take advantage of new capabilities like AI functionality for donor segmentation.
3. Integration capabilities that extend your advancement solution—To be truly effective, your advancement solution should integrate with the rest of your stack. Think about the integration needs of each of your systems, including:

• Payment processing
• Marketing automation
• Document generation
• Data deduplication
• Address verification
• Event management

Discover how Heller Consulting and The University of Toledo Foundation modernized alumni engagement efforts and increased donations in this on-demand webinar.

Move Forward with Advancement Technology

There are a number of things to consider when considering new tech for advancement but you can start now on the following:

• Get a handle on your data. It would be a waste of time to move duplicate or outdated data into your new system. Worse, if you move “dirty” data into a new system, your alumni engagement efforts will suffer. So, start to scope now what it would take to move. For example:
  • How many duplicate records do you have? What tools and resources will you need to deduplicate them?
  • How far back does your data go?
  • What data do you need for collect now for future use?

If you share data with other systems outside of the advancement department, document those systems and which data points are shared.

• Be realistic about timeframes. While moving to a more modern advancement solution can offer big benefits, it won’t happen overnight. Think about any large projects your team might have on the horizon and how you might accommodate the additional technology implementation project. For example:
  • Ask your leaders to provide support for the technology project, including reasonable accommodations for the time needed for the project.
  • Consider what other projects might be postponed or shifted to other staff.
  • Allow time in key team members’ schedules for the technology project.
• Work with an experienced implementation partner. It is critical to choose a partner that has experience implementing higher education advancement systems. Heller Consulting can help set you up for success in these ways:
  • Define how your new system will be implemented
  • Help you to understand who on your team needs to be involved and how much time to expect to spend on various phases of the project
  • Implement and customize the new software
  • Find ways to optimize your processes in the new system
  • Provide post-launch support to ensure your team is working confidently and efficiently in the new system
  • Support change management throughout the project

Take Your Alumni Engagement to the Next Level

If you’re an advancement professional looking for technology to help improve alumni engagement, the Heller Consulting team is ready to assist. Contact us today to learn more about our services for higher education advancement.