The March (Alumni Giving) Madness Brackets

Updated: April 6 to include results for the men’s and women’s brackets.

March Madness is upon us, and Ruffalo Noel Levitz is enjoying all the excitement. We have quite a few client partners who have been part of the men’s and women’s tournaments, and it’s been great to see all the excitement on campus and with alumni supporters and fans.

Last week, I got a call from RNL pal Jason Finney, asking an interesting question:

What if the NCAA brackets were decided based on alumni giving statistics?

I thought this was a fun question, and since I spend a lot of time doing research from giving statistics in the Voluntary Support of Education Survey and other great sources, I decided to take a look.

First, I had to determine how each matchup would be decided. One way to do the brackets would have been to decide winners among the 64 institutions on just one stat: alumni participation. With incredible contenders in this year’s men’s and women’s tournaments like Princeton, College of the Holy Cross, Yale, The University of Notre Dame and Duke—institutions that enjoy some of the highest annual alumni giving participation rates in higher education—the results would have been a foregone conclusion.

Then I noticed Villanova, USC, and others nipping at their heels with incredible alumni donor growth over the past decade. All of these institutions mentioned so far have a lot to be proud of, having established a real culture of philanthropy with alumni. In fact, alumni from all the institutions in the men’s and women’s brackets gave nearly 3 billion last year.

So, while these institutions all have a lot to be proud of, I still had to devise a way to determine winners by considering both long-term and recent alumni giving success.

The game plan: Scoring alumni participation rates and other factors

I think we love March Madness because it’s all about surprises, underdog stories, and a complex interplay of team strengths and challenges. Like a giving program, there are lots of moving parts on a successful basketball team, so I decided to capture that with a four-part methodology to determine the winner in each bracket matchup:

• Overall team strength: the 2015 alumni participation figure reported to the VSE survey—this is the raw number of alumni givers divided by total alumni of record. It differs a little from the way other rankings indicators are calculated or how you might calculate participation for your annual report.
• Upward momentum going into the tournament: the increase or decline in alumni donor count from 2014 to 2015. This gave institutions that have had recent success a fighting chance.
• Recruiting strength and past tournament performance: Appearing in the NCAA tournament is a culmination of years of work. So I also took a bit of a more long-term look, using the total increase or decline in alumni donors between 2007 and 2015. This gave institutions that have done tough work since the recession to grow donors some credit.
• A strong bench of dedicated team members: Because what your full team is giving can be so important, I went with a giving total on this one. I utilized the total alumni giving in dollars divided by the alumni of record over the last three fiscal years (2013-15) to iron out any one-year blips in giving.
• The tiebreaker: When an institution couldn’t win on three of these four stats, or we didn’t have enough data to make a judgment, we “went to the tape” and utilized a comparison between the two institutions’ online giving portals, deciding based on how easy it was for an alumnus to “get a shot off” and make a gift. A few institutions won at the buzzer through this tiebreaker.

I primarily utilized statistics from the VSE survey. However, since not all the institutions in these brackets report every stat to the VSE, I also headed to school websites to look at annual donor reports and review alumni participation numbers submitted for the US News rankings when data were missing. Each of these sources looks at alumni giving in a different way, so there were judgments to be made.

I was the primary ref for the bracket, and relied upon two stats pros here at Ruffalo Noel Levitz (Josh Robertson and Jason Finney) to vote on approval for any calls I made. Since institutions can be a bit sensitive about their giving stats, we’ve presented the bracket with the winners, but we’re not publishing the play by play. (If you are on the list and want a little color commentary, send me an email).

