Name: donorCentrics® FY24 Annual Giving Report on Higher Education Alumni Giving
Uploaded: 2025-05-28T18:30:45.921Z
Duration: 58 min 44 s
Description: donorCentrics® FY24 Annual Giving Report on Higher Education Alumni Giving

Transcript for "donorCentrics® FY24 Annual Giving Report on Higher Education Alumni Giving": Hello. Welcome to the donor centric annual report on higher education alumni giving for f y twenty four. My name is Catherine Ross. I'm a fundraising analytics consultant with the Blackbaud DonorCentrics team, and I'm joined here today by my colleague, Shaun Keister, who is an annual giving consultant from Campbell & Company. We're also joined today by several of our wonderful colleagues, Ashley Clark and Nate Cooperrider from Blackbaud's marketing team, who you'll see in the background helping us answer some questions and answers and chat questions. A couple quick housekeeping items before we dive in today. You will see receive a link to the recording of today's session via email with, within twenty four hours of the webinar. I also wanna quickly point out a few resources in the docs section of the platform, which is up at the top right hand side of your screen next to the chat and q and a area. You'll find some links to a few, recent DonorCentrics, webinars and our, resources, and also you'll have a copy of today's slide deck that you can download for yourself. Lastly, please feel free to utilize the q and a to ask us questions to the presentation. And if we have time, at the end of our time together, we will answer a few questions. And if we can't get to your questions today, we'll be sure to follow-up after the webinar concludes. Before we dive into the data, I'm gonna just give you a quick background on the dataset that we're going to be reviewing today. The trends that we'll be looking at are part of the DonorCentrix collaborative benchmarking service provided by Blackbaud. DonorCentrix was established in 1989. We work with hundreds of nonprofit organizations across The United States, Canada, and around the world. Some of you listening may already be very familiar with DonorCentrix. But if this is brand new to you, what we do in DonorCentrix is we put the donor at the center of our analysis. That allows us to look at trends from the past and identify opportunities for the future. We're also gonna be looking at trends across a five year period. That allows us to analyze donor behavior with a wide angle lens so that we can see the impact of external events, such as the COVID nineteen pandemic or a natural disaster and how that influenced fundraising trends across a multiyear period. Today's data is going to include results from a 36 participating institutions across North America. We're gonna be analyzing giving from a total of 1,100,000 donors and over $1,200,000,000 in charitable contributions. Today's trends are going to be based on alumni giving behavior. That means we're gonna be focusing on the behavior of alumni who give back to their alma mater. It also means that non alumni donors are not going to be included in today's analysis. The time frame that we're gonna be focusing on today is fiscal year 2024, meaning the data that we're looking at is giving through 06/30/2024. So whenever you see a date of 2024 on the slides or you hear me or Shaun saying twenty twenty three, twenty twenty four, so it's gonna be referring back to that July 1 to June 30 fiscal year. It's never referenced in calendar year. I'm also gonna pause quickly to mention here, in case you're wondering why we're not looking at fiscal year twenty twenty five data, that's because fiscal year twenty twenty five is not over yet. We're actually gonna be starting to collect data from fiscal year twenty twenty five very soon, and then we'll go through our individual review meetings with organizations. So if that's something that you're interested in analyzing, we would love to talk to you about it. The data we'll be looking at in just a few moments is also based on actual donor transactions, and those are gonna be cash transactions received in the current reporting period. I also wanna point out that when I pass things off to Shaun in just a moment, he's gonna be walking you through median values, and the median is the middle value in a ranked order of numbers. And the reason we use medians is one of the ways that we're ensuring that we're standardizing data across organizations. Participating organizations may use different CRMs. They may have different strategic areas of focus or key performance measures. And at DonorCentrix, we have really mastered a process of standardizing data. So we're able to look at fundraising trends and compare apples to apples as much as possible. And with that, I'm gonna pass things off to Shaun to walk us through the data. Thank you, Catherine. Welcome, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. As Catherine said, we're going to be looking at alumni data, and we're gonna start at sort of the 10,000 foot level with some overall giving trends from last year. So you can see here the percentage change in the number of alumni donors. And most of these slides, just to orient you, will have the private institutions that we work with, the public institutions that we work with, and then everyone combined, all of the institutions that are in the dataset. So that's the light blue bars on this screen. What you can see sometimes is that the trends for private and public institutions mirror one another. But in a few of the slides, you're going to see some differences, and I will point them out as we go through them. In general, when we want to think about all of higher ed, as a group, the light blue bars are going to be the best, storyline for what is happening in higher education. And on this slide, when we look at alumni donor counts, you can quickly see the story is not the best story that we could have. You can see that both private and public institutions saw a negative percentage change in the number of alumni donors. This is a trend that's been going on for quite some time. It actually predates the pandemic. You can see there in 2020, the stark drop off in the year of the pandemic and then a very, very modest rebound in 2021, which is