The State of Alumni Engagement in College Athletics

Seven things worth carrying into the report.

Experience beats winning. The quality of an athlete's experience during enrollment predicts later giving more reliably than the team's on-field record.

Alumni giving is in a long, slow bleed. The Council for Aid to Education's Voluntary Support of Education survey series tracked the national all-alumni participation rate at 12.4% in 2005; it now sits around 8%.⁶ More than half of new donors never give a second year, and the base is narrowing to fewer, older, larger gifts.

The revenue-share era added an eight-figure annual line item. The House settlement lets schools share up to about $20.5M with athletes and is pulling tax-deductible institutional giving back to the center of the strategy.

The transfer portal made roster churn permanent — but only in the revenue sports. Most of a department's roster still stays the four years. Belonging is the retention lever money alone cannot buy.

Almost every athlete goes pro in something other than sport. Draft odds sit near 1%, and most programs offer little to no structured transition support.

Alumni have moved off email, and Division I is sending the most of it. VAESE data shows D1 alumni programs sending the highest volume in the sector and posting the lowest open and click rates. The problem is not reach.

What works is already documented. Sport-specific engagement, long-term mentorship, and a genuinely good post-eligibility experience keep landing in the same place across independent research, and the programs quietly winning are the ones doing them.

This report synthesizes NCAA research, the CASE Voluntary Support of Education benchmarks, industry survey data, peer-reviewed and dissertation research on athletic giving, legal and tax analysis of the post-House landscape, and named-program financial disclosures. Every figure is attributed to its original source in the notes.

Two reliability rules apply throughout. Where a figure comes from a vendor with a commercial point of view, it is flagged as such rather than presented as neutral data. Where a widely-repeated claim could not be traced to a credible origin, it was left out. The strongest inputs are primary: NCAA transfer and well-being studies, the 2024 VAESE benchmarking study, CASE data, IRS guidance, and public foundation filings.

A note on causation. Several relationships below are strong and directionally consistent but not yet causally proven, most notably the link between alumni relationships and reduced transfer activity. Those are marked plainly where they appear, because a claim that survives scrutiny is worth more than one that does not.

In 2025 the House v. NCAA settlement resolved roughly $2.576 billion in back damages and, for the first time, let schools pay athletes directly. For 2025–26 each school can share up to about $20.5 million — close to 22% of the average Power Five program's athletic revenue — with the cap set to escalate over the next decade.¹ A department that just took on an eight-figure annual obligation cannot fund it from the same donor list and the same giving day.

The NIL money pooled into collectives is concentrated in a way most sector coverage understates. An estimated three-quarters of NIL back-pay and funding flows to football, against roughly 5% for every sport outside football and basketball combined, and because collectives sit outside the university they largely bypass Title IX.² The non-revenue sports, which make up the bulk of any department's roster and its most loyal future alumni, receive the smallest share of collective attention.

Tax treatment is now a strategic variable

Tax treatment used to be a back-office concern. It isn't anymore. After a June 2023 IRS Generic Legal Advice Memorandum found that many nonprofit NIL collectives fail the private-benefit test, Texas A&M halted its 12th Man+ Fund and its 12th Man Foundation pivoted to a compliant model, moving $139.2 million to the athletics department in FY2023–24.³ Because collective contributions are generally not tax-deductible while institutional gifts are, as revenue-sharing matures the deductible, program-controlled channel becomes more attractive again.

At flagship programs collectives have not yet cannibalized institutional giving. Oklahoma's Sooner Club set records of $110.3 million in FY2024 and $113 million in FY2025.⁴

At mid-majors the picture is different, and worth walking through carefully because the sector hasn't admitted how different. A flagship donor giving $50,000 a year to the traditional athletic fund and another $10,000 to a football-specific collective doesn't feel the tradeoff. Both asks sit within a household budget that can absorb both, and the tax treatment difference is a rounding error. Donors like that exist in the thousands at a top Power-4 program. Mid-majors do not have that depth. A 2018–19 analysis of 128 D-I athletic fundraising organizations found the average program had roughly 4,274 donors, with only four Power 5 schools reporting fewer than 5,000, while the great majority of non-Power 5 programs sat well below that line and the smallest reported as few as 110.²⁶ At those scales, the same dollar cannot fund a collective and a scholarship and a facility campaign. The collective wins, because it ties itself directly to visible on-field roster decisions, produces an outcome the donor can point to in six months, and asks louder than the scholarship fund knows how to. The mid-major foundation 990s will show the effect inside two years.

