Grab Grads Early to Keep Them Giving

One hot topic within educational fundraising programs is whether or not to expend precious staff time and financial resources on courting recent graduates and younger alumni, who often don’t have the capacity to give large gifts.

Development leadership often is hesitant to redirect efforts away from more immediately fruitful major and principal gifts to chase these smaller participation gifts. But if your program doesn’t make this initial investment in educating younger alumni about the importance of supporting your institution, then when they’re more financially stable, it might be too late. They already will have focused their philanthropic efforts somewhere else.

Much like many educational institutions, Rice University’s alumni population has been growing faster than the number of donors each year, due to the increased size of recent graduating classes. We surmised that by honing our solicitations to these younger classes, our participation rate within this segment would increase. Additionally, we believed that while emphasizing the amount of the gift was important to our steadfast donors, the thought of contributing $10,000 or even $1,000 was inconceivable to younger alumni. They were more likely to appreciate being recognized for their annual loyalty versus the amount of their contributions.

In our quest to stabilize and inch up our alumni participation rate, we didn’t want to negatively impact our strategy to increase unrestricted dollars raised for the university. So we conducted some research and analyzed our data for the 10 most recent graduating classes, which confirmed that this segment of our solicitable base made up 24 percent of our overall pool of prospects. Given that we have alumni still living who graduated in the 1920s, this was an astounding number. Even more daunting was that only 25 percent of this particular population was contributing annually, while our overall alumni participation rate held steady at 37 percent. The 10 youngest alumni classes essentially were lowering our overall participation rate by nearly 3 percentage points.

Next, we conducted three young-alumni focus groups to gain their insight as we sought to redesign both our solicitation and recognition programs. It became clear that we needed to develop a program that encouraged consecutive years of giving, regardless of the dollar amount. In other words, build a loyal set of alumni by positively reinforcing the behavior that we wanted to see demonstrated — consistent annual giving.

While we did expend energy fine-tuning our solicitations and messaging to this segment, our main focus shifted to recognition. We created and launched the Rice Pacesetters Club (giving.rice.edu/pacesetters) to specifically communicate to our most recent graduates the importance of giving annually to the university. The mission of this recognition club is to cultivate these young alumni into future leaders who would one day become loyal, annual contributors. We do not require a minimum dollar contribution to participate, nor do we tell them where they have to give. Our only requirement is that their gifts be consecutive year after year.

Volunteers are a crucial component of the young alumni program and include a chair from each graduating class. The classes celebrating fifth and 10th reunions have a formalized committee structure with several co-chairs to solicit gifts. For the Pacesetters Club, we designate two alumni to co-chair the effort, helping to keep contact information as current as possible and making the occasional follow-up e-mail or phone solicitation. All of these volunteers also assist with sending thank-you postcards throughout the year to our donors.

The young alumni population is segmented for all e- and direct-mail solicitations, which are characterized by consistent messaging, concise text, youthful graphics and an influx of humor. The e-solicitations are the primary mode for corresponding with this group, and a series of appeals is developed for a given year. Since the implementation of our efforts, the number of gifts through our online-giving Web site has more than doubled because we have been more aggressively driving our alumni to the site to increase pledge fulfillment and to decrease other associated costs.

As we begin another cycle in our fundraising program, we reflect on the initial success of this initiative. The retention of first-time donors has increased by nearly 25 percent in the past two years, overall participation by the 10 youngest classes is up to 27 percent, and we continue to receive accolades from our volunteers and donors for our innovative approach to soliciting and recognizing them for their

consecutive contributions. Also, the the number of hits on our various Web pages has increased, as well as contributions received online. With the new young alumni mantra to “Give Every Year, Any Amount, Anywhere,” the numbers are showing a solid growth with this critical segment, building a solid foundation for years to come.

Kevin J. Foyle, CFRE, is the senior director of development at Rice University in Houston. He can be reached at kfoyle@rice.edu.