Why Community Colleges Struggle to Fundraise

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0:00:10.4 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. Our experts today explore findings from a new survey of advancement leaders at two-year institutions. We know that community colleges are relying more heavily on fundraising today. Unfortunately, the survey responses indicate that understaffed advancement teams are losing valuable time to manual work, disconnected technology, and incomplete alumni data. Our experts offer tips on ways to address these challenges to boost fundraising revenue. So, give these folks a listen and enjoy.

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0:00:50.0 Shelly Walia: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. I’m Shelly Walia and I work with our university and community college partners to strengthen advancement strategy, alumni engagement, employer relations, and fundraising. And much of my work has historically been with both four-year institutions and community colleges. As I helped launch Advancement CRM for EAB in the community college space, I’ve had more opportunities to really speak with community college advancement leaders. And one thing really became clear very quickly, they are hungry for research designed specifically for the community college advancement sector, as there’s not much data really out there. In fact, one executive director told me she’d wanted to actually focus her thesis on alumni engagement at community colleges, but ultimately chose another topic because there was so little research available. And that story really stayed with me. At EAB, research is really central to how we help institutions solve complex challenges. And so we saw a meaningful gap in the market and I partnered with our research and marketing teams to really design a survey focused on community college advancement. And the findings come at really an important moment. Community colleges are relying more heavily on fundraising to expand scholarships, strengthen alumni support, and respond to growing financial pressure. And at the same time, advancement teams are being asked to do more than ever. They’re cultivating donors and alumni while also managing employer relations, community partnerships, events, grants, and really expanding their range of digital outreach. And today we’ll explore why staffing is only part of the challenge. We’ll also look at how alumni data gaps, disconnected systems, and labor-intensive processes can prevent colleges from building the relationships that lead to deeper engagement and greater giving. And joining me today to unpack these findings and share practical steps for community college leaders can take is my friend and colleague, Adam Owenz. Adam, welcome to the program.

0:03:09.9 Adam Owenz: Hey, Shelly. Really happy to be here. Super interesting new study on two-year college fundraising. I also work with Shelly on the advancement team, and interestingly, my background is mostly four-year institutions where I was in advancement in annual fund, alumni relations, and major gift fundraising. And as I peel back the onion on two-year fundraising, I’m consistently surprised by what I hear. And what I’ve seen in this report is also really interesting. So this can be a lot of fun today. Thanks for having me.

0:03:42.4 Shelly Walia: Of course. So, Adam, let’s start with the big picture. And I’m a data person, a bit of a data nerd, so I will be talking a lot through numbers. EAB surveyed 93 community college advancement leaders for this new report. And because research specific to advancement at two-year institutions has been so limited, these findings give us a really rare view into the field. Adam, when you look at these results, what surprised you the most?

0:04:12.0 Adam Owenz: Yeah, for me the big takeaway is that we have this great juxtaposition between a huge fundraising opportunity at two-year institutions compared to largely understaffed teams. So, to me that’s super interesting, especially coming from the four-year space. But there’s a lot to dig in here. But that was kind of the wow moment for me, it was a huge fundraising opportunity sitting right next to largely understaffed and underinvested teams.

0:04:41.8 Shelly Walia: And the report suggests that community college advancement teams are evolving to something closer really to an institution-wide relationship hub. And that idea really actually resonated with me because these teams are increasingly working alongside employer engagement, career services, academic leaders, and faculty to build lasting relationships with alumni and community partners. What does that model look like in practice and how does it differ from your traditional view of the advancement office, Adam?

0:05:14.3 Adam Owenz: Yeah. And Shelly, we’ve talked about this a lot, but what I’ve consistently seen at these community colleges is you have these like, super VPs, and that’s the term I use for a VP who’s covering multiple areas instead of just one. And then you have, under that super VP, you have these absolute rockstar coordinator-level team members. And in many shops in the two-year space, they’re like a mile wide and an inch deep. That’s not a joke. That was something a VP told me at a community college last week when they said about all the different things that they’re into. They were even helping with student recruitment and things like that. So, you have these really, really flat teams, right? You have one VP kind of overseeing usually more than just advancement, and then a bunch of kind of coordinators that are all reporting directly up to them. And those coordinators, in my opinion, are like super coordinators, kind of like super VPs, because they’re doing what multiple departments at a four-year institution would do in the advancement space. You might have a coordinator that’s doing gift processing, stewardship, research… And oh, by the way, is also the advancement services person and the database administrator. And so I think to me that was like from a team-wide, having to do all these relationships and managing all of these different constituents at a university, that’s kind of the picture that I’ve seen.

