How to Drive Fundraising Event Participation

Colleges are raising more money than ever, from fewer people. CASE’s 2024 Voluntary Support of Education report put total giving to U.S. colleges and universities at $61.5 billion, up 3% after inflation.

The catch sits underneath that headline: the number of donors keeps shrinking, and a smaller group carries more of the weight each year.

For an advancement team, that gap is the whole job. Major gifts pay the bills this year. Broad participation is what protects you next year, and the year after.

Events are where you rebuild that base, if you can get people to show up and take part.

Here’s a practical look at how to drive participation in your fundraising events, from who you invite to how you follow up once the room clears.

• Giving is up, but donors are down. Record dollars are coming from a shrinking pool, so widening participation is what protects your program over the long run.

• Events are how you widen the base. Giving days in particular reach first-time donors at scale, and every first-timer is a participation number you can grow from.

• Segment before you promote. A reunion-year alum, a recent grad, and a major-gift prospect each need a different ask, and recent grads are worth pursuing even when the dollars look small.

• Go multichannel, and make the ask personal. Reach people across email, phone, text, and mail, lean on student callers and engagement centers for turnout, and strip the friction out of registration and giving.

• Cadence fills the room. A spaced sequence of save-the-date, reminders, and a day-of push reaches far more people than a single send, without tipping into fatigue.

• The follow-up is where participation compounds. Prompt, specific stewardship turns one-time event participants into repeat donors and a future major-gift pipeline.

For decades, participation meant one number: the share of alumni who gave in a given year.

U.S. News dropped it from its rankings, and CASE removed it from the VSE survey, so the metric that once ran advancement offices is mostly retired. What replaced it is broader and more useful. CASE’s Insights on Alumni Engagement now tracks four kinds of participation: communication, events, philanthropy, and volunteering. Events sit right in the middle of that list, because they’re where affinity gets built before a gift and where lapsed donors drift back into contact.

Giving days are the clearest modern example of participation as an event. In CASE and Almabase’s State of Giving Days research, close to 40% of institutions said their giving day helped them engage more alumni and lift donor participation.

When the University of North Texas ran its 2025 Day of Giving, it brought in more than $2 million from 1,866 donors, 767 of whom had never given before. That last figure is the point. A well-run event not only collects gifts from your regulars but also serves as a door for first-time donors, and every first-timer is a participation number you can grow from.

Participation starts with having something worth showing up for.

Meaningful incentives and flexible ticketing can lift attendance, especially when ticket sales include tiered pricing and options that fit the format. The right format depends on your audience, your calendar, and your capacity, but these consistently pull higher-ed constituents in:

• Giving days. A 24-hour online push built around matching gifts and live challenges. The broadest participation vehicle you have, and the best one for reaching first-time donors.

• Reunions and homecoming. Milestone framing does the work for you, especially in reunion years. Pair the gathering with a class gift challenge.

• Galas and scholarship dinners. Higher-touch events for donors with capacity, and a natural stage for stewardship and recognition. A virtual gala can also extend your reach to larger audiences while reducing event costs.

• Regional alumni gatherings. Small, city-based events that keep far-flung alumni connected between the bigger moments.

• Student phonathons and engagement-center campaigns. A calling season is its own kind of event, and often the most personal one you run.

• Peer-to-peer and crowdfunding campaigns. Class challenges, team funds, and student-led drives that turn your constituents into fundraisers.

• Virtual events and webinars. Faculty lectures, expert panels, and behind-the-scenes tours that reach alumni who can’t travel to campus, while online auctions can engage participants and raise significant funds.

• Trivia nights. Among the most reliable virtual fundraising event ideas, they work well as a pay-to-play format that keeps participation light, social, and competitive.

• Silent auctions. A fun event built around bidding can create momentum before, during, and after the program, whether bundled into a larger campaign or paired with online raffles.

• Car washes. A low-cost way to engage the community and raise money, especially when volunteers, local sponsors, and visible campus locations help draw traffic.

• Secondhand sales. They promote sustainability while helping you raise funds through donated clothing, books, furniture, or other gently used items.

• Athletics-tied events. Tailgates, game-day giving, and booster drives that convert school spirit into support.

Before you promote anything, decide who you’re actually inviting.

Set SMART goals first so your segmentation reflects whether you’re trying to increase attendance, strengthen fundraising efforts, win first-time donors, raise more dollars, or reactivate lapsed supporters.

