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The Essential Guide to Alumni Giving and Fundraising
Between small recurring gifts and large one-time donations, alumni giving often makes up the largest segments of university fundraising efforts. Who’s more motivated to donate to your university than the individuals who were once students themselves?
Keeping this in mind, this guide will review the current state of alumni giving, the best practices for engaging your alums, and the most effective ways to increase your alumni giving rates. We’ll also review the tools that make it easier to reach your fundraising goals. Here’s what to expect:
- Why is Alumni Giving Important?
- Exploring Alumni Giving Rates and Trends
- How Can Prospect Research Help Find Top Alumni Donors?
- Alumni Giving Best Practices
- 6 Helpful Alumni Giving Tools
As we walk through these steps, you’ll likely find yourself exploring the quantitative and qualitative information you have on your alums. Before making any programmatic decisions, however, plan to conduct an audit of your alumni database, remove outdated and duplicate information, and enhance your data with additional wealth and philanthropic indicators. Then, you can be confident that any changes you make will be based on the most accurate, thorough data possible.
Why Is Alumni Giving Important?
Alumni giving is important for two primary reasons: it offers crucial support to the important work your university does in educating the leaders of tomorrow and it’s a key indicator of your university’s financial health. In this section, we’ll cover how alumni donations tend to be directed and used by universities, plus the major benefits of developing an alumni giving program.
How Are Alumni Donations Used?
There isn’t just one type of student that graduates from your school. Likewise, you don’t have only one type of alum. Your graduates have gone on to be biologists and writers, farmers and professional athletes. In many cases, alums will direct their donations to a specific program or department that was meaningful to them during their studies. In fact, restricted gifts make up 93% of giving to universities.
Overall, alumni giving generally funds:
- Scholarships. If an alum received a specific scholarship or support during their time at your university, they’ll often want to “pass on” this opportunity to current and future students.
- Construction costs. Usually, alumni interest in funding construction projects piques after the kickoff period of a capital campaign to fund a specific project, such as a new science center with up-to-date technology or a state-of-the-art theater. Alums are particularly apt to give to buildings for which the name (e.g. the Alumni Hall) will acknowledge their contribution.
- Research projects. Funding faculty research can be attractive to your alumni, especially when it’s framed in the context of its impact on students and the broader community.
- Operational costs. While the day-to-day operations of running a university aren’t as sexy as new experimental research, they are just as important! Because of this, operational costs generally end up being funded by unrestricted donations.
By engaging the diversity of your alumni community, you’ll be able to attract and direct resources across your funding priorities.
What Are the Benefits of a Strong Alumni Giving Program?
Even though the majority of alumni gifts contain restrictions, they are still incredibly valuable to your university. So why exactly is it important to build a strong alumni giving program? A thriving program allows you to:
Access a broad range of support that adds up to make a big impact. Relying entirely on one income source can become a big problem if you suddenly lose that stream. Alumni giving helps you avoid that risk by diversifying your fundraising efforts across a large body of donors. Moreover, small gifts can really add up. For example, in a given year, an annual fund made up of $500,000 in small donations can have the same financial effect as
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Four Ways to Make Your Volunteer Opportunities More Inclusive
Making your volunteer opportunities more inclusive requires careful planning to ensure you don’t leave anyone out. Every volunteer brings in a different background and perspective, and you may wonder how you can create opportunities that will give everyone an equal chance to participate.
After all, your volunteers are the foundation of your nonprofit organization, and it’s crucial to have a diverse team. Creating inclusive volunteer programs will help you reach and engage a wider array of talented volunteers.
To make your volunteer opportunities more inclusive, it’s important to start off by understanding what barriers your supporters may have and how to overcome them by offering alternatives.
Here are the top four strategies for making your volunteer program more inclusive:
- Diversify your recruitment strategy.
- Address your volunteers’ specific barriers to volunteering.
- Offer virtual and micro-volunteer opportunities.
- Create a buddy or mentor program.
The goal is to optimize your volunteers’ experience so that everyone can participate. InitLive’s guide to creating inclusive volunteer programs offers a full overview of how you can make your program more welcoming. In this article, we’ll review the highlights. Let’s get started!
1. Diversify your recruitment strategy.
As a volunteer manager, you may already know the importance of having a diverse team. Having a team consisting of individuals from different backgrounds helps organizations become more innovative, resilient, and creative. And when your volunteer team is diverse and accepting, your new volunteers will feel more comfortable joining because they’ll see themselves represented in your organization.
In order to attract a diverse group of people, it’s crucial to expand your recruitment strategy to reach new groups of people that you may not have connected with in the past.
There are plenty of sources you can explore to reach new volunteers and welcome them into your organization. These include:
- Local community groups and civic clubs
- Local businesses
- Your organization’s constituents (the people who benefit from your services)
- Nearby colleges and universities
Remember to craft your volunteer opportunity descriptions carefully to attract diverse candidates. The language you use in your descriptions makes all the difference. For example, avoid using phrases such as “looking for young volunteers” because you may exclude potentially talented and passionate volunteers.
A diversified recruitment strategy allows you to adopt an inclusive approach from the beginning of your volunteer management process.
2. Address your volunteers’ specific barriers to volunteering.
In order to make your volunteer opportunities more inclusive, it’s crucial to identify any specific barriers that your volunteers face to participation.
Get to know your organization’s volunteers on an individual level to address their personal barriers to participation. This ensures you aren’t taking a “one size fits all” approach to accessibility and inclusivity, but a truly well-rounded approach that’s most effective for your supporters.
Here are some examples of common barriers that volunteers may face include:
- Time restrictions: Many volunteers have full-time jobs or children to take care of and won’t have ample free time for volunteering. Consider giving an evening option for your volunteer opportunities and offer a variety of shift options for those who may have time restrictions.
- Physical barriers: Certain volunteers may also face physical barriers where they cannot stand for long periods of time. Others may use wheelchairs or other devices to assist with mobility. Keep these barriers in mind as you plan your in-person volunteer opportunities to ensure those with physical restrictions can participate.
- Language barriers: Your volunteers may not speak English as their first language and may face difficulty participating in your volunteer activities because of language barriers. You can take stock of your current staff and volunteer language capabilities and incorporate different languages into your program, such as in your training materials.
- Transportation barriers: Some volunteers may not have access to reliable transportation. Consider offering a shuttle service or carpool program to offer everyone a chance to participate.
To ensure you don’t leave any volunteers out, you can send out a survey to them to ask about their specific barriers to participation. This way, you have all the information you need from the start, and it also leaves a good first impression.
When your volunteers see that you’ve taken the time to think of solutions for any barriers that they face, they’ll feel greater goodwill toward your organization and be more likely to continue engaging with your opportunities.
3. Offer virtual and micro-volunteer opportunities.
Finding the free time to volunteer can often be a major barrier for supporters. If some of your volunteers have busy schedules, a great solution is offering virtual and micro-volunteer opportunities.
Virtual volunteer opportunities open your volunteer program up to those who may have transportation, time, or mobility restrictions. If your volunteers have restrictions regarding their schedules or health, this is a great way to allow them to still be a part of your organization’s activities. It also helps boost engagement since participants are volunteering within the comfort of their own homes.
And, since we are still experiencing the effects of the ongoing pandemic, virtual opportunities are a great way to maintain strong relationships with all your supporters while staying safe.
Another effective way to offer volunteers more flexibility is by scheduling short volunteer opportunities that still allow participants to leave a major impact. For instance, if you’re hosting a major event like a festival, you can offer one-hour shifts, so volunteers only have to take minimal time out of their days to participate. This allows volunteers to fit a quick volunteer shift into their daily activities.
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