0:06:42.0 Shelly Walia: Exactly. And they really are wearing so many different hats. I mean, so resourceful and scrappy, and they really do do a lot. And nearly 7 in 10 respondents have five or fewer advancement employees, and 65% say they are understaffed or severely understaffed. But the report makes the case that capacity is more than a headcount. What else would you say determines how much a small team can realistically accomplish?

0:07:11.7 Adam Owenz: Yeah, I’m curious what you think, but for me it’s like whether it’s a two-year or four-year environment, if your technology that you’re using is getting in the way of your ability to fundraise, and if your donor and alumni data isn’t current or easily accessible, I think that’s probably the biggest challenge no matter what your organization is. I don’t know if you see it any differently.

0:07:35.1 Shelly Walia: No, I agree. I think headcount matters, but also how the staff is spending their time. And capacity really depends on whether recurring processes are standardized, whether data is easy to access, and whether technology reduces work or creates additional steps.

0:07:54.1 Adam Owenz: Yeah, yeah, I agree with that completely. The report describes the manual work as a hidden tax on the advancement teams. So do you think in your experience that what are some of the seemingly small administrative tasks that are consuming so much of their time, and how do they ultimately affect the relationships with donors and alumni and employers and all these different constituents?

0:08:19.2 Shelly Walia: Yeah, great question. I feel like the time really disappears into tasks such as assembling lists. That’s really a big one. Reconciling duplicate records, entering notes in multiple places, and searching for past interactions, setting up campaigns and rebuilding reports. And so really each task may seem manageable on its own, but the cumulative burden, that’s really substantial. And that really helps explain why 66% of teams need at least three weeks to launch a campaign.

0:08:55.9 Adam Owenz: Yeah, and one of the things that’s kind of interesting to me is if you think about an advancement team and you just ask them how many minutes or hours in a day are you actually talking with donors, prospects, and alums? And I think the answer would be surprisingly little ’cause so much of the work gets consumed in these tasks that feel like work, but they’re not really what we’re here to do, which is actually engaging with those people. So, I think the technology gets in the way so much.

0:09:25.9 Shelly Walia: Yeah, I agree with that. And the thing I hear also consistently is a difficulty in alumni contact information finding, with only 16% of survey participants having current contact information for at least half of their alumni. And 40… Nearly 50% say limitations in systems, data, or capacity really prevent them from contacting their alumni base. So, Adam, how can leaders distinguish between alumni who are generally disengaged and alumni the college simply cannot reach?

0:10:04.2 Adam Owenz: Yeah, that’s like the million-dollar question. To me, the distinction is really important. If you don’t have a valid email or phone number or an address for an alum, you really can’t conclude that they’re disengaged. You just simply haven’t had the opportunity to engage them. So I think before a school can really measure alumni engagement, they need to understand kind of the health of their underlying data. Otherwise, they’re kind of making mistakes with… Mistaking it for a data problem, and it’s actually not an engagement problem, it’s actually a data problem that you have. And research shows the way this can kind of shake out. So, research shows that people change their address and their email more frequently than they change their phone number. And so if a bulk of your advancement team’s outreach is gonna be email ’cause it’s fast and it’s free, it’s kind of expected that most shops don’t have time to make sure every email is correct. And so if you have a short-staffed team, how do you do that? ‘Cause you can’t manually call everyone and say, “Hey, what’s your current email? What’s your current address?” That presents a real opportunity now with AI, ’cause you could deploy an agentic AI campaign that could text everyone and say, “Hey, are you still at [email protected]?” because they’re probably not, but that’s the address you got in 1999 when they were community college students. So I think there’s a real opportunity to find these people. And there’s also an opportunity with some advertising. You can do like lookalike campaigns and try to find those alums that maybe are generous and have good feelings about your institution but haven’t shared their latest contact information with you. So I think there’s a lot of opportunities there.

0:11:46.9 Shelly Walia: Those are all helpful tips. And the report describes graduation as a point when colleges often lose valuable student information and effectively have to restart that relationship from scratch. This, to me, is such a miss. So what information, Adam, should colleges preserve during that transition, and which campus departments need to be involved?

