The alumni body is a rich resource for fundraising, graduate students, legacies, mentors, faculty, employers, business partners, trustees, word-of-mouth boosters and voting advocates. Yet just 16 percent of alumni attend their 10-year reunion. Only 16 percent are described as “significantly involved” or “greatly involved” with their college. Only a quarter of alumni have ever made a financial contribution of any amount. Why?
According to Jim McAlexander, a professor at Oregon State University, too often the first interactions that alumni experience upon graduation consist of credit card offers, invitations to pay membership fees to alumni associations and requests for gifts. “Healthy relationships are firmly grounded in the principle of reciprocity,” he says.
Among alumni who are not currently giving, nearly 85 percent are receptive to the idea. Young alumni have strong inclincations toward university-directed philanthropy, but they often lack disposable income. Attentive cultivation of them should build toward results in the future.
That may appear logical, perhaps even patently obvious. However, many development directors have only crude demographic tools to quantify the potential of the alumni pool to give.
McAlexander and OSU colleague Hal Koenig interviewed 2,000 alumni of colleges and universities from all 50 states. From the Close to the Customer Project, they built a “brand community” model that attempts to quantify the alumni relationship and the corresponding propensity to give. The Brand Community Index (BCI) measures four customer-centric relationships:
1. a person's assessment of the impact of college upon his or her life
2. a person's connection to the institution’s identity
3. a person's feelings about interactions with the institution, and
4. the degree to which he or she values relationships with alumni peers.
Alumni with higher BCI scores, donated nearly twice as much as their peers. Good start.
Meanwhile, executing on the OSU Brand Community Index is not a cookie cutter exercise. The research found that alumni of smaller schools have stronger, more positive, feelings about their education than those from larger schools. However, there is no evidence of stronger or weaker connections to a school’s brand based on institution size. Nor did alumni from smaller schools report more interaction with other alumni. The data also showed that alums of larger colleges and universities were more likely to desire logo clothing, and were more likely to encourage friends and family members to attend their alma mater.
Some alumni associations and campus advancement offices – with or without the BCI – get the point.
For example, David Kalsbeek at Chicago’s DePaul University embraced a simple yet provocative scheme for classifying alumni based upon their current and intended relationship with an institution. Kalsbeek cautions against assuming that all alumni have fundamentally the same interests that merely vary in degree or intensity. Alternatively, he does not assume that each alumnus is unique with completely idiosyncratic interests. He believes alumni can be categorized into four distinct typologies: Rallyers, Reminiscers, Resisters and Reconnectors.
McAlexander and Koenig found that students who are actively engaged while on campus typically have higher BCI scores than their less engaged peers. Those involved in fraternities and sororities, athletics, student government, study abroad programs, and peer advising programs are likely to be more generous as they become engaged alumni. Stetson University stresses the value of alumni relationships to prospects during recruiting, as do most colleges. Once enrolled, students and alumni engage through a sequenced series of formal programs that include a student alumni club of campus ambassadors, “Dinners with 12 Strangers” held at alums’ homes and career enhancement sessions called “speed networking.” Arizona State starts just this side of in utero, with a legacy program designed to get young Sun Devils birth to eighth grade familiar with the college through campus visits and even some kiddie course work.
The BCI may be short of predictive modeling, but it offers some direction to fundraisers who are dependent solely on intuition or guesswork.