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title: "GiveCampus Honor Roll Awards: Bowdoin College"
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Community Activation Award Higher Education Powered by GC Volunteer Management

# Bowdoin College

Bowdoin moved a 157-year-old volunteer network onto GC Volunteer Management in a single year: 800+ alumni and parent volunteers plus 25 student class agents, and 6,283 emails sent at a 72% open rate.

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![Bowdoin College](https://info.givecampus.com/hubfs/Honor%20Roll%20Awards/winner-bowdoin-college.jpg)

6,283

Emails sent through GC Volunteer Management in year one

72%

Open rate, well above most institutional email

800+

Alumni and parent volunteers, plus 25 student class agents

70%

Volunteers registered in year one, vs. a 37.5% average

## School overview

Bowdoin College, founded in 1794, is a private liberal arts college in Brunswick, Maine, serving more than 21,000 living alumni. Its Office of Annual Giving sustains one of the highest alumni participation rates in higher education, a distinction built over 157 years of volunteer-driven fundraising rather than any single campaign.

At Bowdoin, annual giving runs on relationships. More than 800 alumni and parent volunteers, together with 25 student class agents, do the personal, peer-to-peer outreach that keeps participation high. Alumni are organized into reunion committees and a lead-and-associate class agent structure spanning the classes of 1955 to 2021, while parents serve on the Parents Executive Committee, a critical part of the program in its own right. Many volunteers have served for decades. Keeping that network engaged and bringing it into modern tools intact is central to how the college funds its mission.

## The challenge: aging tools and data security made emailing untenable

When Christi Lumiere joined Bowdoin as Executive Director of Annual Giving in 2017, the volunteer program still ran on a homegrown system the team called AGWeb, which she describes as “a fancier Excel spreadsheet.” It worked, but the college’s IT team recognized that keeping pace with what volunteers wanted, from an app to modern features, was not realistic for an in-house tool. “We’re not an app developer,” Lumiere recalls them concluding. Bowdoin moved to EverTrue’s volunteer product as an early adopter, but after a few years, sought an alternative that would better meet their needs.

A second pressure was mounting underneath the technology question. To protect alumni data, staff needed a more secure tool than spreadsheets. Bowdoin needed a platform that protected personally identifiable information and that volunteers of every age and comfort level would not just log into once, but actually use.

## The solution: a single, secure hub for volunteers of every generation

Bowdoin made GC Volunteer Management the home of its volunteer program for fiscal year 2026 and treated onboarding as a strategic project. Jordan Drolet, Senior Associate Director in the Office of Annual Giving, and a team of class managers hosted five large-scale trainings over two months, tailored to specific cohorts: non-reunion class agents, reunion committee members, and younger alumni.

Then they got personal about the follow-through. “Our team of class managers also did a lot of work in hosting one-on-one Zoom calls, creating one-pagers including screenshots, picking up the phone, and making sure that volunteers felt comfortable and confident in utilizing the platform,” Drolet says.

Recruitment set the tone before training ever began. Bowdoin leaned on peer-to-peer, one-to-one asks that were transparent: recruitment emails defined the role in a few clear bullets, named the impact a volunteer could have, and stated the time commitment up front. The team even built in a graceful exit, so anyone who could not continue had an easy way to step back. To define each ask further, class managers wrote role descriptions volunteers could carry beyond Bowdoin, including language they could add to a LinkedIn profile. The guiding idea, borrowed from the team’s own shorthand, was that clear is kind.

Consolidation was a large part of the appeal. Under the old setup, a volunteer might juggle a toolkit on Bowdoin’s website, a separate volunteer platform, and their own email client. Bringing resources, contact information, and communications into one place removed that friction. Bowdoin kept the on-platform materials deliberately spare, pairing simple advocate instructions placed directly on the campaign page, which helped capture organic volunteers, with pared-down toolkits that answered the who, what, where, when, and why. The team leaned hardest on the built-in email templates volunteers could adapt, and class managers went a step further by building templates specific to each class so outreach felt even more personal.

“For volunteers, they’re thinking: I want a place to start. I can just click this email template, and then I can edit it to make it sound like me and send it out.”

— Jordan Drolet, Senior Associate Director, Office of Annual Giving, Bowdoin College

Simplicity was a deliberate strategy, not an accident. “The more complex the role and tools are, the less likely volunteers are to keep doing it,” Lumiere says. The team paired that with light-touch stewardship, using platform announcements to spotlight top users so volunteers heard from leadership without another email landing in a crowded inbox. Bowdoin also made a firm decision about security and accepted the short-term cost of holding the line: “If you want to be a volunteer, you need to be on this platform,” Drolet says.

