Charitable gifts fund many areas of higher education operations and special projects. Alumni gifts are critical to fund research, teaching and other areas, as well as capital projects, building improvements and special programs.
Tracking alumni giving to gain insight on trends can help schools fine tune their outreach programs to maximize donor dollars. The Napa Group, a consultancy that helps educational institutions develop and communicate the right strategies for success, meaningfully engaged alumni are needed to populate the development pipeline. The Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) Voluntary Support of Education survey findings, released earlier this year, show an increase of about seven percent in charitable giving to U.S. higher education institutions. What’s more, contributions from alumni increased by approximately 11 percent, although gifts from foundations still represented the largest portion of total voluntary support.
Anthology Encompass, an alumni and donor engagement platform that supports successful, scalable fundraising initiatives and helps higher institutions find, engage with and connect to alumni and supporters, also tracks fundraising activities. The platform combines analytics with engagement tools to follow fundraising progress and deliver insight to help schools fine-tune their alumni outreach. Currently, approximately 400 universities use Anthology Encompass for some aspect of their alumni engagement efforts. The platform combines engagement tools with analytics and capabilities include email marketing, event management, donations organization and forms. Anthology offerings span the entire length of the student experience to alumni advancement and many schools host their alumni site on the platform, including MIT and Yale.
Anthology used Encompass’s email marketing and online giving capabilities to track and tally the total dollars raised by colleges and universities who use the platform for some aspect of their alumni engagement efforts on Giving Tuesday in November. On that day, more than 34,000 gifts were made using the Encompass platform, and the average gift amount was nearly $250. Nearly 250 higher education institutions received more than 30 donations amounting to $8.5 million on that single day.
Giving on the platform decreased by about four percent from 2021 levels. ”It wasn’t totally unexpected for me that we saw an overall decrease in giving from the prior year,” explained Dr. Mirko Widenhorn, Anthology’s resident researcher. “In 2020 and 2021 on Giving Tuesday, alumni giving focused on student support and student emergency funds, due to the pandemic. This year, we saw a little step back for higher education specifically, partially because the messaging changed and because there are so many non-profits trying to get dollars in on Giving Tuesday.” Widenhorn added that a range of school sizes and types reported significant giving on that day.
“More and more institutions have a different dedicated day of giving, so Giving Tuesday may not be their primary focus,” Widenhorn said. “For many, Giving Tuesday is an opportunity to raise funds, but they may often do their primary fundraising in the spring.”
Also noteworthy is the amount of support Anthology Encompass sees digitally, but also specifically with digital wallets including Google Pay, Apple Pay and PayPal. “Thirty percent of donations that were made on Giving Tuesday were made using digital wallets. That’s a significant increase over previous years,” Widenhorn pointed out. “It speaks to how people want to give to an institution. Their preference is starting to shift away from credit card giving to giving through a digital wallet. My assumption is that more recent graduates are driving that trend, which speaks to opportunity with that generation to foster increased support.”