Community College Advancement at a Capacity Crossroads

EAB recently survey community college advancement leaders to better understand their priorities, challenges, and practices. The findings point to a clear theme: they often operate with lean staffing, broad relationship portfolios, and with donors who care more about workforce mobility and local impact than institutional affiliation.

This paper highlights three key findings, along with the opportunities they present for advancement leaders to build more scalable, data-informed engagement strategies. Each section offers data from our survey respondents as well as recommendations for how to combat the constraints they reported by turning repeatable tasks into workflows, building alumni records earlier, and rethinking how you evaluate technology.

Read the paper to explore three key findings:

• Opportunity is expanding faster than capacity. Leaders report growth in employer partnerships, digital outreach, CRM usage, and personalization, but many teams lack the resources to sustain that growth. For these teams, capacity is about both headcount and how efficiently they operate.
• There is a data gap getting in the way of progress. Many institutions are trying to grow alumni engagement and giving without complete alumni lists, reliable contact information for the alumni they do track, or the relationship data needed to personalize outreach. The student-to-alumni transition is a particular weak point: community colleges often know students well while they are enrolled, but too much of that context is lost before advancement teams can use it to build long-term relationships.
• Teams have tools, but not always the ones they need. CRM adoption is common and AI use is emerging, but many leaders still struggle to segment audiences, track engagement across channels, personalize outreach at scale, and reduce manual work. The next technology investment must help small teams move from data to action without adding complexity.