A reunion-year alumna, a graduate from three years ago, and a longtime major-gift prospect are three different conversations, and a single blast email flattens them into one. Segmentation is what lets each of them open an invitation that reads like it was written for them, and defining your target audience makes those invitation choices much clearer.

Good event planning should also include a budget so participation supports your fundraising goals without costs overtaking returns.

A few ways to cut the list that tend to earn their keep:

• Class year and reunion cycle. Reunion years respond to milestone framing that means nothing to everyone else.

• Giving history. First-time, lapsed, consecutive-year, and major-gift-capacity donors each need a different ask, and some segments may be better suited to peer-to-peer campaigns than a standard invitation.

• Affinity. Athletics, a specific school or scholarship, Greek life, a program someone loved as a student.

• Channel and contactability. Who opens email, who answers the phone, who only ever sees you on Instagram.

Recent graduates deserve their own line here because they sit within younger audiences.

They participate at low rates, they rarely have real capacity yet, and they’re the donors you’ll keep for the next forty years if you bring them in now. An event aimed squarely at them, like a virtual happy hour or a class challenge on giving day, is participation infrastructure even when the dollar total looks small.

People participate in the channels they already live on, so the invitation has to travel across more than one. The more ways you can reach a donor (email, phone, mobile, mail), the better your odds that the invitation will land, with personal invitations typically outperforming general announcements, and the easier it is to catch the people who ignore one channel but respond to another.

Your event promotion has to do two things at once: reach people where they are, and make the gift or RSVP effortless to finish on a phone, since that’s where most of them will open it.

In practice, a single event pulls in several channels at once, including social media for broader visibility and outreach into online communities through the same promotion mix:

• An email sequence to the full list

• Calls or texts to the segments worth a personal touch

• Social Media Posts for reach and reminders

• A printed invitation for the audiences who still open the mail

Deciding to do this is the easy part. Running it across thousands of records, without letting invitations and reminders slip through the cracks, is where teams struggle.

That’s where a queue-based engagement platform earns its place.

Free tools can help with supporting assets, but coordinated outreach still matters more. Vanillasoft routes each contact to the right person at the right moment and runs the full cadence (call, email, text, follow-up) as one connected sequence rather than a stack of manual to-dos, with email campaigns helping build momentum before the event.

The University of South Florida used that setup to stand up its Digital Engagement Center, where automation freed staff time and let the team optimize donor touchpoints instead of chasing them by hand.

When outreach runs as a system, often through virtual platforms or an online platform that unifies outreach, RSVP tracking, follow-up, and donor engagement, no segment gets skipped and no reminder gets forgotten, which is often the whole difference between a half-empty room and a full one.

Channels get you in front of people. A personal ask is what moves them to take part.

Student callers, engagement-center agents, and alumni volunteers consistently outperform automated blasts because a real person can answer a question, explain flexible pricing, whether you sell tickets, or any concerns about entry fees when cost is a barrier, and make the invitation feel like a relationship rather than a transaction.

That kind of outreach does more than boost attendance; it helps encourage participation.

Two Vanillasoft programs show what that looks like at scale.

Concordia University runs a Student Ambassador Program where student callers reach alumni across channels, and shift leads listen in from the platform’s dashboard to coach in real time, even with everyone working remotely.

Chaminade Julienne, running a student phone campaign, exceeded its fall campaign goal by 80% in its first month on the platform, with 17% of calls producing a gift or pledge. Those are participation numbers before they’re revenue numbers. More conversations, more people saying yes.

The other half of the ask is removing friction. Every extra click between “I’m interested” and “I’m in” costs you participants. Registration and giving pages should:

• Load fast on mobile, with participant registration kept simple

• Ask for the minimum

• If you sell tickets, offer tiered pricing or flexible options to reduce friction

• Confirm on the spot

A brilliant invitation attached to a clunky RSVP form is a leak you can measure, while a clear path to register, give, accept donations, or collect donations increases response.

Timing decides how much of your list ever sees the invitation at all. Send once and you reach the people who happened to open their inbox that morning. Build a cadence and you reach the rest.

A workable rhythm for an event looks something like this:

1. An early save-the-date and email campaigns that build anticipation for an upcoming event

2. The formal invitation

3. A reminder or two as the date approaches

4. A day-of push

5. A last-call message while the window is still open

Save-the-date and reminder messaging can also point supporters toward the next event or next fundraiser on your calendar when appropriate, and social media can reinforce the cadence between emails and reminders.