## The result: one of the platform’s largest volunteer programs, with adoption that stuck

Bowdoin set out to move the bulk of its alumni volunteers and its Parents Executive Committee onto a brand-new platform in a single year. By mid-2026, more than 800 alumni and parent volunteers, plus 25 student class agents, were being managed on GC Volunteer Management, spanning the classes of 1955 to 2021. That placed Bowdoin’s volunteer corps among the largest on the platform. For a program built over 157 years on personal relationships, the scale mattered less as a headline number than as evidence that those relationships could survive the change of tools and processes.

The team’s focus from the start was sustained use: would volunteers keep coming back to the platform after the first login? Bowdoin registered 70% of its volunteers on the platform in year one, well above the 37.5% average among Partners with comparably active volunteer bases. Lumiere is quick to draw the distinction that matters to her. “I’m not just proud of the adoption rate, but I’m proud of the sustained usage rate, too. Because when we launched our past VM, we had, within a year, maybe 60% of our volunteers get on, but then when you looked, they were not using it. They created a login, but they were still coming to us for a list,” she says.

This year, the usage followed the sign-ups. Bowdoin volunteers and staff sent 6,283 emails through GC Volunteer Management over the past year, opened at a 72% rate, well above what most institutional email earns. Much of that outreach came from volunteers using templates they adapted in their own voice. “It could truly take you 5 minutes to reach out to 50 people. … It doesn’t matter what busy time of life you’re in, we can meet you there,” Drolet says.

Retention is where Bowdoin’s relationship-first instincts show most clearly, and the team keeps the gestures meaningful without making them expensive. Every volunteer receives a Presidential thank-you with a bookmark during National Volunteer Appreciation Week in April. Top advocates get whatever custom swag students receive on a giving day, mailed with a handwritten note, and staff draws on a “gift drawer” of low-cost, easy-to-mail thank-you gifts to recognize anyone who goes above and beyond. Custom items, the team has found, land better than anything a volunteer could buy in the campus store. Spotlighting top and rising performers does double duty, thanking the people who showed up and quietly nudging others to step up in the future.

The team is carrying the momentum into fiscal year 2027 with more training and data cleanup, aiming to push registration higher still. In the same year, Bowdoin’s two spring giving days, Bowdoin One Day and the Go U Bears Athletic Fund Challenge, both drew record participation.

“There are layers of stewardship, and they don’t have to be a huge lift or cost a lot of money, but they are meaningful. As long as our volunteers feel like we see them, we hear them, and we care about the work they are doing, they will stay with us.”

— Christi Lumiere, Executive Director of Annual Giving, Bowdoin College

Steal this strategy

### Bowdoin’s playbook

1. **Identify**
     - Mine your data for people who’ve volunteered before, given three or more years in a row, sit in a key demographic, or show up to events often.
     - Ask your best volunteers who else to tap — they know their classmates.
2. **Recruit**
     - Make peer-to-peer, one-to-one asks, and lead with the “what’s in it for me.”
     - Define the role in a few clear bullets; state the impact and the time commitment up front.
     - Offer a graceful out so stepping back is easy.
     - Write role descriptions volunteers can add to LinkedIn.
3. **Activate**
     - Keep it simple: pare toolkits down to who, what, where, when, and why.
     - Put advocate instructions right on the campaign page to catch organic volunteers.
     - Give volunteers class-specific templates they can edit to sound like themselves.
     - Activate on a steady cadence — Bowdoin reaches out about five times a year.
     - Train a few all-star volunteers to help train others.
4. **Steward**
     - Keep the same manager with the same classes year after year; the trust that builds is the engine of retention.
     - Spotlight top and rising performers, using platform announcements so recognition doesn’t add to a crowded inbox.
     - Show volunteers their own impact on their dashboard, and report the group’s collective results back to keep inspiring them.
     - Match the thank-you to the right voice: staff, volunteer leaders, or college leadership, depending on the volunteer and the moment.
     - Right-size appreciation: an annual Presidential thank-you, giving-day swag with a handwritten note, and a gift drawer of low-cost custom items.
     - Remember that saying goodbye can be kind, boundaries matter, and this is relationship work.
5. **If you’re switching platforms**
     - Call a peer school that’s already made the switch and ask what they’d do differently.
     - Run trainings as live, interactive sessions, not one-way webinars; record them for anyone who can’t make it, and a small thank-you for attending helps.
     - Seed early sessions with a pilot group of bought-in volunteers to build momentum and model good questions.

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