Seven findings on the state of scholarship donor stewardship

For years, donor stewardship has been treated as the part of fundraising you cannot measure. The 2026 Donor Stewardship Benchmark, out today, shows it is not unmeasurable. It has just gone unmeasured.

It is a benchmark of how scholarship donor stewardship works across higher education. 125 foundations told us how the work actually gets done: how it is staffed, how reports go out, how thank-you letters are handled, and where AI fits. The picture is candid, and it is more clarifying than comfortable.

What the data shows

• Capacity is the constraint. 46% of programs run on one FTE or less, and 53% name staff time, not budget or technology, as their single biggest barrier.
• Reporting is stuck in the past. 79% still deliver by U.S. mail, and 45% have no way to know whether a donor read what they sent.
• Quality is a quiet worry. The field rates its own work 2.66 out of 5, and only 5% regularly collect donor feedback to check.
• Unawarded funds are a silent risk. 71% had at least one fund go unawarded last year, and 37% had no protocol for telling the donor.
• AI adoption is wide but shallow. Half are experimenting; only 15% use it consistently.

The pattern underneath

Read together, the findings group into three pillars: a capacity-quality trap, a measurement blind spot, and an AI inflection point. And they point to one conclusion that should change how you read the rest: this is not a story about people who do not care. It is a story about people who care a great deal and do not have the infrastructure to act on it. A systems problem has a systems answer.

What to do about it

The report closes with three recommendations you can start on without new budget: audit your capacity against your fund count, build a measurement baseline so you can see whether donors engage, and operationalize AI in one high-volume workflow instead of experimenting at the edges.

Get the report

The 2026 Donor Stewardship Benchmark is a free download. It includes all seven findings with the data, the methodology, and the three recommendations in full. While you are there, you can watch the on-demand webinar, grab the executive brief, and score your own stewardship work against the field with our free benchmarking tool.

Download the report