"While public two-year colleges have been faced with increasing enrollment demands, the amount of direct financial support received from their state governments decreased. With the college president as chief fundraiser, these institutions...
more"While public two-year colleges have been faced with increasing enrollment demands, the amount of direct financial support received from their state governments decreased. With the college president as chief fundraiser, these institutions have embarked on private fundraising programs to address these deficits. The public two-year colleges have fared not as well as four-year colleges or the K-12 public school systems in legislative funding and have less well developed external fundraising capabilities. Further, much emphasis is placed on community college presidents’ fundraising abilities although the majority of the presidents have little fundraising training or experience.
Conclusions and Recommendations
From the literature reviewed and the results of the survey conducted, it seems clear that the increasing professionalism of the development office at community colleges is key to their success. Even though two-year colleges have been late to get into the fundraising business, this study shows that the potential is there to be successful for community colleges of any size, age or locale.
Implications for Theory
The results of this study corroborate the Worth and Asp Vector Paradigm. Both that theory and the study results presented here assert that foundations increase in effectiveness as they develop over time. This is accomplished through the status of the director and the staffing of the foundation, as well as its time in existence.
Implications for Practice
First, establish a foundation or endowment corporation for the community college as soon as possible, if it does not have one. The correlation shown between foundation assets and foundation age suggests that this function has the ability to have success over the longer term. While a community college foundation cannot “instantly” mature, the longer the college waits to get serious about fundraising efforts, the more likely it is to miss opportunities and the longer it will take for an endowment to grow.
Second, make the director of the fundraising operation a full-time position, either at the inception of the position or as an upgrade to whatever college official is currently overseeing the foundation as a part-time responsibility. The survey responses clearly show the positive impact of full-time effort in managing development activities.
Third, provide adequate staff for the development office. Again, the survey shows a strong connection between size of foundation staff and size of endowment balance. With more people active in the fundraising office, all activities can be performed with greater community penetration. This would mean more prospect management, more direct contact with professional donors, and more people going throughout the community making the funding appeal.
Recommendations for Further Research
While universities can work their alumni base and draw larger gifts from philanthropic foundations, community colleges, by their nature, are linked to the community in which they operate. Since per capita income did not prove to be a useful gauge of a community’s giving potential, some other measure must either be found or developed. Since many gifts to community colleges take the nature of fee-for-service training grants from local business and industry, it would be interesting to find an equivalent figure to per capita income that would be an indicator of local commercial wealth instead of personal wealth and see if that correlates to fundraising success. Potential figures that could be used would be the total valuation of the county’s taxable property base, the total sales tax revenue reported in the county, and the total payroll for non-public employers. These could be obtained from open source public records.
More difficult to measure would be the value of manufactured goods in a county that is more based on that kind of industry than on retail or service. Totaling the first three figures of property tax base, sales tax revenue and non-public payroll would generate a figure that could be representative of local commercial wealth. Then, a correlation analysis of county commercial wealth to foundation assets could be performed.
Much is known about the career development path for community college presidents but little about how development officers trained and selected. Are they existing college officials who have been assigned fundraising duty and then stay with it if they are successful? Or, are the development officers professional fundraisers from other sectors such as health care or social services who have the technical skills but little background concerning community colleges?
Building a characteristic profile of successful community college development officers might be a useful guide to future presidents looking to hire chief development officers. The same type of analysis of presidents would be useful to perform on development officers. Among the characteristics to collect would be years in college fundraising, years in fundraising in any industry, highest degree obtained, previous position held, number of persons supervised, and title of the position in the college. From this information, a composite profile of community college development officers could be built.
It might also be beneficial to do parallel studies of development officers and foundations at public universities to see if there are noticeable differences between two-year and four-year institutions. Such a study should also include questions about the type and proportion of activities performed. This should include alumni campaigns, annual campaigns, capital campaigns, special fundraising events, planned giving and donor cultivation. The mix of activities by class of institution and the resulting fundraising success would be especially enlightening and may present unconsidered options for community college fundraisers. "