really tied to super loyal donors who took one year off coming back in that year. But since then, and and I typically refer to '22, '20 '3, and '24 as the post pandemic years, we have continued to see a similar trend, and that is a decline in the number of alumni donors. Now what has typically been better news is the positive change in revenue. And I have been working with this data for more than twenty five years now, and I will say, that most years in that twenty five year history I have with the data, we have seen revenue go up. You can see, that the five year dataset represented here sees a lot of bouncing around in revenue. Let me say this. In the twenty five years I've been looking at the data, there have only been five years in which, there was a negative or flat change in revenue. And one of them was back in 02/2009, then 02/2019, and then the other three are represented here on this slide, 2020, '20 '20 '3. And last year, which when you look at all schools, was perfectly flat. No growth, no decline. You can see a modest difference here, though. Private institutions were down 2%. Public institutions were up 2%. When you put them all together, we were perfectly flat last year. That makes me chuckle because at the benchmarking meetings I facilitated this year, I kept saying, we're pretty flat. We're pretty flat. Modestly up, modestly down. Well, as it turns out, when we put everyone together, we were perfectly flat. But that follows a year of decline in 2023. So, again, while revenue has generally been a more positive metric over the last two decades, certainly, these five years pandemic to present have been a little more complicated when it comes to revenue. Now the one positive number we see here is generally growth for both private and public institutions and certainly overall, very positive growth in the revenue per donor, $991. This is an incredibly high revenue per donor metric, the highest we've ever seen, up quite a bit compared to 2020. And if we were to put pre pandemic years on here, this is remarkably higher. This is arguably one of the big story lines of the pandemic. Whether it was the plan or not, we became pipeline programs far more than, donor count programs because of the dramatic loss in donors. But the fact that the donors that stuck with us upgraded unlike anything we've ever seen before over several years here. We are now at a point where we have almost a thousand dollar revenue per donor metric here, $991 last year. Private institutions, of course, have always been higher than public institutions, already over a thousand dollars. Bottom line is though, because our donor counts are starkly down and revenue's been flat or modestly up in the last couple of years, we are seeing the highest revenue per donor we've ever seen. And, again, it really has made many of our programs become pipeline programs, rapidly moving donors through the cycle. Percentage of donors giving a hundred dollars or more. Now this metric is up compared to 2020. Of course, 2020 was a difficult year in general, but remarkably stable. Two thirds of our donors are giving a hundred dollars or more. That's been pretty stable over the last couple of years. And when you look at the public and private comparison, pretty stable over time. Again, if you go back pre pandemic, these percentages would not be quite as high, and you can see in 2020, they were not quite as high. So we are, again, seeing more donors giving at the hundred dollar plus level. One of the more remarkable things about the pandemic is while we suffered massive donor losses, they were primarily our donors who give less than a hundred dollars a year. Donors who give two or more gifts, another metric that has been generally pretty stable for both public and private institutions, and again, the percentages are pretty comparable between the two types of institutions. In essence, overall, roughly one fourth of our donors, are giving two or more gifts during the fiscal year. Now why does this matter? And we talk about this at length at benchmarking meetings. We do find donors who give two or more gifts within a fiscal year are remarkably more loyal and have significantly higher retention rates. So we want more and more of our donors to give two or more gifts throughout the fiscal year. For higher ed, this average is right around or median is right around 23%, so about one fourth of our donors. So let's look at channel for just a second. One of, of course, one of the big impacts of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 because students left our campuses was the dramatic fall in paid student caller programs as a channel. And you can see calling has become a much more challenging channel over time since the pandemic. With just a modest uptick last year, and, again, we talked about this at benchmarking meetings, Some schools have completely moved away from telemarketing. Some schools still have the programs, but have really retooled them. And what we are seeing is a handful of schools actually are seeing their telemarketing results go up. For other institutions, they're remarkably stable. And then, of course, some schools have abandoned it altogether. But I do think, for many, many schools, this is still an important channel even though it's getting fewer donors. Direct mail was the most stable channel for us during the pandemic. You can see that in 2020, pretty significant channel in that year, in particular, very important channel. But what has happened with direct mail for both public and private institutions and overall is since the pandemic, it has become slightly less prevalent or slightly, less impactful tool for us as we have seen these percentages go down a little bit over time. Part of this is likely because people's busy lives resumed, and they are less tuned in to what's in their mailboxes. Conversely, though, web and digital has inched upward over time, pretty flat at the private institutions. Publics have gone up nicely last year. Big jump for public institutions in the web and digital category, but overall, a modest increase over time. Now some of this was happening before the pandemic. The pandemic has probably, made these numbers move faster. We are seeing channel migration