Headline totals still set records in good years. The number of people giving keeps shrinking.

Alumni participation has slid for more than a decade. Ruffalo Noel Levitz's February 2024 analysis "Higher Education Philanthropy Tops $58 Billion in FY23" reviewed 627 institutions that reported alumni donor count in both 2019 and 2023 and found 83% experienced donor-count declines, with the pipeline shrinking by an average of 20%.⁵ The Council for Aid to Education's Voluntary Support of Education survey tracked the national all-alumni participation rate at 12.4% in 2005, 11.0% by 2008, 9.8% in 2010, and 8.3% in 2014 — the last year VSE published a single national rate before citing inconsistent institutional methodologies.⁶ U.S. News data across 304 ranked universities put the average alumni giving rate at nearly 8% in 2021–22.⁶ As a share of total higher-education support, alumni giving has fallen from 27.6% thirty years ago to roughly 22–23% today.⁷

Retention compounds the problem. Donor retention across universities and nonprofits has sat below 50% for years, meaning more than half of donors do not give again the following year.⁸ For former athletes specifically — the group with the deepest natural attachment — participation is often stalled at a baseline of around 5%.⁹ That is the number that should stop athletic directors cold. The most predisposed donor group in the building is giving at roughly half the rate of the general alumni population.

CASE reported overall higher-education giving up about 3% inflation-adjusted in 2024, with alumni giving up 7.5% versus 2023.⁷ The long arc still bends toward fewer people giving more, which is precisely the pattern a program most wants to reverse on its own turf.

The transfer portal is the loudest story in college sports right now. It is also the one most often misread.

In the revenue sports, churn is extraordinary. Men's basketball set a fourth straight record with 2,320 players entering the portal in 2025, more than 40% of Division I players in a single year. Football runs roughly 25–31% of players a year and women's basketball about 29%.¹⁰ The portal opened in 2018; the one-time transfer rule in 2021 accelerated it; volumes have roughly doubled in six years.

Across all of Division I, the aggregate is large and the landing is hard. In 2022, 20,911 athletes entered the portal, up 17.6% over 2021. While 13% of D1 athletes entered that year, only 7% completed a transfer to another NCAA program, leaving thousands without a roster spot.¹¹ Roughly 70% of power-conference men's basketball entrants could not find a better landing spot, or transferred down.¹⁰

The portal is a revenue-sport story. Student-athletes overall transfer less often than regular students, about 39% of whom transfer at least once, with men's basketball and tennis the main exceptions.¹² The odds of actually landing fall sharply down the divisions. For most programs and most sports, staying is still the norm, which is why the durable question is retention through belonging, not who can win a bidding war.

The reasons athletes gave for leaving in the 2022 NCAA data are the most telling part. Beyond money, mental health (61% of women, 40% of men) and coach conflict (56% of women) ranked among the top drivers, and 78% of women and 65% of men were on athletics aid when they left, trading stability for a bet on the market.¹¹

Money is what athletes say they leave for. Experience is what makes them willing to.

For years the working assumption was that donations follow victories. The picture is more layered. O'Neil and Schenke's 2007 study of 2,711 former athletes at a Division I university found that the quality of an athlete's experience during enrollment, and the perception that they had already "given" to the school by playing sports, were both predictive of the amount they donated later.¹³ A negative athletic experience "tempered" giving; a positive one lifted it. On the other side of the ledger, Meer and Rosen (2009) found that for male former athletes specifically, a senior-year conference championship raised subsequent athletic giving by about 8% a year.³⁰ Both findings come back to the same underlying variable: the athlete's felt relationship to the program. Winning helps because it deepens the relationship; a bad experience suppresses giving because it damages it. Zach Harris's 2021 University of San Diego dissertation "Does Winning Matter? An Examination of the Impact of Success on Former Student-Athlete Philanthropic Giving" found each additional year an athlete spent in a program raised their probability of later donating by roughly 6 to 8% — a narrow study of 295 former men's basketball athletes at one institution, but the directional finding is corroborated across the broader literature.¹⁴

Suppression works the same way. The validated Former Student-Athlete Donor Constraint Scale measures exactly what suppresses giving: perceived institutional neglect, coaching turnover, and feeling undervalued.⁹

