The New Rules of Engagement

This study focuses on five rules to help members recruit and retain millennial alumni. Download the complete publication or explore the table of contents to learn more about each rule.

Executive summary: Building the next generation of alumni leaders and volunteers

Higher education advancement is approaching a sector-wide inflection point, when colleges and universities will either sustain momentum and cast off into a decade of record-breaking fundraising returns, or run aground due to a shallow prospect pool, resulting in lost progress to replenish an aging supporter pipeline. The key to success is securing the loyalties of the alumni and prospects of today, who will become tomorrow’s major gift donors and institutional champions. Senior advancement leaders must act with urgency to capitalize on a window of opportunity in which the largest addressable segment of the alumni base is both underengaged and at the optimal age to be receptive to volunteer opportunities.

Millennial alumni are willing to donate to and become involved with their alma maters, but they seek greater levels of personalization, customization, and convenience than ever before. Unlike past generations of alumni, they are interested in deploying their skills and expertise, not just their time and money. Advancement leaders need to recalibrate their engagement strategies to appeal to these alumni and secure their loyalties—and future major gifts.

Unpacking the connection: What does volunteering do?

• Enfranchises donor as stakeholder
• Exposes donor to cause, personalizing and sparking emotional connection
• Welcomes the donor to the “inner circle”
• Allows monitoring for impact and accountability
• Fosters sense of distinctive package of contributions
• Wraps donor in positively reinforcing relationships

Read the Executive Summary

The case for investment

Despite the record number of institutions that have completed $1 billion campaigns and the surging number of major gift prospects, a sense of unease continues to persist in advancement shops throughout the country. Since gift pyramids are narrowing, institutions are more reliant on a few wealthy donors. Alumni participation rates continue to tumble as millennials seem distinctly uninterested in large institutions, preferring to give to causes with smaller overhead and clearer impact. So while there’s good reason for optimism and pessimism, the fact remains that the under-engagement of future prospects constitutes an existential threat to higher education fundraising.

The alumni relations function at most institutions appears woefully unprepared for its newfound relevance. Chief advancement officers are increasingly willing to question long-standing norms about the optimal structure and activities of the engagement enterprise. Leadership and volunteerism stand out as a stronghold of dated practices and a storehouse of unchallenged assumptions. Today’s prospects, donors, and volunteers want more dynamic, hands-on, and impact-oriented opportunities—which the boards and councils that are still prevalent today fail to provide. Since alumni have many choices about where they spend their time, higher education institutions risk losing their potential volunteers and future donations if they cannot compete with more nimble charities who have invested the resources to appeal to what alumni want and when they want it.

Read the Section

Best practices to help you improve alumni engagement

Rule 1: Make it easy to say yes

Shift from long-term, fixed-term, or open-ended roles to one-time, short-term, or episodic engagement opportunities with limited duration, tight scopes, and clearly communicated parameters, and defined end point.

As alumni must work harder to get ahead, they guard their time more closely than ever before. But the steady dissolution of work into a series of short-term engagements only mirrors the way that today’s alumni increasingly live their lives in short sprints and on their own schedule. Heightened by the accelerated rate at which they can access information and entertainment, their entire mind-set is increasingly characterized by a shift to on-demand access.

Ultimately, these changes force colleges and universities to confront the structures of alumni involvement. Typical volunteer structures do not align with this new paradigm in which alumni are loath or unable to make long-term commitments and give themselves implicit permission to bail or flake on those that do not add value to their lives. As institutions compete to capture share of any and all discretionary time that their constituents have to engage, they must develop a broader array of one-time offerings to pique alumni interest. In particular, institutions must work to transform long-term commitments into short-term or episodic ones that that the lives of today’s alumni’ can accommodate.

Rule 2: Meet them where they are

Create convenient and accessible volunteer roles that allow alumni to participate in their regions, workplaces, or online.

Today’s alumni, especially those donors and leaders who institutions most want to engage, are busy and want on-demand engagement. Specifically, they are spending more time than ever at work and on the web, staying connected to friends both online and via phone, often the same time!

Most institutions are asking: “How can we break through all this noise and clutter to get our constituents’ attention?” The answer is to engage alumni through the channels and venues where they are already spending their time.

The workplace represents a largely untapped channel for engagement. Even as professional development and networking have become dominant themes in alumni programming, few institutions seek to connect with graduates through their places of employment. By creating volunteer roles in the workplace and/or opportunities where they can network with other alumni employees, universities make it both convenient and valuable for individuals to engage.

Rule 3: Broker smarter matches

Develop mass-customizable, skills-based roles and make proactive asks of highest-potential alumni to engage them.

Colleges and universities are in competition with other organizations for the time and mind-share of alumni. To stand out from the pack, institutions must offer skills-based volunteer roles, make proactive asks of their alumni, and prioritize those highest-potential alumni for specific roles that match their preferences.

Progressive institutions are creating academic volunteer roles where they truly can add value to the pedagogical experience. Volunteers can act as guest tutors, course assistants, and speakers who can lighten the load of the professor. Guest speakers are especially in well received fields where practitioner insight is highly valued such as business and public policy, and among early-adopter faculty willing to pilot new ideas.

Rule 4: Embrace the “me” factor

Emphasize the two-way value proposition for volunteers, including high-level networking, insider access, recognition, and communication of their impact.

Volunteers have long engaged with organizations for reasons ranging from meting new people to building their leadership resume and having fun with friends. However, generation X and millennial alumni are more candid and forthright about their interest in not only what they can do for the institution, but what volunteering can do for them.

Leadership and volunteer activities have always offered benefits to those who engaged, but institutions rarely market or clarify those advantages to attract more volunteers. As today’s alumni seek a two-way value proposition for engagement, the ability to provide high-level networking, insider access, and distinctive experiences to a broader group of alumni leaders and volunteers increasingly becomes a necessity for colleges and universities.

Rule 5: Cultivate campus allies

Deepen relationships with other campus stakeholders to position advancement as the clearinghouse, but not sole provider, of leadership and volunteer roles, and partner with those stakeholders to develop substantive and segmented experiences.

Higher enrollments and larger class cohorts, growing student body diversity, greater complexity in academic and cocurricular offerings, declining trust in traditional institutions, and a host of other factors are catalyzing a shift in the way alumni prefer to engage with their alma mater. These changes challenge the status quo model of one-size-fits-all mass engagement activities, which fail to penetrate beyond an already-engaged subset of alumni. Moreover, central advancement is typically not well positioned to deliver the highly segmented and niche roles that alumni seek.

As a result, academic units, student affairs, and other departments will in the near future come to provide the majority of campus volunteer roles. This will transform the role of the alumni relations function from a provider of volunteer experiences to the keeper of campus-wide infrastructure, change agent, and volunteer management coach. This transformation of alumni relations into a central clearinghouse for engagement will not be easy. This shift will require staff with different skill sets, redesigned processes, and buy-in for a new division of responsibility across campus. However, it will ultimately strengthen the strategic value proposition of the alumni relations function to development, to alumni, and to campus partners.

Download the Study