from both phone and direct mail to web based giving. Part of this is, of course, tied to dramatic increases in crowdfunding as a tool and modest increases over time in, since the pandemic in give days. And to that point, this is the percentage of donors giving gifts on give day. Nice jump for private institutions last year. As some of you will recall, the last few years, we've been talking about give days flattening out a little bit in '21, '20 '2, and '23 after dramatic growth leading up to 2021. This year, at least for private institutions, a bit of a rebound here on give day. Publix, still a little more, flat, but overall, relative stability among give days. Again, these numbers are higher than they were before the pandemic, but they're not growing as rapidly. And we did have in '22 and '23 a little bit more of a flat line here. So probably a bit of positive news here on the give day front that we saw these numbers inch up a bit last year. And with that, I'll turn it back over to you, Catherine. Excellent. My wonderful marketing colleagues are gonna help me add this poll, so that you can respond to it. But we did wanna hear from you what's happening in your organizations, this current fiscal year. Are you expecting that your institution is going to end the year, up in both donors and dollars, up in donors flat in dollars, up in donors, down in dollars, down in both donors in dollars, down in donors, up in dollars, up in donors, flat in dollars, or, perhaps you're not sure. Maybe it's not your area of focus. And it does look like, as we're we're seeing these live calls coming in, the majority so far are saying that you're expecting the year to end up in both donors and dollars. Really interesting. I'll give it another minute for folks to respond. Some people saying they're gonna see the year end down in donors but up in dollars. There's a little bit of a trend that we've been seeing among other sectors, more revenue from fewer donors. Excellent. So a little bit split, focusing expecting to end the year up in dollars, but maybe, a mix of up in donors or down in dollars. Excellent. Alright. Great. Well, I would argue those results, as Catherine, suggested, were generally good news. Dollars up for the vast majority of you and donors a little bit more of a mixed bag. But, again, flat or even up a little bit in donor counts would be a remarkable reversal of what we've been seeing. So in general, good news. Getting back to last year's data, let's talk about donor acquisition, new donors, trends in this particular metric. And one would probably argue, and, again, much discussed at benchmarking meetings, acquiring new first time alumni donors, and this would include students, has become a bit more challenging, certainly more so than pre pandemic. You can see in 2020, it was especially difficult, real losses in acquisition in that particular year. Much of that tied to the cancellation of give days, which historically have been a powerful acquisition tool. And then you see divergence here between publics and privates, and you see a little bit of growth in '21, '20 '2, and '23 in new donors or percentage change in new donors for the private institutions while publics continued to shrink. Last year, both private and publics were down. So in general, we would argue that acquiring first time donors is flat or modestly down since the pandemic. Arguably, it is harder to get a first time donor today than it was before the pandemic. I would also acknowledge that for private institutions, a little bit of that growth there in those in between years can be traced back to student giving and a rebound in student giving programs in general after taking a year or two off completely because of the pandemic. So do keep in mind that student donors would count in these new donor counts as well. Change in revenue from new donors. Again, a lot of bouncing around here. You see in '21 and '22, slightly better data for public institutions and overall. And what we were seeing in those years were, while getting first time donors was hard, they were giving more money, bigger gifts. And then a big drop off in 2023. And last year, a little bit of a mixed bag. Public institutions were up a bit in revenue, privates were down a bit in revenue, and overall, generally pretty flat, which matches our overall revenue trend for last year, which was remarkably flat. Now that said, slightly better news and a a a slightly different way of looking at this is what's my revenue per donor, in in general? How much are these first time donors giving? And here, again, you see a bit of divergence between private and publics, but I want to acknowledge that for private institutions, the fact that this number has gone down a bit generally gets tied back to student giving and private institutions having more student donors who tend to give smaller gifts. However, I will say prior to the pandemic, public institutions never had a higher revenue per donor than private institutions. Since the pandemic, that is a reversal. We now see public institutions getting a remarkably higher revenue per donor from these new donors than private institutions. Again, some of that has to do with the student giving here, but I would say when we look at just alumni, what we tend to see among the new donors is we're getting fewer of them, but they're giving remarkably bigger gifts. So that is definitely a trend, and some of that is represented here in this data. You can see when you average everyone together, overall, the revenue per donor reached an all time high last year at $200 for these first time ever donors. Then we look at volume. When we think about all of our donors, what percent of them are brand new? Meaning, what percent of them of our overall donor counts made their first gift ever in 2024? And here you see that the percentages are slightly higher among the publics than the privates, but you generally see a lot of stability here. Not a dramatic change in the representation when we look at our donor pools of of how many of them are first time ever donors. Now you gotta layer this in to the fact that our donor counts are down, which also means when we look at the percentage of our donors, it's indicating we're not getting as