The move that works with the incentives already in place is not to chase whales harder — it is to build the base underneath them. Political fundraising has already run this experiment. ActBlue processed $1.78 billion in 2025 across 52 million contributions from 1.35 million new donors, in an off-year.²⁷ WinRed operates on the same model on the right. Many small donations, raised passively through digital channels, add up to totals that rival or exceed a handful of whales, and the small-donor base becomes both durable revenue and the pipeline for the next generation of major donors. CCS Fundraising's analysis of one organization's 732 major donors found roughly 1 in 3 started with a first gift under $250.²⁸ The honest counterweight, from TrueSense, is that fewer than 2% of donors starting under $50 ever reach $1,000+ in lifetime giving.²⁹ Most small donors stay small. That is fine, because in aggregate they still outweigh a handful of whales and diversify the program away from single-donor dependence.

The athletics version of this model does not exist yet. The programs that build it first — an owned, per-sport, mobile-first channel where a former athlete can make a $25 gift to their sport in under thirty seconds, then get asked again next year in the same channel — will be the ones with the base underneath their whales when the whales age out.

Why the portal does not contradict this

Giving is built over years, and athletes increasingly don't stay years. Those are the same problem. What pushes an athlete into the portal — a poor experience, coaching conflict, feeling undervalued — is the same thing that suppresses later giving. Experience quality is what programs are actually measuring twice, once at the moment of transfer and once at the moment of the annual ask. Most of a department's roster, the Olympic and non-revenue sports, still stays the distance, so the years-in-program effect governs the bulk of the alumni base. Experience beats winning holds no matter how long an athlete stays.

The overwhelming majority of athletes never turn professional. The payoff a program can offer them is the one most programs neglect.

Draft odds are small by any measure: roughly 1.4% of NCAA football players, 1.0% of men's basketball players, 0.8% of women's basketball players, and 4.9% of baseball players are drafted.¹⁷ The NCAA's own long-standing line is that most student-athletes go pro in something other than sports. An industry white paper frames the same divide commercially: the top 5% of athletes drive the entertainment model; the other 95% are in college for what sport builds beyond it.¹⁸

The support is thin. The Sport Journal found most NCAA programs offer little to no programming to address the psychological and social effects of leaving sport.¹⁹ The NCAA's own well-being research, drawing on more than 70,000 responses in 2020–21 and a 2022–23 study of over 23,000 athletes, documents how hard that transition is, with only 54% of men's-sport and 40% of women's-sport athletes comfortable discussing mental health with their coaches.²⁰ Career mentorship is repeatedly named as the highest-yield, most underused stewardship move a program has, and engaged alumni are materially more likely to give — one platform's internal data puts it at two to three times.²¹

Mentorship works because it lines everyone's self-interest up in the same direction. The current athlete gets a real person in the industry they're trying to enter, worth more than any career-services workshop. The former athlete gets to reconnect to the program in the one role they haven't been asked to play yet: somebody with something to offer, not somebody being asked for money. The program gets both people warmer than they were before, and any solicitation later is a smaller ask because the relationship is already active. Mentorship is the one program in the athletic development toolkit where the former athlete is treated as an asset rather than a target. That is why it converts.

The programs that treat post-eligibility transition as a stewardship function rather than a courtesy add-on are doing the single most obvious thing in this report, and almost none of them are doing it yet.

The channel programs lean on hardest is the one alumni increasingly ignore. The heaviest senders see the weakest returns.

The 2024 VAESE benchmarking study, covering 367 institutions, puts numbers on the fatigue. NCAA Division I alumni programs send the most email of anyone — about 14.3 messages a month — yet post the lowest engagement of the segments measured: a 23.7% open rate and a 10.6% click rate, both below the overall averages.²² Division I sends the highest volume in the sector and lands near the bottom.

The deeper issue is not reach. It is value. In the same study, 34% of alumni organizations invest nothing in alumni benefits and only 9% invest significantly, and the single biggest self-reported roadblock to engagement is a "lack of compelling, relevant value for alumni."²² The old dues-paying model is collapsing alongside it, with average dues-paying membership roughly halving from about 62,700 in 2016 to about 31,700 in 2024. And yet 65% of these organizations name increasing alumni engagement as their top goal for the year.

