This past summer, US News and World Report announced it was eliminating annual alumni giving participation as a metric in its college and university rankings calculations. Whatever you think of (any) college and university rankings process, a favorable result remains a point-of-pride for many institutions. Many also prioritized increasing their annual giving participation as a result, with ideas and methods that emphasized alumni donor counts sometimes to the neglect of long-term donor relationship growth, cost-effective fundraising, non-alumni prospect audiences, and other worthy metrics and measures of success. Bob will present some thoughts on the U.S. News alumni participation history and decision, the resulting creation (and annual giving potential) of CASE’s still-new Alumni Engagement Metrics, the changes in annual giving strategy being seen at some institutions, and the remaining value to an institution of broad giving participation. We’ll conclude with a forum discussion on how (if at all) the U.S. News change is impacting campuses across the USM.
For this special USM online annual giving session, Bob will be joined by Kirby Gaddy and Lisa Vuolo from UMB. They’ll talk about their successful 5-year-old “Proud to Work Here. Proud to Give Here.” faculty and staff annual appeal. In FY ’23 the appeal raised more than $1 million from nearly 600 donors. Then Bob will share some of his favorite (other) faculty and staff fundraising ideas, examples and strategies from a range of other institutions. How do you involve the president? Should you involve volunteers? What’s the case for support when they are already giving in so many other ways? While not always happy with institution, they can be some of your strongest advocates, and they love your students. Join us with your own faculty and staff success stories (or failures) as we discuss this often-challenging audience.
