Author:
An Observer
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Date Posted: 12:37:09 10/04/24 Fri
Warren Buffett famously said that the secret to a long marriage is low expectations.
As an aside, in the specific case of Mr Buffett, the secret to his long marriage was almost immediately physically but not legally leaving his wife Susan and then living the rest of his life with his girlfriend Astrid, whom he married not long after Susan passed four decades after they separated. So that's something to keep in mind in terms of managing one's marriage.
Spuyten Duyvil is of course correct that this data needs to be interpreted in context.
The rumblings coming out of HYP strongly suggest that their own well-oiled fundraising machines are not hitting on all cylinders. But the explanation is almost universally that the younger classes of alumni, say, the first five years after graduation, account for the weakness. (One development officer told me diplomatically, "Some of these students come from backgrounds without a well-developed culture of giving.")
That should hit the percentage of alumni who give, but much less so the amount raised, since the younger alumni typically account for smaller dollar totals.
Columbia was down 27.9% in NUMBER of gifts compared to the last Giving Day in 2022 and down 35.1% compared to the peak year in 2021.
More damning is that Columbia was down 28.7% in DOLLARS compared to 2022.
Those are catastrophic numbers. I defy any development officer at any American fundraising organization to call a 28.7% decline in dollars as anything other than a disaster.
We will indeed see what other Ivies and other selective universities report over the next few months.
The Spec article graphed the annual dollars raised in every campaign from 2012 to 2024, including the one-year gap in 2023. Every year showed a higher total than the year before. That includes 2020 during the worst of the pandemic when nobody was sure whether we'd ever go back to a normal pre-pandemic work environment. 2020 was up relative to 2019 and 2021 was up relative to 2020. Same with 2022.
I could actually make a case that 2024 should benefit from some mitigation in DOLLARS raised because there was no campaign in 2023. You know, an officer could say, "I didn't ask you for money last year. Would you consider a larger gift this campaign?"
Spuyten may be 100% that other universities will report numbers as bad or worse than these. That would surprise me, but these are unusual times. But the numbers in the Spec are a disaster, whether they are reported by Columbia, HYP or UConn.
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