Three reasons higher education fundraisers are losing gifts, and what we can do about it

Americans are less confident in higher education , along with other major institutions. Giving money to your alma mater is just less exciting than other viral and emotional charitable options . And college fundraising has even risen to the level of comic relief. (careful: adult language alert on that link, and to make it clear, I love John Mulaney and he's been incredibly generous with fellow classmates).

Despite that, higher education raised over $59.5 billion in 2022, according to CASE . It’s inspiring, and these gifts will do a whole lot of good.

But let’s be clear: this is largely wealth distribution by older donors, and it is highly concentrated in a small group of institutions. And while this mega-money is coming in, over three quarters of institutions are still down on the number of alumni who are giving each year since 2019 . During that time, we’ve graduated a ton of alumni, so participation once again massively declines.

There are broad cultural forces at work, as I’ve mentioned. We’ll need to address those as a nation (and in my opinion, do some of it with philanthropy). But there are also things holding fundraisers back, which come from our fundraiser culture, bad behavior, and history. Here are three of them we can fix.

We’re focusing too much on brand, and not enough on impact and community

We’ve heard it time and time again: young donors care about impact. And they are social in their giving. Well, we’re learning quickly that this actually applies to all donors. Yet, we keep doing things like:

• We’ll talk about the tradition of giving, and little about what giving actually does.
• We send many appeals in the voice of a fundraiser, when a peer, faculty member, student would be better.
• We’ve built up mega-campaigns that amplify brand, leaving modest donors wondering, does my gift really matter?
• Today's donors are collaborative, and want a community. We are not leveraging live events that build excitement, giving circles and other collaboration - led by the authenticity of donor peers, nearly enough.
• A whopping 6% of young non-donor alumni want to give to our annual funds , but readily tell us that scholarships, specific program support, and even mental health are worthy of giving. (These all things that annual funds often support).

And yet, we argue about “unrestricted giving,” market mainly on brand, don’t research/communicate impact, and just throw every appeal at everyone and sign it. It’s not smart donor engagement, and we’re not listening.

My take: Giving is not an obligation or an expectation. Philanthropy is a deliberate, social, mission-driven and learned behavior. Let’s start treating it like that and communicate with donors accordingly.

Fundraisers are afraid to get outside help, and that’s pretty silly

Higher education fundraising enjoys the biggest staffs, budgets and infrastructure in American philanthropy. But within the silo of an institution, we do some problematic things:

• Budgets are often focused on salary lines, with very little support funds for gift officers, or tech and help for annual giving leaders. That’s like fielding a baseball team but forgetting about buying the bats.
• Fundraisers mistakenly think that “building it ourselves” will be cheaper and provide more control, where using platforms that hundreds are influencing can put your team at the hub of innovation.
• Consultants are feared because they’ll uncover deficiencies, or “tell us what we already know.” Peers are avoided because they’re “in competition” (they’re not), and we often revert our institution’s internal bubble.
• We have entire math and business academic programs that we fail to tap for analysts, statisticians, thought leaders and strategists.

My take: The world’s greatest leaders and movements share a key thing: a collaborative mindset. In today’s complex fundraising environment, you just can’t do it alone. Get help.

Higher education fundraisers are late to adopt every new technology and our donors suffer

I wonder sometimes if higher education fundraising is an alternate universe, almost like attending a 90’s theme party. We’re incredibly slow to adopt new tech that is already working on our donors in the real world. Some examples that I see every day:

• Institutions still argue about adopting digital wallet tech that lets donors give quickly through Venmo, Paypal and Apple Pay .
• Very few fundraising shops have invested in retargeting, the practice of serving up ads and outreach to those who click, but don’t complete a gift or register for an event.
• We think artificial intelligence is creepy, weird, and we’re afraid of using it to personalize the donor experience.

And then we go home, look at our AI-driven Netflix queue, order up some food with our thumbprints, and shop on Amazon, only to get ads a few minutes later with discounts on the stuff we didn’t buy.

My take: We need to be looking carefully at the technology operating on all of us in the commercial world, and adopt versions of it quickly that can work in philanthropic outreach. Our donors deserve for us to be innovators.

Let’s look at fundraising differently and focus on impact, collaboration, and innovation

I’m guilty of every one of these mistakes during some point in my fundraising career. I learned to move past them, and it made a ton of difference. There’s hope. Higher education institutions who have leaned into impact, adopted new tech and gotten help have set records for donor response.

A proposal: Let’s make higher education fundraising a 2020’s theme party, and invite all our friends. The music will be better, and we’ll get more donors to join us in the fun.

What mistakes do you think we’re making in fundraising, and what’s the solution? Drop a reply here and let’s talk!