Admissions

The first of Richardson and Basinger’s laws of fundraising was:

Law #1: Law of the Nonexistent “They”. Donors are generally not standing in line waiting to give to your institution. You have to go out and beat the bushes to find them. There are people who have the resources to give and would give, if you make the effort to find them. They are not going to “beat a path to your door” without first receiving an invitation from you.

This post will consider how this fits into the processes of student recruitment, retention, and alumni development.

Recruitment: Unless your institution is one of the few very top elites or one of the momentarily “hot” schools, most of the millions of high school students thinking about college know very little about your institution. There are at most 100 institutions that can be classified as truly elite. At any given time, there may be another 50 that are “trending.” This leaves roughly another 3000 regionally accredited institutions in the nondescript middle or lower categories of colleges and universities.

If you are one of these nondescript institutions, you must find effective means for telling your story to enough prospective students in order to enroll a sufficient number of students to survive, if not thrive. If you are one of the elite or momentarily “hot” institutions, you still need to tell your story. You want to be able to define yourself as you want to be defined. Otherwise you will be defined by someone else, and you have no control over those definitions. It is obviously to your advantage to control how you are defined. This will permit you to enroll the students that you want to enroll. You want to be able to pick and choose your students. You are not in an advantageous position, if you have to take the “left over” students.

Retention: Just because a student enrolls in your institution, your job of selling your institution is not done. For years, there has been a national concentration of increasing access to college. However, recently there has been an additional push to put as much, if not more, emphasis on completion. We now have reached the point where more than 50% of high school graduates enter higher education immediately after high school. However, until very recently less than 50% of those students graduated. That meant that more than 50% were attriting, which meant that nationally just slightly over 25% of high school students were graduating from college within six years of finishing high school, pushing us far down the list of highly developed countries in this statistic.

Graduation rates in colleges and universities vary from 98% to less than 10%. This scene has created a great deal of hand-wringing and debate. We have a huge population of individuals who are left with a mountain of student debt and no credential or education to show for their expended time or money. Research over the years has shown that the fewer legitimate connections students have made, the more likely they will attrit. Institutions need to be sure every employee, faculty, staff, or administration is reaching out to students. You don’t want to have students get lost in the shuffle, or feel as if they are not important. They can very easily go somewhere else where they will feel important. Students need to be part of the in-group and not part of the undefined “they.” Students want to go where they will be part of the in-crowd, or as the theme song of the popular television show Cheers said: “go where everyone knows your name.”

Alumni Development: When alumni were students, they were or should have been part of the in-group, the “we” of the institution. If we allow them to fall back into and remain part of the amorphous “they,” these alumni will not provide financial and other important aspects of support like new student referrals, and services to current students such as internship placements, and job or professional counseling.

Although I don’t have any hard data to back up the following assertion, “it is harder to bring a fallen “we” back from “they-land” than attracting a total stranger to “we-land.” I base my claim upon years of work with alumni. A fallen “we” usually has left the fold for specific reasons. To return to the fold these fallen comrades want to know that their specific problems have been resolved. Generally, the fallen “we” will not reach out to the institution on their own volition. The institution has to reach out to these alumni, addressing their specific concerns. This requires individualized communications directed to these alumni. As part of alumni development, is your institution helping alumni with their current needs, such as job postings, placement files, life-long learning opportunities, and directory services to locate other alumni?

In addition to addressing past problems alumni may have encountered, is your institution helping alumni move forward in their lives and careers? Is it providing alumni services such as job postings, placement files, life-long learning opportunities, and alumni directories so that alumni can maintain contact with their fellow alumni? Institutions must continually answer the question from alumni, “What have you done for us lately?”

In Part III of this series of posts on the life cycle of alumni development, I am highlighting the ten axioms of fundraising that I introduced in the introductory post of this series. I borrowed them from a post entitled 10 time-proven laws of fundraising  on Rebekah Basinger’s Generous Matters.  As a reminder, Basinger borrowed the principles from Carl Richardson’s article from 2003 on the Philanthropy News Digest website (PND), entitled The Ten Immutable Laws of the (fundraising) Universe.

As I indicated in that first post of this series, Basinger’s post got me thinking about how colleges were involved in the development of successful and engaged alumni. I also was struck about how the laws of good fundraising were identical to the principles of good admissions and recruitment work with prospective students, the principles of good retention work with students, and the principles of good public relations and development work with alumni. But before I get to how these principles apply to the institutional work with prospective students, students, and alumni in subsequent posts, let me delineate the laws. The bold face descriptions are short hand names for the laws, primarily based on Richardson’s labels. The plain face descriptions are amplifications of Richardson’s laws based on Richardson’s and Basinger’s comments, plus some of my own additions.

Law #1: Law of the Nonexistent “They.” Donors are generally not standing in line waiting to give to your institution. You have to go out and beat the bushes to find them. There are people who have the resources to give and would give, if you make the effort to find them. They are not going to “beat a path to your door” without first getting an invitation from you.