0:12:09.1 Adam Owenz: Yeah, I agree. I think it is a huge miss. I think this is really where two-year institutions and four-year institutions start to really diverge philosophically, because I think they just think about their students differently. I had a conversation with a leader at a community college and she said that our president just doesn’t believe in asking our alums for money. And having all my fundraising experience in the four-year space, my jaw hit the floor because I couldn’t even fathom that. Because I think two-year institutions, I think oftentimes see their students as benefactors of the institutions, like they’re the ones… Everything’s for the students and everything we do is to build them up. Whereas four-year institutions, they obviously wanna do that and the students are the benefactors, but I think they think of them as their future backers and it’s just kind of a different philosophy on them. And then when it comes to actually transferring that data from student data to alumni data, this really involves a coordinated approach between student affairs, IT, and the advancement or foundation. And most advancement and foundation folks would say that they want as much information as the other parties are willing to share. And then institutional leadership can either bolster that information sharing or they can hinder that. I know that I came to you a couple months ago when I spoke to someone who said their institution… They’re in the foundation at a community college and their institution does not share their graduate information with the foundation. And I thought something must be wrong, that can’t possibly be real, but you encountered that as well. So I know it’s kind of shocking coming from the four-year space that an institution would be so reluctant to bring them into the fold and ask them for support. And then regarding what data you would want, I think at the very least you want the basic stuff like the degree, major, minor, and contact information. What we don’t see enough of, I think in the two-year space and the four-year space, frankly, is detailed information on clubs, orgs, sports, and then relationships like advisors, coaches, et cetera. Imagine how powerful that would be. And I know you’ve done this exercise kind of thinking about what if you had faculty advisors, for example, and let’s say that faculty member was gonna retire, you could shoot out a quick campaign to everybody that had that faculty member as an advisor and ask for a gift in their honor. And that’s just one of the many ways if you have the data, you can use the data. And it’s kind of a great little personalized appeal.

0:14:41.1 Shelly Walia: The personalization and engagement tracking numbers were among the biggest surprises for me, with 74% of institutions report increased digital outreach engagement and 66 report increased personalization. Yet more than half of the respondents said they cannot consistently track engagement across channels and they can’t personalize at scale. So, Adam, how do you interpret that disconnect and what should teams prioritize first if they want to turn growing engagement into relevant outreach?

0:15:13.1 Adam Owenz: Yeah, I think… I see two things. One is the underinvestment in technology that would connect the engagement metrics with the outreach efforts so you could actually have some visibility into that, so you could do a better job there. But I think on the other side, it’s staffing. Right? We have 65% of two-year advancement leaders saying that they’re understaffed or severely understaffed. And that’s not because they don’t want to hire or that the talent doesn’t exist. That’s really a budgetary underinvestment. And I say that the financial reasons is probably the number one reason that schools decline technology advancements that I think could tie their data together and allow AI to really help them personalize their outreach and kind of amplify their outreach to folks that they otherwise wouldn’t have the capacity to do. And it would help them do granular and more personalized segmentation, like the faculty advisor example, with some agentic outreach as well. It’s kind of budgetary constraints. And since it’s two-year, it’s like the chicken and the egg challenge. Right? Fundraising has not historically been… There’s not been enough to prove it’s worth the investment for an institution. But then without the investment, the returns won’t yield, and so they have difficulty proving that that’s something that they can do to really help the institution.

0:16:31.9 Shelly Walia: Yeah. And I think those numbers show that institutions are increasing activity, but the systems behind that activity remain fragmented. And so a team could be sending more targeted messaging or running more digital campaigns, but without having that consistent view of who’s engaged through which channel and what should happen next, it is probably a pain point. And personalization then depends on staff effort instead of repeatable processes.

0:17:00.3 Adam Owenz: Yeah. Shelly, what do you think about community colleges? Their donors, they might be motivated less by institutional nostalgia and more by maybe student success metrics and workforce mobility and local impact. How do you think that should shape the stories that those community colleges tell, as well as how they maybe segment and engage those prospective donors?

0:17:26.2 Shelly Walia: Yeah, I think the message should make the donor’s impact tangible. Impact stories are really powerful. And rather than relying primarily on nostalgia, colleges can really show how a scholarship helped a student stay enrolled, how a program prepares people for local jobs, or really how an employer partnership strengthens the community. And those stories really, I mean, people resonate with, and I think that makes a really big difference in connecting giving to outcomes donors already value. Right? And so segmentation should really follow that same logic with program affiliation, scholarship history, or employer and industry connection, as well as volunteer activity or event participation. That can really help teams match the right impact story to the right person. Right? We’re all gonna, if we can relate to content, in general, you are more likely to respond to it. We have that data. We know that. And so better data is gonna allow the colleges to move from that broad institutional message to a specific reason really for the college to engage.