many new first time donors. But as a percentage of the whole, they're holding their own. It is not a significant percentage. About one in 10 of all donors are first time donors. Again, acquisition is harder today than it was before the pandemic. Then the percentage that are students. So here is the point I made earlier. For private institutions, students are a big driver of first time donors. You can see it's about half. That's been relatively stable with the caveat that in 2021, when our students were pretty much living at home, not on our campuses, we saw a pretty big dip there, but remarkably stable overall, for for private institutions. And they do a better job at getting student donors. Now that said, for a lot of public institutions, they don't even bother. They're not necessarily doing student giving programs, but overall, these percentages have gone down. The percent of overall donor counts that happen to be of new donor counts that happen to be students is down quite a bit last year for public institutions. Now when you average them altogether again, though, overall, a modest dip primarily caused by fewer students at among the public institutions, in these counts of new donors. Now this is a slightly different way of looking at the data. We're saying the percentage of our new donors who happen to be young alumni. Now I wanna put a caveat here because for us, we're defining young alumni here as graduates of the last ten years. So we're splitting decades, and we talk at great length at benchmarking meetings about the fact that our twenty twenty decade of young alums are behaving relatively good. Our twenty ten decade of alums has been where we have suffered our greatest losses. And for many institutions, that twenty ten decade is a crisis decade of graduates. This data represents half of that crisis decade and half of what is looking to be a better decade of graduates, and that's the 2020 group. So interesting that we're splitting those two decades when we look at young alumni here. But what's happening? Well, overall, when you look at the light blue bar, the percentage of new donors who happen to be these young alums is down modestly. It's a little more flat for the public institutions and down a little bit for the private institutions. But overall, we went from 36% of our new donors being young alums in 2020 to 33% of them today being young alums. Modest dip. You could look at this and argue it's it's somewhat stable. What is interesting about that, though, is who is represented in in the mix. And it is some of that 2010 decade, which was very problematic since the pandemic and some of the 2020 decade, which while many of us worried about this decade because of the pandemic, they've they're actually doing modestly better as a group. Alright. With that, I'm going to turn it back over to Catherine. Thank you, Shaun. So sustainers continue to be a hot topic both inside and outside of higher education, and it's an area of giving that we have been analyzing closely in donor centric for many decades. So these next few slides are pulled from the donor centric sustainer summit, which is an annual benchmarking cohort that we hold with some of the nation's largest national fundraising organizations that are very focused on growing their recurring giving programs. So similar to the data that we're looking at for alumni giving, this sustainer summit analysis is also going to be based on a July to June reporting period covering the period of, f y twenty through f y twenty four, and their dataset is actually much larger than the one that we're looking at for alumni giving. Our sustainer summit dataset includes 19,400,000 donors and a total of 3,400,000,000.0 in charitable giving from a variety of nonprofit sectors. And what we're seeing in our sustainer summit analysis is incredible stability and recurring giving. At the median, twenty three percent of all current year donors made recurring gifts in this dataset. That's up from a 16% share five years ago in f y twenty. And then among these organizations, a median 32% of their overall revenue was driven by recurring gifts in f y twenty four. And that really tells us that sustainers are providing a stable and reliable source of donors and revenue for this group of organizations. And the reason that we know sustainers are so reliable is when we compare them to single gift donors. So this view is showing us the one year change in single gift only donors, which is shown on the left side of the page in blue versus the one year change in recurring donors, which is shown on the right side of the page. And I just wanna pause for a moment and explain that when we talk about single gift donors in our vocabulary, we're talking about donors who make their gifts one at a time. So these could be people who are giving two or three or four times in the current year, but single gift donors are people who are making their gifts one at a time. So they're not in any sort of committed recurring giving pattern, whereas someone who's making a recurring gift is, giving on some sort of monthly or perhaps biweekly basis in a committed pattern on an ongoing basis until they cancel. So when we look at these two different groups, in a comparison, what we're seeing is a shift in our single and recurring gift populations. We also have a greater volatility among our single gift donors. What we're seeing is three consecutive years of declines among those single gift only donors, and that's really coming out of the pandemic. These organizations see a lot of giving around high profile giving moments. They saw significant growth, and big surges of giving around the pandemic, around natural disasters, for our international relief organizations. They saw a lot of giving around the invasion of Ukraine, and they also had a lot of growth in their sustainer file. So on the right side of the page where we're seeing that one year change in recurring of donors, these organizations had big lifts in sustainers in f y twenty one and f y twenty two. And in the most recent two years, f y twenty three and f y twenty four, we'd really call that flat. A 1% increase in f y twenty three and just a 1% decline in f y twenty four. So they're really able to maintain