The CASE Library maintains this collection of alumni student mentoring materials including program examples, mentor and mentee resources, forms and assorted other materials.

What is race equity as it applies to education institutions? How are advancement teams approaching this work, which experts say involves a wholesale transformation of organizational cultures? How are institutions and individuals moving forward in the name of equity? 

Following a year of extreme variability, community colleges can learn from 2020’s fundraising data to further explore valuable aspects of advancement—including online/mobile giving, donor-advised funds, alumni relations, and institutional benchmarking.

As educational funding models have changed, and expectations for philanthropic support have become staples of institutional strategy, so too has our need for clear guidance evolved.

When it comes to data, we often believe more are better. We look at all the metrics we can track and spend hours studying spreadsheets and reports. But instead what we really need to do is ask the right questions and learn to trust our data.

Last year saw transformative gifts given to certain community colleges (who no longer wistfully sing “If I Had a Million Dollars”). How can two-year institutions continue to illustrate return-on-investment value to increasingly savvy donors?

Advancement professionals at Delta College, Clark College, and Central Community College talk about the benefits of participating in CASE’s VSE and AEM surveys, including benchmarking against peers, maintaining an organized database, and proving your college’s success to leadership, lawmakers, and the community.

What members are thinking and sharing

The Advancement Resource Catalog is the Library's database of 15,000+ item records (including articles, books, and white papers) available online 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 

Alumni engagement metrics have come a long way in a short time and are proving to be crucial to advancement teams. With years of solid data under their belts, many in alumni relations are finding significant results from building systems around these metrics, altering their actions in response, and displaying the value of their work to constituents, institutional leadership, and board members.