Jeffrey L. Stinson

Intercollegiate Athletics as an Institutional Fundraising Tool: An Exploratory Donor-Based View

Previous research has indicated that intercollegiate athletics programs may be successful at attracting new donors to higher education institutions. Research has also shown that major donors who support both athletic and academic programs at an institution give more total dollars to the institution than other donors and are retained at higher rates. Through 65 in-depth interviews with donors making gifts to both athletic and academic programs at NCAA FBS (top athletic division) institutions, this exploratory research seeks to understand how intercollegiate programs influence donor decisions. Donors were questioned as to their motives for giving, specific changes in their historical giving patterns, and their future giving intentions. Several consistent themes emerged from donor interviews that provide insight into previous empirical findings and direction for both fundraising practice and future research.

The Role of Mental Budgeting in Philanthropic Decision-Making

Mental budgeting (also known as mental accounting) has examined how consumers allocate and expend resources. However, the mental budgeting literature has not yet examined the availability and use of mental budgets for philanthropic, as opposed to day-to-day, consumption. Depth interviews with donors in both the United States and Canada reveal that donors do maintain mental budgets for philanthropy, that charitable gifts are expensed against the mental budget for philanthropy as well as against other budgets, and that donors’ mental budgets are malleable. Study findings extend the literature on the management and malleability of mental budgets, and provide insight to nonprofit organizations (NPO) to better position appeals to maximize donations and strengthen long-term donor relationships.

Mental Budgeting and Charitable Giving: Matching Motives with Budgets to Maximize Giving

For the second straight year, American corporations, foundations and individuals donated over

Leveraging Intercollegiate Athletics to Support Academic Giving at NCAA Division I Institutions

300 million in charitable gifts (Wasley 2009). In Canada, fundraising continues to reach record levels. According to the 2007 Canadian Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating (CSGVP), Canadians donated

Examining a Word-Of-Mouth Model in Participant Sport

10 billion, a 12% increase in donations over the previous survey conducted in 2004 (Hall et al. 2009), while 84% of adult Canadians reported making a financial, charitable contribution during the year. Other data is not as positive. The average number of gifts Canadian donors made in 2007 fell to 3.8 annually from 4.3 gifts in 2004. Additionally only 25% of Canadians donated more than

Athletic Giving and Academic Giving: Examining the Value of Split Donors to Educational Institutions

364 a year to charitable organizations. The remaining 75% donate, on average, less than one half of one percent of their income to charity. In the U.S., the number of new donors has fallen by 13.8% (Hall 2009). Thus, while fundraising continues to grow in both participation and donation magnitude, there appears to be a significant amount of unrealized potential for nonprofit organizations to increase fundraising.

University Branding: The Contribution of Intercollegiate Athletics

ABSTRACT On average, National Collegiate Athletic Association Football Bowl Division (top-level of U.S. Intercollegiate athletics) schools raise 15% of their athletic budget from private fundraising. Key questions remain as to how increased emphasis on athletic fundraising influences academic giving. Some authors claim symbiotic effects while others assert that athletic gifts “crowd out” academic giving. The current study analyzes the largest single-institution set of individual donor data available to date. First time donors were more than twice as likely to give to athletics as academics. Fifty-one percent of donors making gifts to both athletics and academics (SPLIT donors) made their initial gift to athletics. Problematically, the conversion rate of athletic-only to split donors has fallen to less than 1%. On three different retention measures split donors have higher retention rates than athletic-only donors, who have higher retention rates than academic-only donors. Among split donors, 41.67% give their largest gift to support an academic program. Rather than competing, development officers would be better advised to systematically cultivating donors to support both athletics and academics.

Athletic Success and Private Giving to Athletic and Academic Programs at NCAA Institutions

Previous research on the antecedents and consequences of consumer word-of-mouth behavior in the sport industry is sparse. Pritchard (2003) identified a significant role for word-of-mouth (WOM) behavior in the tourism industry finding that performance positively influenced satisfaction and word-of-mouth behavior, which in turn influenced repatronage intentions. The current study seeks to extend this line of research, more directly examining the antecedents of WOM in a participatory sport context.

Scoreboards vs. Mortarboards: Major Donor Behavior and Intercollegiate Athletics

A recent report issued by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education noted the decline in state support as a large reason for the increased attention paid to private support of colleges and universities. Both the American Council on Education and the Council for Aid to Education have noted that private support cannot itself replace state support for public universities (Chronicle of Higher Education 2006). Many factors prevent the widespread use of private contributions to offset increased expenditures and/or declining state support. First, the growth in private support is not equally distributed. The top ten institutions in fundraising (only two of which are public) account for over 50% of the growth in donations (Strout 2007). Further, the growth is driven primarily by increases in average gift size as opposed to increases in the number of donors making gifts. Finally, many donors direct or restrict their gifts for use by certain programs, making it difficult to use the increased support to offset many increased operating expenditures (Strout 2007). The increased prevalence of athletic fundraising provides one such example. In some cases, all or a substantial portion of an institution’s growth in private support is being directed to the school’s athletics programs (Stinson and Howard 2007). Together, these factors place increased pressure on institutional fundraisers to maximize the financial support provided by donors. A 2004 study of donors at the University of Oregon identified that SPLIT donors (donors giving to both Athletic and Academic programs) made larger gifts to the institution than their counterparts supporting only athletic or academic programs. The purpose of this paper is to examine the value of SPLIT donors to the institution in more detail.

Winning Does Matter: Patterns in Private Giving to Athletic and Academic Programs at NCAA Division I-AA and I-AAA Institutions

A recent ESPN campaign included a mock Duke University advertisement that conveyed the significant contribution of intercollegiate athletics to institutional brand equity at even the most prestigious academic institutions. The ad positioned Duke’s athletic feats as more relevant and important to prospective students and their parents than the school’s academic reputation; yet, with the exception of Alessandri (2007), the literature has not explicitly considered the contributions of intercollegiate athletics in building University brands. To date, authors that have studied brand equity in intercollegiate athletics have almost universally considered branding as it relates to building team brand equity (Gladden, Milne & Sutton, 1998; Ross, 2006), as opposed to the contribution of athletic brands to institutional brand equity.