Digital Warming Engagement research
Understand what keeps a school community connected.
Explore the questions behind alumni and donor engagement, then use a practical framework to review how your institution recognizes its people.
Read the researchA research and planning resource for advancement teams
Start with the evidence.
Engagement is broader than giving alone. The Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) describes four modes of alumni engagement: philanthropic, volunteer, experiential, and communications. Its framework is a useful starting point for deciding what your institution should measure.1
No Digital Warming study or findings have been published on this page yet. We present the research questions and source framework here without inventing a statistic or implying a measured outcome.
Questions for your team
- Which alumni and donor stories are visible today, and whose are missing?
- Where can people find those stories, on campus and beyond it?
- What would count as meaningful engagement for your institution?
Turn the questions into a recognition plan.
Use this checklist with your advancement, alumni, and communications teams. It is a planning tool, not a claim that recognition alone changes engagement.
Find the missing stories.
List the people, groups, and milestones already represented. Ask who is absent and what permission or context is needed before sharing a story.
Make them easy to find.
Review where people encounter recognition today, including campus spaces, your website, and alumni communications.
Keep the record current.
Assign an owner, a review cadence, and a way for your community to suggest corrections or new stories.
An interactive recognition experience can bring an institution’s stories into a shared place. Rocket Alumni Solutions’ platform is one example of that approach. This is an illustration of the framework, not evidence of an engagement result.
Keep the source in view.
The engagement modes above come from CASE. They are external research, not a Digital Warming study. A future original finding should appear with its publication date, population, sample, method, and source before it is used as evidence.
- 01 / External frameworkCASE Alumni Engagement MetricsAlumni Engagement Metrics Task Force · Published August 2, 2018
Put the research to work for your community.
Bring your current alumni or donor programs and the questions your team is trying to answer. We can discuss whether a recognition experience fits those goals.
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