Case Study

Florida Institute of Technology: Protecting Alumni Relationships Through Smarter Unsubscribe Management

Key Highlights

Organization: Florida Institute of Technology (Florida Tech), a private STEM-focused university serving alumni and donors across the globe.
Recipient list: 50,000+ contacts
Teams served: Advancement, Alumni Relations, Athletics, University Marketing
Key contacts: Erin Alvarado, Interim Director of Annual Giving; Daniel Blucker, Director of Advancement Services
Customer: Approx. 3 years

The Challenge

Florida Tech’s Advancement team relied on their donor database platform for all external email communications. It covered the basics well, but alumni were opting out of all university emails without realizing it. The team identified the issue relatively quickly but had lost contact with some alumni who had only meant to unsubscribe from a particular segment of emails. Rebuilding that list and re-engaging those contacts was a real concern.

No granular unsubscribe options: The platform offered a single global unsubscribe. A click meant opting out of everything, with no ability for alumni to choose by interest area or email type.
Growing multi-team communication needs: As email use expanded across Athletics, Marketing, and Annual Giving, the team needed a dedicated email platform built for communicators, not just a feature of a donor database.
Limited list management at scale: With 50,000+ contacts and multiple sending teams, keeping lists organized and segmented for targeted sends required more flexibility than the existing setup provided.

The Solution

Erin Alvarado was tasked with researching alternatives and evaluating platforms on both functionality and pricing. She came across Envoke while reviewing what other universities were using for external mass communication. After reviewing it against her criteria, it matched the team’s needs. Daniel Blucker, Director of Advancement Services, joined the effort shortly after, helping to keep contact data and segmentation organized so Erin’s team could focus on building and sending.

Among the Envoke features that stood out were:

Subscription categories: Alumni and donors can now choose which types of emails they receive, so a single unsubscribe no longer removes them from everything.
Multi-team access: The platform serves Advancement, Alumni Relations, Athletics, and University Marketing from a single account, with Erin managing builds and sends.
Segmentation and tagging: Daniel’s team exports contact data from its donor database, maps it to Envoke’s tag structure, and keeps lists organized for targeted sends and resyncs to the CRM.
Analytics suite: Open rates, click rates, bounce backs, and unsubscribes are all tracked in one place, making it easy to review campaign performance in real time. The opportunity to perform A/B testing also allows the team to test variables to improve both open and conversion rates.

The Results

Alumni stayed on the list.
The main reason Florida Tech switched was to stop losing contacts to all-or-nothing unsubscribes. With Envoke’s subscription preferences in place, alumni and friends can now opt down instead of opting out entirely. The team re-engaged contacts who hadn’t realized they’d removed themselves from everything.

Large-scale campaigns ran smoothly.
Florida Tech’s annual giving campaign for #GivingTuesday ©, involved a high-volume, multi-day email push to donors and alumni. The analytics suite gave Erin real-time visibility into open rates, click rates, and unsubscribes throughout the campaign, so the team could monitor performance without leaving the platform. Since using Envoke, donor engagement and support via email have increased substantially.

The whole advancement team sends through one platform.
What started as an alumni communications tool now serves Athletics, University Marketing, and Annual Giving. Erin builds and schedules all sends; Daniel’s team handles contact data and segmentation. The division of responsibility has made it workable across multiple teams without duplicating tools or processes.

Looking Forward

Florida Tech and Envoke are eager to expand their relationship with more teams across the university, more digital marketing campaigns, and reach more of the university’s external community.

“We were really just doing the basics, but when we found Envoke, it checked everything we needed. Three years in, we're using it every day across the entire team, and we're still finding new ways to use it.”

Erin Alvarado
Interim Director of Annual Giving
Florida Institute of Technology

For universities managing alumni email across multiple teams, the right unsubscribe structure isn’t a small feature, it’s the difference between keeping your list and slowly losing it.

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