Why combining alumni engagement software + digital fundraising tools boosts donor stewardship + Giving Day results

In a world that is becoming increasingly digital, it’s more important than ever to meet your school and alumni community where they are—online. To boost engagement throughout the entire journey from students to alumni to donors and ambassadors, it’s crucial for institutions to leverage digital solutions like alumni engagement and digital fundraising software. 

Graduway and Advance from Gravyty work together to serve institutions around the world to improve their alumni engagement, boost Giving Day results and scale major donor fundraising. 

By providing a place for alumni, students and staff to engage, connect and give, our clients see a return on investment through donation amounts, retention and alumni engagement.

Let’s dive into the power of pairing alumni engagement and digital fundraising.

Benefits of an alumni network platform for educational institutions

Digital alumni networks are powerful fundraising resources that foster meaningful connections between your school and its supporters. An alumni network platform empowers you to connect with your school’s biggest fans to encourage them to reach out to those within their own communities for engagement, event participation, mentorship and donations. 

Online alumni communities also give donors immediate access to updates from your institution, ensuring they stay engaged past an initial donation appeal so it’s always top of mind. With an alumni network platform like Graduway, school fundraising efforts become streamlined and lucrative in both the short- and long-term.

Connect your community with measurable results with an alumni network platform

Graduway offers more than just a community feed and platform to engage current and future donors. Schools can create a fully branded, custom alumni community platform to convey your institution’s story. 

With features like an alumni directory, which allows members to search their professional network for connections and groups for topic-specific communication, and automated mentor matching that enables mentorship programs at scale, alumni engagement teams are empowered with the tools they need to build community and connection. These in-platform features—events module, mentoring hub, jobs board, digest and surveys—eliminate the need to integrate with external tools and ensure your data is kept in one place.

Graduway integrates with multiple CRM systems including RE NXT, BBCRM and Salesforce as well as LinkedIn to ensure that your alumni database is kept current.

Why engagement is key to successful alumni fundraising

Engaged users are three times more likely to make future donations.

Engagement builds connection which builds enthusiasm and passion for your causes. By engaging your alumni through networking, career opportunities, events, mentorship and volunteer opportunities, you build loyalty and ambassadorship amongst your biggest supporters. This extends to monetary donations. 

Advance, Gravyty’s digital fundraising platform, makes it easy for institutional advancement fundraising teams to leverage the support of their engaged alumni to raise donations at scale for things like Giving Days and other fundraising initiatives.

Features designed to boost alumni donor engagement: 

• Leaderboards provide a fun way for donors to track their progress throughout a giving campaign by comparing themselves against other participants in their group.
• Thermometers provide a visual representation of progress toward goals which helps with major donor fundraising. 
• Dynamic Challenge Matching Widgets offer donors an incentive by providing additional funds to their cause when they reach certain donation thresholds, which encourages them to donate more money.
• Cause-Giving Forms make it easier than ever before for donors to give directly from their accounts without having to manually enter credit card information every single time they want to donate money!

Here’s the exciting part: With Advance’s embedded donation forms within the Graduway platform, engaged students and alumni will be more likely to donate (and more often).

Advance, like Graduway, also integrates with many CRM systems including RE NXT, BBCRM and Salesforce and major payment providers including Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, PayPal and major credit cards.

Working together to build a strong alumni donor community

Establishing an online alumni community is essential in the current digital era—it empowers K-12 schools and universities to nurture relationships with their current students and alumni, as well as acquire new ones rapidly and efficiently. 

With Graduway and Advance, teams get powerful engagement and fundraising tools to easily create and scale engaging communities that will not only help increase donations during Giving Days but also strengthen engagement year-round through stewardship.

Ready to learn more? Book a demo.