Where Alumni Giving Is Actually Going: Department Level Trends the Annual Fund Misses

Alumni want to give to your department. Your university keeps asking them to give to the annual fund instead.

I have managed alumni relations and giving campaigns across three departments over the past decade. In every single role, the same pattern repeated itself. When we sent a department specific giving appeal, alumni responded at two to three times the rate of the university wide annual fund appeal. When we gave alumni a restricted fund tied to a specific outcome, average gift sizes increased by 40%.

The Council for Advancement and Support of Education's Voluntary Support of Education survey for fiscal year 2024 confirms this is not just my experience. Alumni gave $12.9 billion to U.S. higher education in 2024, up 7.5% from the prior year. But the composition of that giving tells a story that most advancement offices are not listening to.

Here is the data on where alumni giving is actually going and what departments can do with it.

The $61.5 billion landscape

Total giving to U.S. higher education reached $61.5 billion in fiscal year 2024, a 3% inflation adjusted increase. Here is who gave what:

Alumni are the second largest source of giving, but they are giving in a very specific pattern that conflicts with how most universities ask them to give.

The annual fund problem in one statistic

The 2020 National Young Alumni Survey, covering 40,000 alumni from 36 U.S. colleges with graduation years from 2002 to 2017, asked donors and non-donors to rank their giving priorities. The results should reshape every advancement office's strategy:

Alumni ranked scholarships and financial aid, a specific department or major, first generation student initiatives, and mental health services as their top giving priorities. The institution's annual fund, which is unrestricted giving to the general operating budget, ranked dead last.

The RAND Corporation's analysis of Voluntary Support of Education data found the same pattern at larger scale. Unrestricted current operations gifts were approximately 12 to 13 percent of total support. Restricted current operations were approximately 42 to 44 percent. RAND concluded that "donors of unrestricted gifts have more trust in the institution than donors of restricted gifts" and that the growth of restricted giving suggests "an increasing need on the part of donors to control the uses to which their donations are put."

Alumni are telling the industry exactly what they want: to give to something specific where they can see the impact. Departments are the most natural container for that specificity.

Who gives and when

The giving data by graduation cohort reveals a pipeline problem that most departments have not addressed:

Alumni 31 years and older account for approximately 85 percent of all alumni gift dollars. The oldest cohort, 50 plus years out, gives at nearly three times the rate of recent graduates and contributes more than a third of all alumni dollars.

The standard advancement interpretation of this data is to focus fundraising resources on older alumni who have more wealth and higher giving rates. That interpretation is incomplete.

The data also shows that recent graduates give at 6.9 percent, and their giving rate drops to 4.8 percent in the 6 to 10 year window before slowly climbing back. That dip and recovery pattern suggests that alumni who stop giving do not stop because they cannot afford it. They stop because no one asked them in a way that felt meaningful during the years when they were building their careers and families.

What department level fundraising actually looks like

The construction management field provides some of the best examples of department level giving because these programs tend to track their fundraising publicly. Here is what works:

The University of Central Missouri's construction management program raised $303,761 over seven years through two annual alumni run golf tournaments. That is approximately $43,000 per year from a single program with roughly 200 to 300 enrolled students. The funds support scholarships, a quasi-endowment, and program advancement.

Ferris State University's construction management program ran its first day of giving campaign in 2025 and raised $14,700, finishing third out of more than 90 causes across the university. In its second year, the program is targeting $25,000.

LSU's Bert S. Turner Department of Construction Management raised $36.3 million in private gifts toward a $107 million construction and advanced manufacturing building. The lead gift of $15 million came from an alumnus, Art Favre, class of 1972.

These are not one off successes. They are the result of department level fundraising that connects alumni to specific, visible outcomes. The UCM golf tournament funds go to named scholarships that alumni can see awarded each year. The LSU building will have the department's name on it. The Ferris State day of giving campaign lets alumni give to a specific program they remember, not to a general fund they cannot picture.

We have written about how to be a department alum who actually helps. The fundraising data suggests alumni want to help. They just want to help their department, not the university's unrestricted operating budget.

Five things departments can do with this data

Stop sending alumni to the university's annual fund page. Create a department specific giving page with named funds tied to visible outcomes: student competition travel, guest speaker series, equipment upgrades, named scholarships. Alumni give more and give more often when the fund has a specific name and a specific purpose.

Build a giving pipeline that spans decades, not years. The data shows alumni giving follows a U-shaped curve by age. The alumni who give $50 to your scholarship fund at age 28 are the same people who will give $500 at age 45 and $5,000 at age 65. Track them. Keep them. Do not discard recent graduates as low value donors.

Use industry advisory boards as fundraising infrastructure. ACCE accredited construction management programs are required to maintain an Industry Advisory Board. Many of these boards have tiered membership dues ranging from $500 to $2,500 per year. Departments outside construction can adopt the same model. A 20 member IAB at an average of $1,500 per year generates $30,000 in unrestricted departmental revenue before a single alumni appeal is sent.

Run one department specific giving event per year. UCM's golf tournaments work because they combine social connection with tangible impact. Pick your department's equivalent. A showcase of student projects with alumni judging, a guest lecture series sponsored by a named alumni fund, a competition travel fund drive tied to a specific event. Alumni give to experiences they remember having.

Tell alumni exactly what their money did. This sounds obvious. It is not. Most university giving reports list dollar amounts and fund names. Department level giving reports should list specific outcomes: "Your gift sent 12 students to the ABC competition in Orlando. They placed third in the national estimating category." Alumni who receive outcome specific reports renew their giving at nearly double the rate of those who receive generic thank you letters.