For a decade, Dr. Jay Dillon has been chasing one question: why do some graduates stay generous for life while others drift away? His answer upends how most advancement shops operate. It isn’t demographics, event attendance, or email clicks. It’s identity.
In this conversation, Jay walks us through alumni identity — a measure of how much being an alum is actually part of who someone is today, long after they’ve crossed the stage. Drawing on role identity theory, he breaks it into three ingredients (is it salient, is it social, is it tied to a role?), then shows how it can be measured with the Alumni Identity Score and, more importantly, what it predicts.
The numbers are hard to ignore. Alumni with high identity are roughly 10 times more likely to give and volunteer, and when they give, they give far more — an average of about $300 a year versus $2 for low-identity alumni. Identity, Jay argues, sits upstream of engagement and giving: it shapes both intent and behavior before any of it shows up in our metrics.
What we get into:
Why “affiliation is a fact, but belonging is a choice” — and what that means for your database
How to measure identity, and the two-minute score anyone can try
The provocative case for segmenting (and yes, “losing alumni early”)
Why identity can’t be manufactured after graduation — only activated or eroded
Jay’s emerging identity-first framework for engagement and philanthropy
The takeaway for practitioners: design engagement to express the identities that are already there — not to manufacture connection.
This is the second Research Exploration of Jay’s Faculty-in-Residence. More to come, including a live Symposium where our members put their own questions to him.