Giving days live or die on that final stretch, when live leaderboards and matching gifts turn a routine ask into something with momentum behind it.

Purdue University raised $76.5 million in 24 hours during a giving day, which shows how much timing and urgency can matter. Real-time updates can also give the day more of a live event feel. Live moments should also include a clear call to action to encourage donations while attention is at its peak. The best of them lean on alumni volunteers who launch their own challenges and carry the word through their networks, helping supporters form teams and build friendly competition so participation starts to compound, with participants recruiting the next wave of participants.

The line to walk is persistence without fatigue.

Cadence works because it’s spaced and relevant, not because it’s loud. A platform that tracks who has already responded, so you stop messaging the people who’ve said yes and keep gently nudging the ones who haven’t, is what keeps a cadence from tipping over into annoyance, whether you’re running a giving day or a virtual campaign.

The event ends, but participation shouldn’t. That first-time donor from your giving day is, right now, a one-time donor, and whether they ever give again is decided almost entirely in the next few weeks, with follow-up to attendees ideally starting within 48 hours post-event as part of a successful fundraising event follow-through.

A prompt thank-you that shows where their gift went, paired with a low-pressure invitation to stay involved, is what turns a single act of participation into a habit and helps engage donors beyond the event itself.

This is the part most teams under-resource, and it’s where the engagement-center model pays off a second time. Vanillasoft's guide How Engagement Centers Build Full-Funnel Revenue and ROI makes the case that the same infrastructure you use to acquire event participants can steward them afterward and surface which ones are ready for a bigger conversation.

Tracking funds raised alongside donors engaged, while also measuring fundraising potential over time rather than just immediate revenue, gives you a clearer read on post-event performance than revenue alone. First-time and small-dollar donors become mid-level prospects. Mid-level donors become a major-gift pipeline. The event was only ever the first touch in a relationship you’re now set up to continue. St. Jude PLAY LIVE, for example, raised over $75 million through livestreams, showing how sustained follow-up and community momentum can extend virtual fundraising.

Worth saying plainly: this is why Vanillasoft works with more than 65 universities on their engagement and fundraising campaigns. Driving participation is a system for reaching the right people on the channels they use and following up without dropping anyone along the way, with those lessons shaping future campaigns and the next successful fundraising event for universities and other nonprofit organizations.

The teams that win on participation over the next few years won’t be the ones with the flashiest gala. They’ll be the ones who treat every event as the front door to a longer relationship, and who give their people the tooling to run outreach like a system instead of a scramble each spring. Get that right, and participation stops being a number you chase. It becomes something your program produces on purpose.

Segment your audience first, then invite people across the channels they already use (email, phone, text, social, and mail), make the ask personal for the segments worth it, and build a reminder cadence in the run-up to the event. The best approach may combine in person events with a virtual event when audience reach matters, especially when you need flexible ways to host events for different supporter groups. For some schools, a virtual gala works because it can reach larger audiences and reduce costs while still feeling personal if the outreach is segmented. Board members can appear as presenters or in pre-recorded segments, and a paddle raise can add a mission-focused live giving moment. Follow up quickly afterward so first-time participants have a reason to come back.

Giving days concentrate outreach into a single high-energy window with matching gifts and live leaderboards, which lowers the barrier to a first gift. In CASE and Almabase’s State of Giving Days research, close to 40% of institutions said their giving day helped them engage more alumni and lift donor participation. dollars raised matter, but they should be read alongside participation growth and new-donor acquisition. Peer-to-peer fundraising can amplify giving-day reach by mobilizing existing supporters to bring in additional support through their own networks.

Total dollars are rising because a smaller number of major and mid-level donors are giving more. CASE’s 2024 report put giving to U.S. colleges at $61.5 billion, up 3% after inflation, while donor counts kept sliding. Broad-based events are one of the main tools institutions use to widen the donor pool again.

A mix beats any single channel. The right mix can also help raise awareness beyond the core alumni file. Email and social media give you reach, calls and texts add a personal touch for the segments that warrant it, and direct mail still lands with older alumni. The more ways you can reach someone, the better your odds that the invitation gets seen and acted on, so match the channel to how each segment actually engages. Partnerships with local businesses and sponsors can help spread awareness and expand audience reach through their own networks, which is especially useful when trying to reach local communities or community members beyond the alumni file. Branded merchandise or merchandise sales can sometimes extend event visibility through partner promotion when used with sponsors.