that volume of sustainer growth that they experienced in the more recent two years. So they capitalized on sustainer acquisition during high profile giving moments to, grow their files. I can also just add anecdotally that our team is in the middle of our sector specific benchmarking meetings for national nonprofits. And what we're hearing from them is that, those national nonprofits, are seeing a lift in giving and particularly in their sustainer acquisition since the beginning of this calendar year. And, again, that's really related to a lot of the high profile giving moments that many of them are experiencing, and particularly because a lot of them are being impacted by changes in federal policy or federal funding, or different, experiences of that nature. Another metric that we look at in sustainer benchmarking is the difference in how single and recurring gift donors retain. Of course, we're gonna be looking at a dataset here for very large organizations with sophisticated recurring giving programs, but I wanna emphasize that what we see in this pattern, is true with organizations of all shapes and sizes with their sustainer programs. Recurring gift donors always retain at higher rates than single gift donors, and that's exactly what we see here. So in this view, retention rates of recurring gift donors are shown in orange, and single gift donors are shown. For me, it shows up in blue. At the median, our overall retention rate of recurring gift donors is on the far right side of the page, and those donors retained at 81% in 2024 compared to a 46% retention rate of single gift donors. So we have a difference of nearly 40 percentage points in our retention rates of these two different donor populations. The other thing I wanna point out is on the left side of the page is that change in first year retention rate for new sustainers. We are seeing a little bit of softening in our thirteen month retention rate over the last two years. Thirteen month retention rate is a more specific metric around sustainer retention. So it's referring to whether a donor, that was, acquired as a, let's say they were acquired as a new sustainer in April 2023. We're looking at whether or not they're still giving thirteen months later in April of twenty twenty four. And we are seeing a little bit of softness in that thirteen month retention rate, but that's directly related to the mix of channels organizations are using to acquire their new sustainers. So many of the organizations in this dataset have expanded their use, of face to face street canvassing programs, and others are testing new digital acquisition tactics, which may result in a higher churn rate. So we don't just see a difference in retention for sustainers in terms of that annual retention rate. We also have a difference in long term value. Long term retention and long term donor value is a big area of focus for us in donor centric. In our reports, we'll look at whether donors are still giving three or five years after acquisition. Sometimes we get a lot of excuse me, a lot of bang for our buck in that initial acquisition year, but we'll find in our analysis that donors might behave differently over time. And that's what we're seeing playing out here. So this view is showing us the difference in long term retention of donors that were acquired in f y twenty two, and we're looking at whether the donors who were brand new in 2022 were still giving three years later in 2024. And what we're seeing on the right side of the page, is that 15% of donors acquired with a single gift were still giving three years later, whereas 50% of donors acquired with a sustainer gift were still retained in f y twenty four. This is gonna be a similar view, but now we're looking at how much revenue was received per donor in their lifetime of giving to the organization. And we have a really similar pattern here. Donors who were acquired with a single gift in 2022 have a long term value of a hundred and $61 after three years of giving compared to donors acquired as sustainers who have a long term value of $405 in 2024. So those donors who are acquired as sustainers are proving to have a higher long term retention rate over time, and they're also proving to be much more valuable. So I'm gonna shift gears slightly to look at our recurring giving inside higher education. This is the only area of today's presentation that is based on survey responses. And as you can see, 55% of the schools that participated in our alumni giving benchmarking said that less than 3% of their gifts in the current year are recurring gifts. But 8% of schools said that 5% of them or more of their gifts were from recurring gift donors. Schools also told us about the methods they're using to solicit recurring gifts. The majority are relying on their direct marketing channels. 79% are soliciting, recurring gifts through a web or digital, channel, so their website, email, that kind of thing, and 69% are using direct mail. I also just wanna quickly add some context about the sustainer and summit analysis that we looked at a moment ago. Those organizations are typically using a sustainer first approach in all of their solicitation channels, by which I mean that the default ask on their giving form and all of their solicitations is generally an invitation to join as a monthly donor. The last thing that I'll quickly just mention here is that, we are gonna start offering a sustainer report for universities. We know that this has been a growing area of interest in the higher ed space. We're really excited to offer that as an option. So if that's something you're interested in analyzing, we'd love to talk to you about that offline after this session. Great. Well, Catherine, thank you. Always great to hear what's happening in the world of sustainers. It's the one area where higher ed, is a bit behind some of our peers. Going back to our alumni data. So let's talk donor retention. I think many of you know, who've been working with this data for a while that, prior to the pandemic, we always thought of donor retention rates as our most stable metric. And, I think when you look at this data for both public and private institutions, we can, again, now say that, at least post