The Nostalgia Factor: Strategic Storytelling for Alumni Engagement

Seven out of every hundred alumni give to their school in a given year.

That’s the NAIS median: 7.1%. Flat for years, and declining. In this webinar, consultant Penny Abrams — who has spent more than 20 years working in and with independent schools — argues the path forward isn’t a better solicitation strategy. It’s a fundamentally different relationship with your alumni. And it starts with nostalgia.

This is Part 1 of a two-part series on alumni engagement. Part 2 features The John Cooper School showing exactly how they put these ideas into practice on Giving Day.

The Problem with How Schools Think About Alumni

Most schools are stuck in a broadcast mindset. They push content out, measure email opens and click rates, and then wonder why engagement stays low. The answer, Penny argues, is structural: schools are asking the wrong question first.

When a school’s alumni communications are primarily about what the school wants — time, money, referrals — alumni disengage. They opt out, stop opening emails, decline event invitations. Not because they don’t care about the school, but because nothing in the communication gives them a reason to.

Penny’s shift: lead with what’s in it for them. Belonging. Memory. A reason to feel connected to a place that shaped them. Once that emotional foundation is built, everything else — volunteering, giving, referring families — follows more naturally.

The Coffee Shop Story

Penny tells a story that illustrates the mechanism better than any framework could.

She had been slowly disengaging from her own high school, Ravenscroft in Raleigh, North Carolina. Events kept coming up on the calendar; she kept saying no. The timing was never right.

One afternoon she walked into a coffee shop thirty minutes from home. There was no connection to her high school — just a neighborhood spot she’d been to before. But that day, the tables were laminated with photos. And the photos were of her senior class, 1993.

The photos were not perfect. They weren’t the kind of images that make it into a marketing campaign or a yearbook cover. But they were real, and they were hers. And a single unplanned encounter with them was enough to reverse months of passive disengagement.

That’s the nostalgia factor.

Why It Works: The Science Behind Visual Memory

Penny grounds the emotional argument in neuroscience. Citing molecular biologist Dr. John Medina, she points to a striking gap in how we retain information:

The implication for alumni communications is direct: text-only updates, plain-text emails, and word-heavy newsletters are working against the brain’s natural architecture. Visuals don’t just look better — they are remembered longer, and they are more likely to trigger the emotional response that drives action.

And the research goes further. Nostalgia specifically has been shown to make people more likely to spend — money, time, attention. The emotional warmth of a memory lowers resistance and increases generosity. Penny summarizes it plainly: nostalgia is a lever, not just a feeling.

Four Generations, Four Different Alumni

One of the most practical sections of the webinar is Penny’s generational breakdown. An independent school’s alumni base typically spans four decades of graduates, and treating them as a single audience is one of the most common mistakes advancement teams make.

Stratford Hall in Vancouver produces 62-second impact videos for each element of their “portrait of the graduate” — a format built for Gen X alumni who want to see outcomes. Cardinal Gibbons in Raleigh lets its journalism club produce event content: 80 photos from a 4A football regional final, raw and unfiltered, distributed immediately. That’s what Gen Z alumni actually engage with.

Connection Over Perfection

One of the most counterintuitive arguments Penny makes is about photo standards. Most schools discard the imperfect shot: the slightly blurry action photo, the one where someone is mid-laugh, the picture that would never survive a marketing review.

Penny argues those photos are exactly the ones worth keeping.

The coffee shop photos that re-engaged Penny were not great quality. They were candid, slightly imperfect, unmistakably real. That’s what made them work. Twenty years later, an imperfect photo of a student laughging in a hallway carries more emotional weight than any staged portrait.

Mandy describes how Vidigami functions as exactly this kind of living archive: every photo uploaded is organized, tagged, and personalized to the students in it — not just the ones that make the yearbook, but all of them. Today’s candid becomes tomorrow’s nostalgia trigger.

What to Actually Measure

Penny’s closing argument is about metrics. Open rates and click rates measure passive consumption. They do not measure engagement. The shift she recommends: measure alumni producing content, showing up at events, volunteering their time, and eventually giving. Those are the indicators that the emotional relationship is working.

Her four takeaways: lead with nostalgia, prioritize visual communication, segment your alumni by generation, and — borrowed from a longtime faculty member at Phillips Exeter Academy — love all alumni all the time. Not just during campaigns. Not just during Giving Day. All the time.