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Christina Balotescu
December 8, 2025
(And What It Means for 2026 Planning)
On paper, many colleges and universities appear well-equipped to manage alumni engagement.
They have an alumni database.
They have an online alumni directory.
They have tools for email, events, fundraising, and reporting.
Yet behind the scenes, advancement and alumni relations teams often struggle with an invisible problem that quietly drains time, morale, and budget: fragmentation.
As institutions head into 2026 planning, this issue deserves closer attention—the true cost of fragmented alumni systems rarely shows up where leaders expect it to.
Fragmented alumni systems are rarely the result of poor planning. More often, they accumulate over time.
A typical stack might include:
Each tool may serve a purpose. The problem is that they don’t serve it together.
Over time, what starts as flexibility turns into complexity.
Fragmentation is expensive, but not in ways that are easy to quantify.
Alumni relations teams spend hours:
This is time that could be spent on relationship-building, strategy, or innovation.
When alumni data lives in multiple places:
An alumni data management system is only as valuable as the confidence leaders have in its accuracy.
From the alumni perspective, fragmentation shows up as:
An online alumni community should feel cohesive. Fragmentation makes it feel transactional.
During spring planning, advancement leaders are often asked to explain:
Fragmented systems make those answers harder, often resulting in reporting that is manual, incomplete, and reactive. Leadership needs to see trends, patterns, and outcomes. Fragmentation undermines that credibility.
When institutions hear “consolidation,” they often worry about loss of flexibility.
In reality, modern alumni management platforms are designed to replace fragmentation without limiting capability.
A true all-in-one community platform can:
The goal is not fewer tools for their own sake. The goal is clarity.
The biggest cost of fragmentation may be what institutions never realize they’re missing.
Fragmented systems make it difficult to:
As a result, institutions often underperform, not because they lack commitment, but because their infrastructure holds them back.
Related reading:
Power Alumni Networks in the Digital Age
Budget planning for 2026 is a natural moment to ask harder questions:
For many institutions, this is the first time consolidation becomes not just attractive, but necessary.
As institutions look ahead, the most important question is not:
Can we afford to change our alumni systems?
It is:
Can we afford to keep paying the hidden cost of fragmentation?
Institutions that address fragmentation position themselves to:
Those that don’t often find themselves having the same conversation again next year, under even tighter constraints.
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