Rethinking Student Philanthropy

Article by CMAC Vice President and Senior Consultant Howard Heevner M.Ed., Executive Director of Annual Programs at UC Berkeley.

One of my first projects as a professional staff member that didn’t involve running the student phone program was to devise a student philanthropy program. I did what we all do. I called other schools for advice. I "Yahoo’d" some things (Google didn't exist yet). I borrowed from the student affairs world. I tried to build my understanding of how to make an impact in this space. 

Over the next many years, I helped build many different student philanthropy programs. I funded countless cookies decorated with philanthropy facts. I supported printing t-shirts with clever phrases on them for giveaways like, “Philanthropy: Hard to say! Easy to do!” I collaborated on activities that would illustrate the impact of philanthropy on students' lives, like covering up the many senior class gifts on the Penn State University Park campus. Yet despite all of that work, post-graduation giving continued to crater. A couple of years ago, I had an epiphany and declared, “I will fund no more cookies!” 

It was time for a different approach.

First, we needed to look at where we were already having success. Students were enthusiastically participating in giving day and crowdfunding. Second, we got realistic about success. 

We realized that we didn’t have to reach every student. We didn’t even have to reach half of the students. If we could build a bridge to 25% of them, it would be incredibly impactful. Finally, we noted that our greatest outcome of these programs was not the dollars raised, but the opportunity to prove we could be trusted with students' resources. We had to prove that we had high integrity and that we valued the dollars they gave us. We had to show them that the system was in place to ensure that their dollars made it to where they intended them to go.

In the past few years, we've determined that the best thing to do moving forward is to make sure that students who are involved in our giving day and crowdfunding programs are having an experiential learning process. The experience they have as a student shows them that their dollars end up in the funds they care about; that experience builds trust in the greater system. While it may be a less fun version of a student philanthropy program, I feel much more confident in the impact it will have on our future alumni.

Ask: "What do students need to know?"

If our goal is to have more philanthropically-informed alumni, then we need to think about what we want to inform them about while they are students. In my opinion, we need to focus more on building trust in the philanthropic process and less on educating about the impact of philanthropy, which was the previous ethos of our programs.

We need to leverage digital giving programs to build experiential learning opportunities for students. They'll learn to understand the entire philanthropic structure while they are highly invested in raising funds for programs they are passionate about and personally involved in. This is where giving days and crowdfunding create opportunities for us to really explain how the giving process works and to more deeply ingrain in our students what happens on the donor side AND on the "back end" - on the actual administration side. 

That's the kind of trust that will build a foundation for a stronger future and keep post-graduation giving from slipping.

Does this thinking align with your strategy for student philanthropy education? Drop us a line!