pandemic, that these retention rates have very much settled down and now are pretty stable and relatively reliable year over year. Of course, we saw a little bit of bouncing around between 2019 into 2020 because of the pandemic and then in 2021. But overall, since the pandemic, we have seen donor retention rates, stabilize quite a bit within higher ed and, again, overall and for public and private institutions. Now there is differences here when we look at the data separating out the multiyear donors from first time donors. When you look at the green bars across the bottom, these are our first time ever donors, meaning what happened in year two, were we able to retain them or not. And this is representative of the pandemic forward, and you can see these numbers look stable. For private institutions, last year, it was twenty three percent. For publics, it was twenty percent. So roughly two out of 10 stick with us in year two. However, if you would go back prior to the pandemic, these rates would have been a little bit higher. We have seen a bit of a drop off here with the new donors. They're harder to get and slightly harder to keep. And, again, since I've been working with this data for more than two decades, I can also tell you if you go back quite a bit further in time, this green bar would be closer to 25 or 30%. So over a longer arc of time, keeping first time donors has gotten a bit more challenging. What is interesting here, I think, is the multi year numbers. When you look at private institutions, we have seen the multiyear, our most loyal donors actually go down a little bit over time. And the publics have gone in the other direction. They've actually inched up a little bit over time. When you average it altogether, it looks like a remarkably stable line overall, but there are slight nuances here where private institutions are struggling a bit more with retention of the loyal donors, and public institutions have improved a little bit year over year. Now we had lots of discussions at benchmarking meetings this past year about retention and what was going on here. And two big factors that did get discussion, and I think it's worth noting here, is that there has been some erosion in the five plus consecutive year donor pools. This historically and through the pandemic were our most stable and loyal donors. But since the pandemic, we have seen for some institutions some softness among the superloyals, the five plus consecutive year folks, which are in this multiyear group here on this slide. And the two things that got the most discussion as to why that might be happening was the aging of our donors, that a lot of our superloyals are donors that have been giving for thirty, forty plus years, those pre 1960 graduates that are just simply timing out of their giving. And then the other factor, at least for last year, was campus unrest. For some of our private institutions, campus unrest was a very significant factor in 2024, and the superloyals appear to be the group most impacted by that in that they paused their giving or, in some cases, stopped their giving. So a couple of factors at play here, certainly, that was more prevalent at private institutions than public. So we might see a little bit of that reflected in this multiyear, data as well. Now when you compare all alumni with the young alumni, again, those graduates of the last ten years, you see quite a bit of difference. Those super high retention rates that we saw on the previous slide are our overall numbers, 61% here. Compare that to the young alums. Much, much harder to keep those young alums year over year. Dramatically lower retention rate. Now lots of factors can play into this, including the student donors in here, but also the young alums, have a history of coming and going. They give a year, take a year off, give again. Some of this, is also, driven by, other factors that occurred, over the years, but some of it's channeled also. So, we've always seen, and this is actually somewhat true even before the pandemic, that young alums just aren't quite as loyal as those older alums. They haven't developed those behaviors. They haven't developed those five plus consecutive year patterns. They haven't been out of school long enough to do it in some cases, obviously, for some of these groups. But this is worth noting and probably worth tracking, with your own programs in that these young alums are certainly not yet as loyal as the older generations. And the question really is, is this a pattern behavior? Are they going to come and go, more frequently, or are are we able to get them to that magical five plus consecutive years and that is just still in progress with this particular group, of young alums. Giving day donors definitely behave differently. We talk about this at all of our benchmarking meetings. Here is, the data, and this is, certainly worth noting. So you see median retention rates for donors who only gave on Giving Day last year was fifty one percent, and the median retention rate of new donors that were acquired through Giving Day was twenty five percent. Now the 25% here would be comparable to what we saw two slides ago with those new donor retention rates, and the median there was 20%. Here, for Give Day only donors, 25%. So we've known this. It happens every year. We talk at great length about it. Give day donors or those donors who are acquired on give day have better retention rates than our overall numbers. It is a fantastic way to acquire new donors, and lo and behold, they stick with us. They're more likely to stick with us the next year. So important nuance here and and yet more evidence why to the extent we can do it, we should leverage these give days for acquisition. Okay. Pipeline. I made the comment earlier that whether we were doing it on purpose or not, and certainly some institutions were doing it on purpose, but some are not, we have become pipeline programs. And that has happened for a couple of reasons. The dramatic loss in low level donors was one of them. The other factor is clearly we saw some upgrade behavior over the last five years, which our loyal donors were upgrading by margins we have never seen before. So they're moving through that pipeline even