0:18:38.0 Adam Owenz: Yeah. You know, what wasn’t in this report that my time with community college advancement leaders has really been an eye-opener for me is the fact that at a four-year institution, if someone doesn’t have the diploma, they’re very unlikely to be donors because they’re probably somewhat bitter about the fact that they didn’t finish. But I think at a community college, you have a huge number of people that never actually complete the degree because they use the college as a stepping stone to an institution that’s like a four-year institution that they might have wanted to go to initially but couldn’t. So community colleges have these huge contingents of probably really supportive people who these stories would resonate with, but they don’t hold a degree. So they’re even less likely to be in that advancement database. But they’re people who are really sympathetic to the school and would love to support them, especially if the message is about student success and workforce mobility, because they had the impact and that school did it for them, but they didn’t hit the database as an associate’s degree-holding alum, so they’re not in the database. So I think that’s where advertising can really help these schools from a fundraising perspective, because they can reach people who might have an interest in the school and they’re local that don’t necessarily hold that degree. So that was kind of interesting, too, in my work with two-year.

0:19:57.2 Shelly Walia: Yeah. And when thinking about two-year, there’s continuing education opportunities and…

0:20:00.8 Adam Owenz: Yeah.

0:20:04.4 Shelly Walia: And there’s a lot of missed opportunity there where they might not be engaged, but they do feel an affinity to the college and they’re part of that community. I mean, I know I live in Pasadena and I’ve taken classes at Pasadena City College and very much feel a part of that community. And I have spoken to the college about the fact that I’ve attended, and seeing some of the impact stories that they shared with me was really powerful. And so I think with community colleges, you’re right, Adam, in that the graduate, there’s all sorts of people that graduate from community colleges, and then they may not get that degree, but they have taken classes there and they do feel an affinity to that community.

0:20:50.5 Adam Owenz: Yeah, the friends of the community college, yeah.

0:20:52.7 Shelly Walia: Exactly. And thinking about technology, when leaders were asked where better technology could have the greatest impact, 81% pointed to data reporting and analytics, and donor and alumni engagement and workflow automations each followed at 67%. So, what do you think leaders should look at if they want technology that helps a small team move from data to action more quickly?

0:21:19.3 Adam Owenz: Yeah, you and I talk about it all the time. It’s really connected data, right? You need to tie that data together into a unified system as much as possible because it allows you to use AI in truly transformative ways. We talk a lot about, you know, AI taking jobs, which is a conversation for another podcast, but if you’re an understaffed advancement team, AI isn’t going to take any of your jobs because you don’t have enough people doing those jobs already. So rather, it’s about all the great things that we hear AI can do; creating efficiency, whether it’s smarter segmentation that’s going to help you source data that you otherwise maybe couldn’t find because it’s buried in contact reports. If you have all that data tied together, AI and agentic outreach can really make a huge positive impact. And in a small advancement shop, it’s definitely not going to take any jobs because everybody’s already doing 10 things. It’s just going to allow them to do maybe five things and do them really well. So, to me, there’s a lot of positive promise for AI in the small advancement shop space, and so that requires connected data.

0:22:25.7 Shelly Walia: Yeah, I agree. Connected data, that’s such a big, big piece of this. And AI has been in the news a lot lately, with folks understandably having some mixed reactions to it. In our survey, we found that 65% of respondents are already using AI, but the smallest and most capacity-constrained teams are using it the least. And why might that be? And what AI applications would you say offer the safest and most immediate value for a small advancement shop?

0:22:57.9 Adam Owenz: Yeah. Yeah, some of it’s pay to play, right? Because if you’re a small team and you don’t have a lot of technology, the best you’ll get is, you know, whatever free agentic AI service… Not agentic, but generative AI service you have available to you, whether that’s ChatGPT or Google. But to me, I really see three tiers of AI usage in the advancement space. You have, like, tier three, which is kind of the safest and the most common. So when I think shops say, like, they’re using AI, they might be using it for, like, using just a publicly available generative AI for maybe campaign message responses or campaign message writing and email responses. And that’s kind of the safest and most common, that tier three stuff, because it doesn’t involve personalized data, doesn’t require, kind of, like, specific licenses. But it’s also not really the most impactful and time-saving way a small team could use AI. Then there’s, like, what I see as, like, tier two, which is when you have AI connected to maybe some of your data. So maybe it’s a point solution or a top hat solution that you’re using to do a specific operation within your team. So maybe it’s you’re using it for annual giving or you’re using it for stewardship. And that’s where you’re using AI, it’s got to be secure, so you have to have a good tool that you can trust, and it’s using AI to do actual outreach based on the data that you can put into it. So maybe it’s helping you segment the data, or maybe it’s helping you with, kind of, agentic outreach.

