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Christina Balotescu
August 1, 2025
Spring budget planning has a way of surfacing uncomfortable truths. Every line item is questioned, every investment is asked to justify itself, and long-standing assumptions are quietly put back on the table.
For college and university leadership teams, alumni engagement is increasingly one of those areas under renewed scrutiny. Not because alumni relations is unimportant but because many institutions are unsure whether they are truly investing in alumni engagement, or simply maintaining systems and programs that no longer deliver meaningful outcomes.
That distinction matters more than ever.
Across higher education, institutions are facing tighter budgets, enrollment pressure, and growing expectations around career outcomes, philanthropy, and reputation. In this environment, alumni engagement cannot survive as a passive or inherited expense. It must function as a strategic capability with clear value to the institution and its alumni.
The question executives should be asking this spring is not: Do we have an alumni platform worth maintaining?
It is: Is our alumni engagement producing measurable results, or are we just keeping something alive because it has always existed?
Institutions that fund alumni engagement view it as a long-term investment. They expect their alumni engagement platform, alumni database software, and online alumni community to actively support institutional priorities such as advancement, career outcomes, enrollment, and lifelong affiliation.
Institutions that are merely maintaining alumni engagement tend to see it as a fixed cost. The alumni management system remains in place, the online alumni directory exists, and communications continue but with little clarity about outcomes, growth, or return on investment.
The difference is not philosophical. It is operational and visible.
Many institutions believe their alumni engagement is “fine.” The system works. Alumni can log in. Communications go out. Donations come in.
But fine often hides real cost.
Legacy alumni platforms and fragmented systems quietly consume staff time, dilute data quality, and limit engagement potential. Alumni relations teams spend hours reconciling spreadsheets, exporting lists, and working around system limitations instead of building relationships.
From an executive perspective, this matters because inefficiency compounds:
Spring budget planning is the right moment to surface these costs, because they rarely appear as a single line item. They appear as friction, delay, and missed opportunity.
If alumni engagement feels labor-intensive but underwhelming in results, the issue may not be staffing or strategy, it may be that the institution is maintaining tools that were never designed to support modern engagement.
One of the most useful evaluation questions executives can ask is deceptively simple:
If we turned off our alumni engagement platform tomorrow, what would actually break?
Would alumni lose:
Or would very little change?
If engagement is happening primarily through email—or off-platform entirely—that is a signal. It suggests the institution may be maintaining infrastructure rather than funding engagement.
A funded alumni engagement strategy depends on an alumni engagement platform that alumni choose to use. That platform should function as an all-in-one community platform, supporting connection, participation, and data-driven insight—not just record keeping.
Related reading:
Maintaining an Effective Alumni Database
One reason alumni engagement budgets come under pressure is that results are often framed in terms of activity rather than outcomes.
Leadership teams hear:
What they want to understand is:
Answering these questions requires more than effort. It requires the right alumni tracking system and alumni engagement software—tools that measure participation across touchpoints and show trends over time.
Institutions that fund engagement invest in platforms that make these answers visible. Institutions that maintain engagement rely on anecdote and instinct, which weakens budget conversations.
Spring budget cycles are not just about approving numbers. They are about signaling priorities.
When institutions continue to fund alumni engagement without evaluation, they send a message that alumni relations is a legacy function—important, but static.
When institutions actively assess whether their alumni community software is delivering outcomes, they signal that alumni engagement is a strategic lever worth improving.
This doesn’t always mean increasing spending. In some cases, it means consolidating systems, replacing underperforming tools, or refocusing investment on platforms that actually support engagement.
Related reading:
Power Alumni Networks in the Digital Age
As leadership teams finalize budgets for the coming year, the most important question is not whether alumni engagement costs money.
It is whether the institution is funding alumni engagement as a strategic capability—or merely maintaining it as an inherited expense.
Institutions that choose the former build alumni networks that grow stronger, more connected, and more valuable over time. Institutions that choose the latter often find themselves revisiting the same questions year after year, wondering why engagement plateaus despite continued investment.
Spring planning is the right moment to decide which path your institution is on.
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