faster, making bigger gifts faster, upgrading more frequently and by bigger margins. And the third factor, I think, for some programs, was the shift in focus also over the last couple of years. When US News and World Report no longer tracked participation, lots of programs across the country decided, okay. We're not gonna worry about getting a ton of alumni donors. We're gonna focus on the dollars. So some by strategy became pipeline programs, but even for many that that wasn't the strategy, we've become pipeline programs. And for us, the pipeline, is often about those that are giving higher level gifts. Oops. This is a sorry. I don't know why my slide just these are not the right slides. There. Here we go. Those, percent of all donors who are giving a thousand or more. So look at these numbers, and you can clearly see that that certainly for privates, but also for publics, they have been inching upward. So what does this tell us? It says, okay. Overall, we know that our number of donors have gone down. But when we look at the percent of them that are hitting that thousand mark or higher, the percentages are going up, which means a greater volume of our annual donors are at the thousand dollar plus level. And when you look at this data more closely, what is very evident is that we had a lot of upgrading to these levels, and these donors stuck around higher retention rates. So the one group that has grown since the pandemic is the thousand dollar plus pool, primarily tied to increased loyalty, but also nice upgrading to these levels. So, again, if you go pre pandemic, these percentages would have been three or four percentage points lower, for both publics and privates. Now it does vary by graduation decade. We are getting some young alums hitting that thousand dollar plus mark, which is great. They're harder to get to the thousand dollar plus level, but we're happy when we get them, there quickly, right, these young alums. But really, our bread and butter are older decades. Much higher percentages of those decades are giving at a thousand or more. And when you see some of these older decades, one fourth of that group, are giving at the thousand dollar plus level. And that's where a lot of this upgrading has occurred in recent years. And then a couple of other one off metrics here, but certainly super important. The median retention rate of donors who gave a thousand or more last year, 75%. So that is quite a bit higher than overall donor retention rates, which we looked at earlier in the sixties, 75%. What is ironic about this number is it's been 75% for each of the last five years. I happen to know that statistic off my head, top of my head, but 75% again last year. This retention rate did not budge because of the pandemic. 30% of those retained donors at the thousand dollar plus levels upgraded last year. So that's a good percentage. Typically, our loyal our our loyal donors, we see somewhere between 3035%, and that is happening. These upgrades are happening even at the thousand dollar plus level. 12%, started at a thousand last year. That's also a pretty high percentage. So we have a decent number. About one out of 10 of our thousand dollar plus donors start there. Their first gift ever is at the thousand dollar or higher level. And then this number hasn't changed a whole lot in the last couple of years, but on average, from the time a donor makes their first gift to us to the time they hit a thousand dollars for the first time, on average, it takes eighteen years. So just shy of two decades, which does show that while, we've seen a lot of growth in the thousand dollar plus donors, These are donors who've been around a while, by and large, a a group of donors that have been around a while, and it does take some time to move them through the pipeline. Alright. With that, Catherine, I'll turn it back over to you. Excellent. So our last, sort of group benchmarking exercise before we wrap up today with a couple last housekeeping items. So we wanna know from you what is the most important measure of success success for your annual giving team? So is it number of donors raised? So that might mean, are you still a participation focus? Are you, an alumni giving, alumni donor focus team? Is it dollars raised? Is your team responsible for, identifying and feeding donors into the major gift pipeline? Or is it that alumni engagement? Are you responsible for those interactions and creating that better relationship with, alumni? Or is it something else that we haven't identified here? So far, it looks like the majority of you are responsible for number of donors. That's what you are measured on as your greatest measure of success, 41% of you. 22% are responsible for dollars raised. Just give it another moment here. Yeah. So not moving a ton. 42% saying number of donors, 28% with dollars raised, about 15% responsible for feeding the pipeline, and about eight percent responsible for alumni engagement. Excellent. Alright. Well, let me jump in, with a bit of a wrap up here on what we sort of see as some of the bigger, topics, if you will, from, last year when you look at this data holistically. And and before I even talk about this, I just wanna say that, last year when we did this and and talked about the big movement, we had that 02/2019 data. So we're able to look at pre pandemic, pandemic, and then post pandemic, and we talked at great length about the bigger shifts that still exist today. So I just wanna reference them real briefly. Dramatic loss of low level donors, dramatic upgrading of our mid level loyal donors, record, number of thousand dollar plus donors, and the stability among those thousand dollar plus donors being pretty remarkable. So those were major shifts in higher ed annual funds, because of the pandemic. But now that we're sort of beyond the pandemic, these are some of the things that we saw in last year's data. We're still losing donors, so that's consistent, but it continues, and we're getting more revenue from fewer donors. So, again, that pipeline impact is still happening. Upgrades, of course, slowed last year, quite a bit, or were were relatively flat compared to the year before. So that dramatic upgrade boost that we had seen the first years