Institutional Advancement Benchmarks, 2015 Edition

The 185-page study presents highly detailed data form a survey of the advancement offices of 35 North American colleges and universities. The report helps its readers to answer questions such as: What are trends in advancement office budgets? Number of positions allocated? Spending on various fundraising vehicles or methods? How much are colleges spending on direct mail? Telephone solicitation? On web-based methods? How successful are the pursuit of bequests? Brick campaigns? What is the marginal cost of funds raised for various institutions? How effective are appeals to faculty, staff and students? How much do such campaigns raise? Data in the report is broken out by type and size of college, by level of tuition and other variables for easier benchmarking. Just a few of the report’s many findings are that: • Mean spending on telephone solicitation for the colleges sampled was $31,814 in the past year. The median was $8,000 and the range, 0 to $255,550. • Athletic booster clubs in private colleges raised a mean $2,563,700.00 and median $50,000 with a range of $0-$17,255,863.00. Public colleges, on the other hand, raised a mean of $174,285.71 with a median $20,000 in a range of $0-$1,000,000. • 12.90% of colleges sampled said that over the past three years their use of direct mail had increased by less than 10% while 9.68% said it had increased by more than 10%. • Private colleges spent more than double the amount public colleges did for the online element of their Annual Fund drive. The range for private colleges was $0-$10,000 with a mean of $3,312.50 while the range for public colleges was $0-$5,000 with a mean of just $1,277.78. • The marginal cost of funds raised (excludes fixed costs such as salaries and overhead) was 11.65%.