Why Advancement Teams Need Broader Donor Pipelines - and the Commerce Experience to Support Them

Colleges and universities raised $78 billion in fiscal year 2025. Eighty-nine percent of it came from 2% of donors, according to the Council for Advancement and Support of Education's most recent Voluntary Support of Education report. CASE's CEO Sue Cunningham puts the shift in context: when she started fundraising three decades ago, roughly 80% of dollars came from 20% of donors. That ratio has narrowed dramatically since.

The dollars are up. The donor base isn't. That's a concentration risk, not a fundraising win, and it's a problem advancement teams can only fix by widening the pipeline; not by working the same major donors harder.

Three things happening at once make this the moment to act on it.

The tax code just gave lapsed and small-dollar donors a reason to come back.‍

Starting with the 2026 tax year, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act revives the charitable deduction for non-itemizers: up to $1,000 for individual filers, $2,000 for joint filers, on cash donations. That's the first federal incentive aimed squarely at the roughly 90% of taxpayers who take the standard deduction and, until now, got no tax benefit for giving at all. It's a direct lever for re-engaging the alumni and supporters who've drifted out of the file.

Rankings pressure on participation rates just eased.

U.S. News has dropped the alumni-giving rate from its methodology, which means institutions no longer have a rankings incentive to chase participation numbers for their own sake. That's not a reason to deprioritize broad-based giving; CASE's data makes the opposite case, but it does mean institutions can stop optimizing for a vanity metric and start optimizing for what the metric was always meant to proxy: real, durable donor relationships.

Advancement capacity is a budget conversation, not just a strategy one.

EAB's benchmarking data puts a number on the cost of underinvesting: every dollar cut from an advancement budget costs institutions roughly $8.25 in lost production. Run that the other direction and the case for investment is just as direct: pipeline-widening work doesn't happen without the staff and systems to do it.

That third point is where the other two collide. Non-itemizer donors and lapsed alumni don't respond to the same cultivation playbook as a $50,000 major-gift prospect. They respond to a low-friction ask, delivered well, at the moment they're most receptive, which for a huge share of them now means a clean, mobile-first giving experience that can explain a $1,000 deduction in one line and complete the transaction in three clicks.

Every institution should ask itself one question: what happens to our budget if five major donors change their minds next year? A generation ago that question was almost academic giving was spread across a fifth of the donor base. Today it isn't. Two percent of donors now account for 89% of every dollar raised, which means most institutions are one estate plan or one falling-out away from a real budget crisis. The fix isn't asking the top 2% for more. It's rebuilding the other 98% into a donor base wide enough to absorb the shock, and that starts with making it radically easier for them to give.

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This is a commerce problem as much as it's a fundraising one

Broadening a donor pipeline at scale means treating recurring and one-time gifts less like pledge cards and more like transactions - because to the donor, that's what they are. A donation page that requires four form fields too many, buries the ask behind a separate portal from the merchandise store and the event registration system, or can't explain a $1,000 deduction at the moment of giving is losing exactly the donors this year's tax change was designed to bring back. Most institutional giving infrastructure was built one system at a time - a donation form here, an events platform there, a bookstore somewhere else, and donors feel every seam.

Where Giving Cloud fits

Giving Cloud is ForteNext's Salesforce-powered giving and commerce storefront, built specifically for higher ed's governance, compliance, and branding requirements, and live in three weeks rather than the six-to-twelve-month timeline of a custom build. It puts fund donations, merchandise, and event registration in a single branded storefront with one cart and one checkout; a donor can give to the alumni fund, buy a hoodie, and register for homecoming in one transaction, with tax and shipping calculation appearing when merchandise is in the cart.

The features map directly onto the pipeline problem this piece opened with:

• One-time and recurring giving, with self-service subscription management - a lapsed or first-time donor who gives $25 today can set up a recurring gift, then change the amount or cancel it later without emailing the advancement office.
• Donation leaderboards and crowdfunding-style campaign pages, with an opt-in anonymity option - built for the kind of broad, momentum-driven giving campaign that grows the donor base rather than deepens a handful of major-gift relationships.
• Einstein-powered recommendations that surface a related fund, event, or product based on what a donor is already browsing; useful exactly when a non-itemizer donor is deciding whether $500 or $1,000 makes more sense at the point of giving.
• A single self-service account hub covering donation history, gift receipts, order history, and saved payment methods, so donors manage everything themselves.
• PCI, GDPR, and CCPA compliance built in from day one: not a bolt-on, which matters for institutions that can't take on new compliance risk to fix a UX problem.

Why this is where we're focused

The advancement teams that pair this year's non-itemizer deduction with a giving experience actually built for the donors it's meant to reach are the ones who'll turn a one-year policy change into a permanent shift in their donor base - not just a bump in this year's small-dollar gifts. Three weeks to live matters here: institutions that move now can have a rebuilt giving experience in place well before this year's non-itemizer deduction and next year's giving season.

The ROI case follows the same logic institutions already use to justify advancement headcount: what does an incremental dollar of investment return in production. A frictionless giving experience doesn't replace the additional advancement FTE EAB's data justifies: it extends what each of those FTEs can do, by removing the technical drag between "donor wants to give" and "gift is recorded."

The 2% concentration problem isn't solved by asking major donors for more. It's solved by making it easier for the other 98% to give, and Giving Cloud is built specifically for that job.