right after the pandemic has slowed down at least some, but, overall, the trends of of, donors down and those that are giving, giving bigger gifts is still happening. And then, you know, I think one of the more provocative questions here is if this trend continues, I suspect it will, what happens really, with having fewer donors, and and we don't have those low level donors anymore. And and, what does that mean for our programs? Do we move away from asking for low level gifts? I know some programs have done that based on these trends and are more focused on upgrading those that are giving at the hundred dollar plus level or $50 plus level. But if you look historically, having a lower volume of donors today compared to what we had ten or twenty years ago, what does that mean for the pipeline going forward? Are we going to be less reliant on alumni and more reliant on other types of donors to our institutions, or will we still end up with the same number of major gift prospects ten years down the road, because of the dramatic upgrading we've seen from this group? So I think those are some of the things that in the next five years, we'll be able to do a little bit deeper analysis on. And then, certainly, there's been a movement in the channel data. We saw that earlier, and more and more institutions are going the route of the digital channels for acquisition and engagement, crowdfunding. While we didn't have a specific slide on it, we know that is a growing market, texting. Give days, again, we talked about it earlier, Seemed to have a slight rebound last year, still a very major driver of our acquisition and donor count efforts. So the leveraging of it of more aggressively of the digital channels does certainly seem like, where the donor growth is happening. And then how do we move these young alumni, through the pipeline? It does appear that they're willing to give higher gifts when they start giving. They're just harder to get in in the giving mode to begin with. And I and lots of discussion about that this year, that young alumni are, a tough group. It does appear the 2020 decade might be modestly better, than the previous decade. But still, if you think of beyond alumni as those that graduate in the last ten to fifteen years, they're generally a tough group. The the little silver lining we have with them is that once they do give, they're giving bigger gifts. And how do we then move them through the pipeline and get them to those higher levels of giving as the next phase of that. Alright. With that, I'll turn it back over to you, Catherine, to wrap up. Excellent. Thank you, Shaun. I know that this is a lot of data. Oh, excuse me. I jumped forward too far. I know it's a lot of data to digest, but, if you're already a participant or you have participated in the the past, you are likely already very familiar with the slices and dices of data that we provide. But if you're new to DonorCentrix, I'm just gonna give you a very brief overview of DonorCentrix participation. And in just a moment, I'll give you a couple quick examples of the reports that we provide. The first component of participation is the overall program assessment report. It's a report where we break down the key performance metrics of your program. It's an individual report where we're just looking at what's happening at your organization and how outside factors may be having an impact. And along with that report, you get to receive a one to one, review with a donor centric's fundraising analytics consultant that will walk you through the report, help you navigate how to read and interpret the data, and will help you understand how your organization's trends may be similar or different from the dataset that we looked at today. This is just a very quick look at an example, from one of those overall program assessment reports. This is showing us an anonymized dataset of trends and donors that are giving a thousand dollars or more. And in this view, we can identify donors. How many of them are on your file that are currently giving a thousand or more? We could also learn what that donor's very first gift amount was. For example, how many of them started out as a hundred dollar donor, and how long did it take for them to upgrade to a thousand or more. And, of course, the other component for donor centric's participation is a collaborative benchmarking report. We take the exact same dataset that was used in your school's overall program assessment report, and we flow it into our report alongside other participating schools. And in that report, you get to see how your organization's trends of ups and downs compare to your peers. The data that we looked at today was anonymized, but our collaborative report, would let you look under the hood. So you get to see if maybe an organization is really investing in digital acquisition. We get to see maybe they're seeing lifts in those donor accounts or if they're testing out a new channel. And the culmination of that benchmarking report is a collaborative peer group meeting that's facilitated by a fundraising data expert, someone like Shaun who would walk you through the trends that we're seeing in the data. It's a chance for participating organizations to come together and share ideas. You get to talk through tactics that are working or when it's not working and learn from each other. So these next few slides are just gonna list out the participations that participated in benchmarking this year. I'm not gonna read through the names out loud, but just I want you to know that it is here for you to reference. I'm also just gonna quickly mention for you that you do have access to a copy of the slides, and you will receive a copy of the recording. And I just wanna thank you again so much for joining us today. Please feel free to email us if you have questions about the data that we looked at today or how benchmarking works. And we'll also be sure to follow-up with you directly if you asked a question in the q and a that we didn't get a chance to answer during our time together. We love talking about data, and we would love to talk to you about, your data anytime. So with that, thank you so much, and have a great afternoon. We appreciate you. Thank you, everyone.