Case Study: Alumni Association of the University of Michigan achieves 50% reduction in membership acquisition costs with Salesforce for Nonprofits

The Alumni Association of the University of Michigan Reduces Membership Acquisition Costs by 50%

The Alumni Association of the University of Michigan supports a global community of more than 600,000 living alumni with events, career services, travel and more, but was limited by legacy CRM and marketing systems that created data silos, slowed campaign creation, and couldn’t scale for long-term goals. With a relatively small staff, the association needed a flexible, enterprise-grade platform that could integrate with existing technology (notably Blackbaud CRM) and enable data-driven engagement.

The association implemented a Salesforce solution—Lightning CRM, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, Service Cloud, Einstein Analytics and related tools—integrated with Blackbaud and supported by Premier Success to centralize data, automate outreach, and deliver dynamic, segmented communications. The result: marketing costs fell by about $200,000, targeted campaign build time dropped from as much as a day to minutes, and membership acquisition costs declined 50% year-over-year, enabling more effective, ROI-focused engagement.

University of Michigan

Andre Zoldan

Senior Director of Technology for the Alumni Association