As education company EAB’s principal consultant for advancement, Jenny Jones spends her days talking to university advancement officials, people who spend their days in the high-stakes world of higher ed fundraising. It’s an inherently stressful job, one made all the more anxiety-inducing in recent years.
Last fall, students found themselves in a hole after the government’s botched efforts to roll out a new federal financial aid application process resulted in a delay in delivering financial aid to cover housing, books and personal expenses. Advancement teams “stepped up and deployed donor-funded emergency aid, gap scholarships and flexible funds to help students enroll or stay enrolled,” Jones said.
The calendar year turned to 2025 and we all know what happened next. “I work with partners every day, and most of them have been impacted in some way, shape, or form, typically by [cuts to] research funding,” Jones said. “It was already a hard time with the changes that took place, and so advancement teams are really concentrating on, how do they fill those gaps?”
The answer to that sadly familiar question is a complicated one. Advancement officers must focus their efforts on a segment of prospects and previous donors who seem more likely to give at a time when alumni engagement is lagging. But many advancement teams lack the in-house expertise or access to data that would allow them to create customized pitches to alumni. “We live in a world of Amazon and Netflix, it’s all about personalization,” Jones said. Knowing what an alumnus did as an undergraduate and is doing now in a professional context “helps us narrow and focus our time.”
EAB explores these challenges and more in its “2025 Advancement Leaders Playbook: Insights from EAB’s Advancement Leaders Survey.” Culled from interviews with 164 advancement professionals throughout the fall of 2024, the report surfaces opportunities in three key areas: the workforce, the donor pipeline, and data and technology.
Jones stressed that higher ed advancement teams have always struggled to do more with less. “Everywhere I’ve worked, there are budget issues, and I guarantee you that every time we do a survey, budget issues are always the top challenge,” she said. But developments across the past six months have made advancement officers’ lives exponentially more complicated.
“Everything in the report is still true today,” Jones said. “Actually, even more so.”
How advancement teams can address workforce challenges
EAB asked survey respondents to name the top three challenges their advancement teams were facing. The most cited challenges were limited budget/resources (79% of respondents), decreased alumni engagement (61%), staffing shortages (54%), increased competition for donations (49%) and adapting to digital marketing (23%).
The report then delved into the first of three overarching challenges, “The Workforce,” noting that 75% of respondents reported vacancies in their advancement offices.
Advancement teams are frequently unable to attract talent due to the prosaic fact that candidates can earn more money in the private sector. “There’ll be differences between a community college, junior tech and an R1 research institution,” Jones said, “but what we’re seeing is that on the whole, they’re not paying the same [in the private sector], especially for those data positions as a Google or an Amazon. Even if you have great benefits, it’s just not the same salary.”
Compounding matters is that many college towns are no longer bucolic bastions of affordable housing. Universities can mitigate this issue by letting advancement staff work remotely. However, EAB’s research found that 24% of survey respondents reported that their employees are never allowed to work outside of the office.
Jones encourages advancement teams to be more flexible on this point. “Major gift fundraisers should always be on the road, but advancement services staff working with data, many times, can do their job remotely,” she said. “Alumni engagement is different. You probably need to be on campus so you can interact with students and recent graduates.”
EAB Associate Director, Research Discovery & Design Edward Issertell joined Jones on the call and suggested that advancement teams can mitigate their workforce challenges by casting a wide net in the recruitment process. “There are so many transferable skills candidates can have,” he said, noting that applicants with backgrounds in sales and business are particularly well suited for the world of fundraising.
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Fundraisers are concerned about the state of the donor pipeline
Advancement teams are paid to worry about not just the next gift, but 10 gifts after that. “They have those major gift prospects in place, but they’re looking five to 10 years down the road,” Jones said. “And they’re thinking, if alumni engagement is down and if we’re seeing donor engagement also drop, how do we fill that pipeline in the future?”
EAB’s report found that 84% of survey respondents are either “concerned” (44%) or “very concerned” (40%”) about the “declining donor counts” — that is, donors of all types (individual and organizational), regardless of alumni status — affecting their donor pipeline. Eighty-two percent of respondents reported that the alumni participation rate had either declined (41%) or remained stagnant (41%) over the past five years.
The good news is that deeply personalized alumni engagement gives advancement teams a foothold to build a constructive and durable relationship. “When you engage alumni,” Jones said, “you have to think about what’s important to them and how they were involved.”
Her perspective hit a nerve. I thought about how, for a good 10 years, I received an occasional postcard from my alma mater that had what I can only describe as a “catch-all” quality to it. Jones calls this the classic “pray and spray” strategy, where advancement teams “send you a postcard and hope you respond.” It’s the standard practice at most schools because they “don’t bring over student data to the advancement teams.” As a result, fundraisers are effectively flying blind. “They don’t know an alumni was in a sorority or the Honors College,” Jones said. “But that’s what shaped your experience, that’s how you were engaged.”
Leveraging data to drive personalized prospect and donor engagement
Jones’ takeaway dovetails with the third challenge in EAB’s report, “Data and Technology.” Forty-five percent of survey respondents ranked their team’s data management skills as “fair or poor,” and nearly 40% reported not using AI in their offices at all. Advancement officials who can leverage data to connect those experiential alumni dots with quantifiable giving behaviors have a better chance of making them reach for their checkbook.
“We’d ask advancement officers questions like, ‘How do you know who you’re acquiring?’” Jones said. “How do you know what your alumni participation rate is? How do we know if alumni are engaged? Are they attending events? Are they giving after that event?” In many cases, they couldn’t confidently answer those questions because “they are not using their data, or don’t feel that the data is relevant or that it’s clean. They need the data, and they don’t have the staff to look at that.”
Jones notes that many of EAB’s partners are transitioning to newer and more sophisticated customer relationship management systems that can meet their data analysis needs. She encourages advancement officers to identify and re-engage donors “that have been giving for seven years but have never been asked for an upgrade” and ensure that the university’s site includes impact stories that will resonate with what EAB calls “donor investors” looking for a return on investment.
Issertell underscored the importance of staying apprised of the legislative proposals making their way through the halls of Congress, citing EAB’s Federal Policy Navigation Suite for Education Leaders. The resource has been “helpful for some university leaders to understand how policy changes may affect the institution,” he said.
All of which brought us back to universities affected by events in Washington, D.C. Are they asking donors to fill the gaps or publicly reaffirming their support for programs that may run afoul of the administration’s efforts to restrict diversity, equity and inclusion programs?
“It depends on the culture and the politics on the particular campus,” Jones said. Some universities “meet it head-on,” while others “talk about support for international students, or scholarships for those students, or maintaining diversity in the student population. We know donors are interested in education, social justice and healthcare. So it doesn’t make sense for institutions not to talk about how they are working with students and faculty in those areas.”
