mini-campaigns

There are few things that I consistently speak about and focus on internally and externally as often as mini-campaigns. I look upon these as discreet focused efforts to accomplish a discrete goal. In higher education, we often take these on to complete endowment of a scholarship or faculty chair. The current trend is to look at causes based on or connected to your campus that you can support this way.

This trend is something that I see as an overall positive - it moves us as an industry in the direction of making a case for support, moving away from the historical "because you owe us" loyalty argument. While that line of reasoning was successful for a number of years, to me it is now right up there with "to increase our US News ranking", old, played out and really, really, really weak for younger (defined as since the early 90s) alumni.

Most of the folks who graduated in the last 20 years did so with substantial loan debt, no matter how successful your fundraising efforts, they saw the out of pocket cost for their education increase rapidly, in some cases by 2 digit percentages each year they were in school. As we all know, for the most part, (there are exceptions to every rule) this is a portion of the alumni body that is no where near as consistent with financial support as our older alumni.

Try breaking them up into mini campaigns. Take a look at what they did as students, identify some of the causes that they may have been interested in and find the students currently associated with those causes - utilize those students to tell the story as to why the alums should support that area.

No data? Try a targeted PURL campaign - let your alumni identify that they are interested (by responding) which causes they were interested in as students and are interested in today (survey questions) and provide them with the opportunity to raise their hand as volunteers for that cause today (information or thank you page in the PURL.)

Easy, quick, simple and affordable - usually can be done for less than $1.50 per alum - money that you will more than make up over the next 24-36 months through funding appeals, often just from new donors!