Alumni and advancement: the academic link fundraising was missing
Connect the people who graduated from your school to the person the Nonprofit module already knows, and read each alumnus’s engagement without inventing a single number. This block is not a fundraising module: funds, gifts, campaigns and receipts stay exactly where they already were. Part of the Education vertical, optional, and off until an administrator turns it on.
The Alumni and advancement block sits at the end of the Education screen. It is deliberately thin, because almost nothing here is new: nearly everything it needs already existed somewhere in the system.
Fundraising is not born here
Restricted funds, gifts, campaigns, appeals, hard credit and soft credit, allocation across funds, correcting adjustments and numbered receipts: all of that already exists in full inside the Nonprofit module. This block recreates none of it and records no gift at all. If you need to log a gift you received, that module is still the way.
What the school has and fundraising did not is the academic link: who this person is in the institution’s history. That is all this block adds, and that is why it exists.
The class year: declared by you, or read from the enrolment
When you link a former student you pick a person who is already in the system. Nothing about them is retyped: name, email, phone and document stay on the person record. If you enter the class year, the programme and the campus, the screen shows what you declared. If you leave the year blank, it looks for the most recent completed enrolment and uses its end year, saying on the row itself that the number came from the enrolment.
When both exist and disagree, the screen shows both and points out the mismatch instead of quietly picking one. If the school declared 2019 and the completed enrolment points to 2018, somebody has to decide which is right, and the system does not decide that for you.
With no declaration and no completed enrolment, the class year shows as not declared. The system does not guess a year.
Connecting to advancement
The Connect button creates the person in the Nonprofit module and opens the alumni role there, in that module’s own vocabulary. From then on, gifts recorded there are recognised here. Connecting twice does not create two records, and the same advancement person cannot be claimed by two different former students.
If the Nonprofit module is off, connecting is refused. That is on purpose: half an advancement setup is worse than none. Schools that do fundraising turn both modules on.
Engagement, and the rule it obeys
Engagement looks at three things: how often the person appears as the credit on a gift, whether they show up for the events they signed up to, and how long ago the last signal was. It never counts amounts. A large donor is not more engaged than a steady one, and how much someone gave belongs to the fundraising module, which has its own permissions.
The rule that matters is this: a former student with no signal at all does not get a zero. They appear in their own list, of people without measurement. Zero is a statement about the person; without measurement is a statement about us, and it is the true one. That is why the screen never mixes the two in one ranking: someone who was not measured is not last in line, they are out of the line.
The same distinction holds dimension by dimension. Someone not yet connected to advancement has no giving dimension at all: it drops out of the calculation and the screen says why. Someone who is connected and never gave has that dimension measured at zero, because there is a basis for saying so. Never gave and no way to know are different things, and the screen treats them as different.
Status is not consent
Marking a former student as lost contact or archived describes the relationship; it silences no campaign. Who may or may not be contacted is decided by the school’s communication and consent rules. An opt-out that lives in two places is an opt-out that will fail one day.
Removing is safe
Removing only undoes the alumni link. The person, the enrolment, their historical role, the advancement record and the whole giving history stay untouched.
Two honest absences
There is no pledge and no donor cultivation cycle on this screen, and that is not an oversight: neither exists in the Nonprofit module today. Building them here would found fundraising’s financial engine inside the wrong vertical. When they arrive, they will arrive in that module, and this block will use them the way it uses everything else.