Preferred Name
Michael Speight
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Date of Graduation
5-6-2021
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
School of Strategic Leadership Studies
Advisor(s)
Benjamin S. Selznick
Margaret F. Sloan
William Ritchie
Abstract
Little research has uncovered clear results on why post-secondary alumni give or which alumni might be more inclined to give. The most significant predictor of future giving for alumni to their alma mater is past giving (Okunade and Justice, 1991). This creates an unfortunate situation for today’s post-secondary leader, where they need to be more reliant on fundraising results to overcome budget shortfalls while knowing their fundraising staffs only have the ability to determine the likelihood of an alumni to give through meeting with them. This problem is only more exacerbated for public post-secondary leader, who has dealt with dwindling state support for years (Mitchell et al., 2018). The goal of this analysis was to see if we could identify alumni more likely to donate based on involvement in certain student activity types. From there, those involved in fundraising and leading post-secondary institutions could then have segmented group of alumni more likely to donate that they can focus solicitations on. In this analysis multiple logistic regressions are conducted to show the impact of participating in at least one of eight student activity types on making at least one gift six to nine years removed from graduation. The findings show that involvement in any of the eight student activity types measured will increase the likelihood of alumni giving, with those participating in varsity sport, greek, or campus leadership activities being over 2 times more likely to give.
Recommended Citation
Speight, Michael, "Analysis of alumni giving based on student activity involvement: Multivariate logistic regression modeling" (2021). Dissertations, 2020-current. 35.
https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/diss202029/35
