An alumna registers for her thirty-year reunion. The form asks for her class year, her degree, and her mailing address. The institution has held all three since 1994. She types them in anyway, because the form requires it, and somewhere in that small indignity a message gets delivered: we don’t actually know you.
Engagement teams tend to respond to disengagement by building. Another event series, another affinity group, another young-alumni happy hour in a city where the last one drew nine people. The instinct is generous. If people are drifting, give them more reasons to come back.
But most of the friction alumni actually feel doesn’t live in the programming. It lives in the plumbing. The salutation that gets a name wrong twenty years after the name changed. The solicitation that arrives four days after the gift it’s asking for. The event confirmation sent to an email address the alum retired in 2011, while the current one sits in a spreadsheet someone exported for a different project.
None of that is an engagement failure in the way we usually use the term. Nobody on the engagement team wrote the bad salutation. It came out of a database, through a query, through a merge field, and every step of that path belongs to a part of the shop most engagement professionals have politely agreed not to think about.
That agreement holds because, from inside the building, nothing looks broken. From where the alum sits, the relationship is mostly made of these small transactions. Very few graduates will ever attend the gala. Most will never meet the vice president for advancement. Nearly all of them will receive emails, receipts, event invitations, tax acknowledgments, magazine renewals, and giving appeals. Those ordinary interactions are the relationship. Which means the people maintaining coding structures, deduplication rules, and data hygiene are conducting more of the day-to-day relationship than anyone whose title includes the word engagement.
We keep drawing the org chart as though relationship work happens on one side and record-keeping on the other. Alumni can’t see the org chart. They just see the institution, and the institution either remembered them or it didn’t.
There’s a version of this argument that says engagement professionals should learn the technology. That’s fine, and mostly beside the point. The shift is smaller and harder: treating the data path as relationship work, and claiming some ownership of it. Asking to see the queries that decide who gets which message. Reading a render of the actual email, merge fields filled, the way the person on the other end will read it. Sitting with the ops team long enough to learn which frictions they’ve been flagging for years to no one in particular. How many “we can live with that for now, but let’s remember to address it” have stacked up? How many of those have disappeared?
We build programs so alumni will feel known. The record is where they find out whether they are.
It’s worth spending time auditing what your systems say to people before planning the next thing that invites them somewhere. The alumna at the reunion form finished typing in under a minute. The wondering lasted longer: whether thirty years of relationship had survived the database.
Dave Hail is a fundraising strategist and storyteller who works with nonprofits and institutions to design stronger donor relationships and more effective engagement strategies. His work focuses on helping teams move beyond transactional communication toward systems that support long-term connection and growth.
His perspective sits at the intersection of strategy, systems, and storytelling, with a focus on helping organizations act with greater clarity and intention.
Dave is a lifelong learner, husband and dad, and lives in Oklahoma.
Big Themes This Week
Data and operations are not back-office plumbing, they are part of the relationship itself.
Good data equals good relationship. Getting one detail right, like a grandkid’s name, is either instant rapport or instant deflation.
With AI, automate the high-volume, low-value work, but start with governance so you never expose your donor data.
Team Discussion Questions
Who actually owns engagement analytics on our team, and what happens if the answer is no one?
Are we using our current systems to their fullest before we go shopping for new ones?
What low-value work could we automate to free up time for the human moments?
Register for our Next Agora
Topic: Talent Development
Title: Starting With Yourself: Set Mini-Boundaries to Preserve Your Capacity
Date & Time: Thursday, July 16 from 12-1 pm ET.
Event Type: TED-style presentation plus small-group networking and discussion
Speaker: Ellen Whitlock Baker - Executive Coach and Leadership Consultant