Click here for the March (Alumni Giving) Madness bracket

There were some real surprises in these year’s March (Alumni Giving) Madness tournament:

• One institution came in at a huge deficit vs. their well-established opponent. They had only half the 2015 alumni participation percentage but pulled ahead with a recent upward donor trend. They were eventually overwhelmed by their opponent’s incredibly high giving per alumnus. But they put up a good fight and have built up some great bench potential for the coming years.
• There were some big mismatches on offense: One institution posted a 49% increase in alumni donors over the past eight years, and this made it a close game, but they weren’t able to overcome their opponent’s long-established alumni giving pattern. Another institution posted a massive endgame rally with a 52% increase in alumni donors for 2015. These were close games and these teams are geared up for future tournament success as their alumni donors grow in giving over time.
• There were some huge upsets, where institutions that had significantly higher 2015 alumni participation lost to institutions that have had real donor growth both recently and over the past eight years. The losing institutions still have a strong culture of philanthropy, but they need to watch their bench game or their competitive advantage could erode quickly.

The winners of this year’s alumni giving tournament are…

Men’s bracket: The University of Notre Dame. In a close final matchup between two of the highest alumni participation rates in the nation, Notre Dame prevailed by a slim margin. Recent large alumni gifts helped propel them over the edge. Their new online giving page also offers a number of options for givers, including a new giving form with specific options for young alumni, athletics, and business and law grads. Although Notre Dame made it all the way to the Elite 8 this year in the basketball tournament, they won the championship based on alumni giving and our methodology.

Women’s bracket: Princeton University. With one of the longest-established alumni giving traditions in higher education, no competitor could face Princeton’s alumni participation, donor growth and high giving per alumnus. In fact, Princeton was listed by the VSE survey as the #8 top fundraising institution in the nation for 2015, and regularly makes it into this top group. We talk a lot about establishing giving as part of the lifetime experience for alumni, and there is no doubt that Princeton has done this. To quote their annual giving page: “The success of Annual Giving reflects the spirit of shared experience and mutual encouragement, as each generation of Princetonians preserves the legacy of opportunity it received, strengthens it, and passes it on.” Princeton’s generous and loyal alumni win them this year’s women’s bracket tournament.

What I learned from March (Alumni Giving) Madness

While this exercise was primarily a fun look at the giving stats of this year’s tournament participants, my examination of the data brought home some important points about the alumni donor pipeline:

• Alumni participation is declining nationwide, and this is fueled by real donor decline at many institutions. This is scary, because we know about three quarters of our major gifts and bequests come from annual donors. Without a robust “bench” of loyal givers, we could really be suffering in future decades. We talked about this in a recent webinar, The Threat of Declining Alumni Giving Rates to Higher Education Fundraising.
• We’re able to find and reach alumni at an extraordinary rate, but we’re not capturing donors as quickly. Alumni rolls grew by 3.4% last year on average, but alumni donors only increased by .7%. We have some work to do.
• Institutions that have built up a real culture of giving and encouraged more alumni to give consistently really do show some incredible total giving numbers. Building up that culture through giving programs that capture alumni passion, make giving personal and also easy are really important.
• These matchups were complicated. We had to go for the tiebreaker 10 times in the men’s bracket and 7 times in the women’s, and many institutions with great alumni participation were forced into a tie with a bracket competitor because of recent alumni donor growth or very generous recent alumni giving totals. There are a lot of moving parts to the alumni giving equation.
• There are many underdog stories. It doesn’t matter whether you are public or private, have a huge endowment or a more modest one, you can definitely move the needle on alumni giving and build an upward trend. It takes work, a carefully crafted message, solicitation plan, and great donor stewardship, but you definitely have a chance at winning.

In higher education, we’re not really in competition with each other for alumni donors. And the statistics used for this activity aren’t the only ways to look at alumni giving. This exercise was more of a fun way to talk about how important a robust alumni giving base is to your fundraising. With alumni providing a significant portion of higher education contributions, a strategy to keep and maintain alumni donors is definitely important to every institution.

If you want to start getting your alumni giving in shape for next year’s tournament, get in touch with us. We have some winning game plans to share.

P.S. If you are not submitting your alumni giving data to the VSE Survey or aren’t sure that you are, email Ann Kaplan, survey director. Make sure your institution is ready for next year’s bracket!