In 2019, Adam Dunigan joined Franklin College’s advancement team as Senior Director of Advancement Services and Analytics, after working in information systems at the Indiana, U.S., college for nearly a decade. One of his immediate goals was to create a dashboard to gauge alumni activities—part of the college’s effort to intentionally measure alumni engagement. 

Dunigan and his team identified engagement touchpoints, tracked them in Franklin’s CRM, and ultimately created an interactive, real-time dashboard to capture and help advancement staff understand the impact of alumni activities. 

To guide this data dashboard work, Franklin’s team used CASE’s white paper on Alumni Engagement Metrics, which had just been released at that time. The white paper drove the launch of the AEM survey in 2020, designed to look at the broad impact of relationships between alumni and their alma maters. The survey measures engagement across four “modes” beyond the traditionally used metric of giving rates. 

“The giving rate metric only tells a small part of the story,” says CASE President and CEO Sue Cunningham. In developing the survey, she says, “We wanted to look deeper—to consider what specifically constitutes alumni engagement and how we as a profession might assess this important work thoughtfully and quantitatively.” 

Now, as CASE’s Global Alumni Engagement Metrics survey enters its fourth year of data collection, advancement teams like Franklin’s are building collaboration through data, assessing their programs, and quantifying the value of alumni engagement.