North America is far more culturally, racially, and ethnically diverse than ever before. Demographic shifts have been felt across college and university campuses as record numbers of historically underrepresented students enroll in college and attain degrees. These shifting demographics have been slowly changing the face of our institutional profile across the last decade. The changes in our student and alumni demographic profile present significant challenges and opportunities for advancement offices, particularly in developing a more diverse alumni volunteer community. Advancement and alumni leaders need not only to recognize the necessity to adapt traditional alumni volunteer structures to meet shifting priorities but to also create new alumni programming that resonates with an increasingly diverse alumni community.
A cascading set of problems
Understanding the cost of inaction
| Today | Next 3-5 Years | Beyond 5 Years | |
| Volunteer Participation | Inability to engage increasingly diverse alumni | Diverse alumni choose to volunteer with other nonprofits | No bench of diverse alumni for leadership roles |
| Annual Giving | Alumni giving rates continue to decline | Increased cost to raise a dollar | Alumni direct annual fund gifts to other nonprofits |
| Major Giving | Aging traditional donor demographic | Drying of major gift pipeline | Inability to meet campaign goals due to lack of diverse donor base |
This toolkit is a compendium of diversity-related resources for advancement professionals to access when working with diverse alumni constituencies. It maps to EAB’s Elevating Inclusion study and contains relevant resources to help advancement professionals better understand the experience of diverse alumni and engage an increasingly diverse alumni base.
Institutions often have many diversity-related programs across campus, but rarely is there a single location where all diversity-related projects that may involve alumni are cataloged. This worksheet provides a template for advancement staff to identify all relevant campus partners who are active in diversity programming.
In doing this research it became clear to EAB that few advancement professionals know what it was like to be a diverse student on campus. In order to better understand their programming desires, it is important to first understand their experiences. These population-specific worksheets provide advancement staff talking points to engage diverse alumni in conversations around their student experience.
- Alumnae Listening Tour Worksheet (p. 65)
- LGBT Alumni Listening Tour Worksheet (p. 66)
- Alumni of Color Listening Tour Worksheet (p. 67)
Institutions often have many diversity-related programs across campus. These programs can be housed in student affairs, academic units, or even as stand-alone centers (e.g., LGBT resource center). However, a single resource that provides advancement professionals with a complete inventory of related projects and contacts is rarely available.
This tool provides advancement professionals a template to conduct an audit of your institution’s diversity-related engagements to ensure advancement staff is aware of the full depth and scope of diversity-related programs already happening on campus.
Job descriptions for volunteers communicate key position details to individuals interested in getting involved on campus. Providing volunteer job descriptions ensures alumni volunteers can fully understand their roles and the institution’s expectations of their commitments in the areas of time and philanthropic commitment.
Use this form to develop or refine volunteer job descriptions for relevant volunteer opportunities at your institution.
Diverse students have strong connections with faculty and staff at your institution. Use this form to identify units on campus that can send emails to diverse alumni encouraging them to volunteer. Be sure to use these “nudge” emails alongside relevant and scoped volunteer job descriptions.
Use this worksheet to conduct diversity audits or demographic snapshots of advancement-affiliated boards and councils.
Alumni-facing advancement publications (e.g., alumni magazines) rarely do a robust job of highlighting diverse constituencies in article content or in images. This audit equips advancement staff with a tool to analyze existing publications to understand where additional investments in diversity-focused content an imaging should be made. Separate audits should be conducted for each alumni-facing publication (e.g., alumni magazine, campaign committee update).
Gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation can be sensitive, personal, and complicated data to capture. Use this worksheet to help ensure that your institution is as inclusive and comprehensive as possible when and if you seek this data from students and alumni. These questions should always be optional and never mandatory.
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