45% of scholarship programs never find out if a donor opened the report

Forty-five percent of scholarship programs cannot tell whether a donor ever opened the report they were sent. That comes from the 2026 Donor Stewardship Benchmark, a survey of 125 institutions fielded February through April 2026. On September 15, Kevin Martin walked through all seven findings behind it.

The session ran about thirty minutes plus live questions, and it is now available on demand. What follows is the shape of the argument, with the numbers as they were presented.

The study, in one paragraph

We asked 125 institutions how scholarship donor stewardship actually gets done: who does it, how often reports go out, whether anyone can judge the quality, and where AI fits. The field skewed toward two-year institutions, at 52% community college, 29% four-year, and 15% private and community foundations. The findings group into three pillars.

Pillar one: the capacity-quality trap

Stewardship is mostly a fraction of somebody’s job. Forty-six percent of the programs surveyed run the entire operation on one full-time equivalent or less, which means the work competes with everything else on one person’s plate.

Asked to grade their own stewardship, institutions averaged 2.7 out of 5. That is below the midpoint, and more telling than the number itself is that few programs have a reliable way to check whether their own read is accurate.

Thank-you letters show the pattern clearly. Nearly every program sends one. Twenty-nine percent say they send letters they know are low quality anyway, because the letter going out on time matters more than the letter being memorable.

Pillar two: the measurement blind spot

This is where the headline number lives. Seventy-nine percent of programs still deliver donor reports by U.S. mail, and 45% cannot track whether those reports are ever opened. The report leaves the building and the signal stops there.

Two related findings compound it. Nineteen percent report zero coordination between financial aid and advancement, which means in nearly one in five shops the two offices that share the same donors and the same students barely talk. And 71% had a fund go unawarded last year, with 37% having no protocol at all for the conversation with the donor that should follow.

Pillar three: the AI inflection point

Interest is nearly universal and disciplined use is rare. Half the field is experimenting with AI for stewardship work. Fifteen percent have folded it into how the work actually gets done. The gap between those two numbers is the whole story of where the category is right now.

The through line

Kevin’s framing tied the three pillars together: stewardship is the only part of the fundraising cycle with no scoreboard. Gift officers have pipeline. Annual fund has response rates. Stewardship has a stack of letters that went out and no way to know what any of them did.

That is why the capacity finding and the measurement finding belong together. A program running on half a person is not going to build a measurement practice on its own time, and a program with no measurement cannot make the case for more than half a person. The loop closes on itself.

Watch the session

The full recording covers all seven findings with the data behind each, and what the strongest programs in the sample do differently. Slides are available as a PDF alongside the recording.

Frequently asked questions

What is the 2026 Donor Stewardship Benchmark?

It is the first comprehensive benchmark of scholarship donor stewardship, based on a survey of 125 institutions across U.S. higher education fielded February through April 2026. It covers staffing, reporting cadence, quality, and AI adoption across seven findings in three pillars.

Who was surveyed?

125 institutions, weighted toward two-year schools: 52% community college, 29% four-year, 15% private and community foundations, and 4% other.

What is the single most cited finding?

That 79% of programs still deliver donor reports by mail and 45% cannot tell whether those reports were opened. Together they describe a stewardship practice that produces output with no feedback.

How do I see where my own program stands?

The benchmark survey tool scores your program against the 125-institution field in about two minutes, and optionally scores a real thank-you letter or donor report you upload.

Watch the deep dive on demand, or score your own program at benchmark.awardspring.com/survey.