The intent is there. The channel is wrong and the offer is empty.

The programs pulling ahead are not doing anything clever. They are doing the boring things well.

Sport-specific engagement beats general-fund appeals almost every time. Stanford's athletics giving day more than doubled in dollars and more than tripled in donor count in two years — from $391,739 across 758 donors in 2023 to $931,421 across 2,595 donors in 2025 — by having sports compete against each other on former-athlete participation rate rather than on total dollars raised.²³ A dollars-raised leaderboard reinforces the existing donor hierarchy. A participation leaderboard mobilizes people who have never given before.

NC State's Wolfpack Club pairs donors with a specific student-athlete across four years through its ImPack program. Michigan's Letterwinners M Club, in continuous operation since 1913, sustains more than 13,000 athlete alumni as a volunteer-run affinity community with a $10,000–$15,000 annual post-graduate scholarship.²⁴ Both are copyable at almost any Division I program willing to fund one part-time coordinator. Neither requires a technology procurement.

Independent research keeps landing in the same place. The Former Student-Athlete Donor Constraint Scale names five barriers to former-athlete giving. A 2025 analysis of how to dismantle them recommends, in order, a standalone sport-specific app, long-term mentorship, communication personalized by sport and class year, gamification, and public recognition.²⁵

Framework: Former Student-Athlete Donor Constraint Scale; counter-practices per AlmaShines, 2025.

A few things I'd bet on over the next 24 months.

The per-school revenue-share cap is set to climb toward roughly $32.9 million by 2034–35.¹ Programs that treat this as a fundraising problem to be solved with a bigger giving day will not get there. The ones that treat it as a mandate to build owned, durable, per-sport engagement channels will.

On collectives: inside three years, at least one Power-4 program will publicly reabsorb its NIL collective into central athletics fundraising and frame it as a strategic consolidation. It will be a retreat, driven by deductibility pressure and donor fatigue. Watch for it, and watch how the sector talks about it when it happens.

The House settlement's shift to roster limits — as opposed to scholarship limits — makes every roster spot a strategic asset. That raises the cost of every unnecessary transfer, which is the argument for spending the money on belonging that programs are currently spending on portal defense.

The engagement channel is going to keep moving off email. Programs that win attention over the next few years will be the ones on the alum's home screen with something worth opening. Email is not coming back as a primary channel, and pretending it will costs a program the years it should be spending building the replacement.

High confidence. The revenue-share figures, the transfer-portal volumes, the giving-participation decline, the VAESE engagement data, and the draft-probability figures are drawn from primary sources (NCAA, CASE, VAESE, IRS, public filings) and are well corroborated.

Directional. The 14% historical giving-rate anchor is widely cited but not from a single clean public table. The entertainment-versus-education split originates in a vendor white paper and is treated as a point of view, not neutral data.

Open research questions. Whether alumni relationships causally reduce transfers is unproven; the longitudinal data does not yet exist because the portal's current form is too recent. Head-to-head donor-retention comparisons between separate-foundation and unified-advancement models remain a genuine hole in the public literature — a hole I keep asking sector analysts about and keep not getting answers to.

Catalyzr Community is the product I'm building for exactly the pattern this report describes. Every pressure above — revenue sharing, portal churn, email fatigue, weak post-eligibility support — resolves into the same underlying failure: athletics is that absentee landlord asking for money and attention on the goodwill of a relationship it stopped maintaining the day eligibility ended. Catalyzr is a branded, sport-specific native app owned by the athletic department, designed to be the way a program stops being absentee — to show up in the one place former athletes actually spend their attention, year-round, in the sport they played.

I built it because the tool this report describes did not exist. Two guardrails you should hold any product in this category to, ours included: it should not be a vehicle for direct athlete payment, and its giving path should route straight to the school's own 501(c)(3), not to the vendor. Catalyzr charges route through Stripe Connect to the school; Catalyzr never holds funds.

None of what this report recommends is expensive. None of it is technically hard. The literature has been consistent for fifteen years, the counter-practices are documented, and the programs already doing this are open about how they do it. The only question is which programs decide to stop being absentee. The ones that do — with our product or without it — will still be raising real money from athlete alumni in 2035. The ones still running on seat-based booster clubs and reunion-cycle emails will have to explain, to a much smaller donor base, why they didn't act on evidence that has been on the table the entire time.