Law #2: Fundraising is a conversation. The organization must initiate the conversation with the funder, and then keep it going. The organization must cultivate an interest in the organization on the part of the giver. However, a conversation is a two-way street. The organization must listen to the prospective donors and be accountable to them.

Law #3: Effective fundraising is a result from telling your story. Positive results only come from telling your story. However, telling your story once is not enough. You must retell it many times, in many different ways. However, the story you tell must be the real story, not a pie in the sky fairy tale, that has no basis in reality.

Law#4: People only give to people. People do not give to causes. They do not give to grand ideas, impressive buildings or heroic organizations. People give to people who are changing lives, making a difference, and changing the world.

Law #5: Someone must close the deal. It is not enough to let our good work speak for itself. Someone must make the sale and ask for the money.

Law #6: You can’t thank a donor enough. Donors are people, and people like to be appreciated. It is imperative that you express gratitude for each and every gift, and that you keep on expressing that gratitude in different ways.

Law #7: Seek investments, not gifts. It is important to look for donors who want to be more involved in changing the world, beyond giving a mere monetary gift. You need to look for people who will not only invest their money, but also their time and ideas. Donors will usually not give unless they know the organization. It also helps greatly if the organization knows them. This process is called engagement. You need to engage donors in the organization. Truly engaged donors will work to introduce and involve their friends and relatives.

Law #8: Donors are developed, not born. Just because someone gives your organization one gift does not cement a bond between that individual and your organization. The development of a donor is a long, and arduous process. It involves the evolution of commitment, which comes from a change in the heart and mind of the giver.

Law#9: Fundraising out of desperation is futile. Most discerning individuals are not going “to throw good money after bad.” It is very easy to spot a desperate organization. Poor results and careless planning are the classic signs of a hopeless situation. A bleak outlook doesn’t make a compelling case for support.

Law #10: The law of uncertainty. People will do whatever they please. To paraphrase an old expression, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink or give.” Likewise, “don’t count your chickens before they hatch.”

In each of the next installments of this series of posts, I will take one law and relate it to three fundamental populations associated with colleges or universities. These populations are prospective students, students, and alumni. I believe the time-proven laws of fundraising have direct application to the process of recruitment, which is the locating and enrolling of a viable student population; to the process of retention, which is assisting enrolled students complete their education goals at your institution; and to the process of alumni development, which is cultivating former students, helping them develop as professionals and life-long learners, and growing them into institutional supporters.

I begin this series of posts with a shout out of thanks to a former colleague, Rebekah Basinger, for a post on her blog Generous Matters  entitled 10 time-proven laws of fundraising. Rebekah’s post began with a statement that had a very familiar ring. “While cleaning out a file cabinet that hasn’t been touched for several years, I came across…” Within the past two years, I have had to pack up my library and 40 years of work files. As I carefully examined the books and files, “I came across” many books and files that I had not thought about for years. Although the ideas from these items were not at the front of my mind, nor on the tip of my tongue, they were not foreign to me. I had saved these books and files for a reason, and as I scanned them, those reasons came back to me.

Rebekah’s found treasure was an article dated 2003, entitled The Ten Immutable Laws of the (fundraising) Universe. She continued her post with a comment which constantly rings true in the academy: “I’m reminded that the more things change in our world, the more they stay the same.” Experience teaches us that the near future is closely tied to the immediate past. In an upcoming series of posts that I have tentatively entitled, “The Future of the Academy,” I will be playing off of that idea in discussions of the structure, form, purpose, economics and outcomes of higher education.

Rebekah’s post quotes Carl Richardson, the author of the original article, by suggesting that fundraising is “guided by certain provable statements.” Rebekah brings the topic up-to-date by observing that Richardson’s time-tested laws still determine the success of today’s fundraising efforts.

My initial reaction to the Ten Laws of Fundraising was that these ten principles were applicable to three other aspects of academic life. These laws could be applied directly to admissions, retention and alumni relations. As I thought about these three aspects of academic life, I was drawn to an analogy of the life stages of butterflies to the development of successful and engaged alumni. I then constructed my metaphor comparing prospective students, students, and alumni to caterpillars, pupa, and butterflies. These developmental levels represent the life stages of alumni and butterflies.

In order to keep each of my posts to a reasonable length which makes them easier to read on mobile devices, I have decided that I must extend this series of posts to at least 15 posts. The current plan is to have Part II as the development of the metaphor comparing alumni development to the life cycle of butterflies. Part III will be a synopsis of the ten laws of fund raising that sparked my original interest in this topic, with some comments reflecting my thoughts on fundraising.

In Parts IV through XIII, I will address each of the ten laws as it relates to the three groups of people of special interest to colleges.  For each of the laws, I will note similarities and differences in how colleges must interact with prospective students, students, and alumni.

In Parts XIV and XV, I plan to return to a discussion of how a college or university can implement a coordinated program to develop successful and engaged alumni. Since many of these posts are already written, I should be able to complete the publication of this series of posts within the next three weeks.