0:24:30.8 Adam Owenz: And then for me, tier one is where, like, AI can be truly impactful for a small team, where it’s going to unlock staff efficiencies, you can do smarter outreach. And that’s where you have to have, if not all, most of your data plugged into an AI system or a CRM that can leverage all that data and you can ask it questions. Because I forget things. Like, who’s the donor that was talking about donating a bunch of sports memorabilia a few years ago? And the CRM could search all of your call notes and visit notes from all of your donors and say, “It might be this person, this person, this person.” That’s an incredible use of AI, and you’re not gonna get that by just using an off-the-shelf ChatGPT. And you’re not gonna get that if you don’t have all of your data queryable in that way. And that’s kind of what I consider tier one, where you can actually ask it to, “Build me a segment of people that might want to donate to the new library,” and you could help give it some criteria of the type of people that you’re looking for and it could actually give you those answers. So I think there’s safe, there’s trust, all those things are really important aspects that your institution has to vet. Like, what do we feel safe with? Which companies do we feel safe sharing this information with? And then what do we have the access to actually be able to do? And then that’s where you can really unlock the power of it.

0:25:57.1 Shelly Walia: Yeah, and I think it’s really about adding capacity to teams. And so even thinking about a major gift officer that’s on the road meeting with potential donors, just having the ability to look on your phone and say, “Hey, what are the last five contact records?” or “Can you summarize my last interactions with this donor?” And back in the day, people had to carry around different files and spend all that time going through that information, and being able to have that AI generate that so quickly really is a huge time saver.

0:26:31.5 Adam Owenz: Yeah, it definitely is. That’s the thing for me with EAB’s Navigate360 Advancement CRM. That’s the piece that I was like, “Wait, that would have been incredible if I was out at an event and I met someone and they had said, ‘Hey, I’ve met with your institution and it’s a great place. I love what you’re doing.'” If I could actually sneak away for a second, look them up, and get a really quick summary of what they’ve historically done with the university, I could turn around and have a really valuable conversation rather than just head nodding and then later the next day being able to actually understand who they were. That would’ve been awesome.

0:27:08.9 Shelly Walia: Yeah, exactly. And Adam, before we wrap, I just want to bring this back to what a small advancement team can do with these findings. And I think the starting point is really making room for relationship building. That is the biggest piece of the donor cultivation and reducing manual and repetitive tasks. And you could begin with something like, this is for an example, an event follow-up, and map the steps and look for places where staff can rebuild lists or enter the same information twice. Agree on who owns the follow-up, prepare a reusable message, and set a clear timeline. And then record the response and next steps in one shared place so that way the team has a process and can repeat that after every event. We spoke a lot about the alumni contact information, and that finding really stayed with me. A manageable place to start there is the next graduating class. So bringing advancement, student success CRM data, career services, and IT together to agree on what should carry over, including personal contact information, program affiliations, and relevant interest. Establish ownership and appropriate permissions, capture that information before students leave, and make contact updates part of the alumni welcome process. And I think what I also was struck by was the personalization and engagement numbers. And my recommendation there would be to start with audiences you already know something about. I received a letter from my high school asking me to donate to help fund the speech and debate team and asked if I’d be willing to share an impact story. And I was on the debate team. I really resonated with that and donated.

0:29:04.4 Shelly Walia: Another example would be former scholarship recipients. They could receive a student impact story and an invitation to volunteer, mentor, or support a scholarship. Really being able to resonate with that outreach makes a world of difference. And it’s important to track who you can reach, who responds, and whether follow-up happens. And that really gives you a manageable way to make outreach more relevant and learn what resonates. And as you make those changes, measure whether that work is getting easier, right? Look at campaign launch time, duplicate entry, follow-up speed, and how many systems it takes to actually complete a task. And those measures can help you make the case for investment and show where a focused improvement is giving staff time back. And that really is the key. Adam, anything you’d like to add there?

0:30:04.1 Adam Owenz: No, I think the only other big takeaway I had from this was I think it would be valuable to do a little lock-in where you had a four-year, large institutional president get locked in a room with a two-year institution’s president and they can talk about advancement and maybe come away with some two-year presidents really having a deeper understanding of what they could unlock in truly effective fundraising on their population.

0:30:34.0 Shelly Walia: Love that. Well, Adam, thank you for joining me and for helping me bring these findings to life. And what I keep coming back to is that the opportunity is already there. Community colleges are expanding digital engagement and trying to personalize outreach, but too many teams really still lack the time, data, and connected tools to follow through consistently. And stronger relationship infrastructure can really help these small teams act on that opportunity without asking staff to carry even more manual work. And to everyone listening, thank you for joining us on Office Hours with EAB.

0:31:14.1 Adam Owenz: Thanks, Shelly.

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