In the San Fernando Valley of Southern California, the entire community participates in Youth Art Month through the Annual Valley Wide Student Art Show. The mission of the show is to provide students with an opportunity to exhibit their work publicly and to promote school arts programs during Youth Art Month. Apart from promoting arts education…

State support for colleges and universities has been in decline since the 1970s. Institutions of higher learning have been forced to rely increasingly on private gifts to balance their budgets. The private gifts are managed by each school's foundation, a separate non-profit entity that exists to raise money for its respective institution. The…

Alumni relations professionals need a method of measuring alumni engagement, including giving, that goes beyond counting event attendees and the number of Twitter followers. Social media are changing the way things have been done within the alumni relations profession, but that does not mean that people throw out everything they have done in the…

Christian institutions of higher education, as with other American nonprofits, are under considerable financial stress. The purpose of this research, which included both a survey of development officers and conversations with a sample of CCCU presidents, vice presidents of development, or provosts, was to identify best practices in fundraising.…

I show herein how to develop fundable proposals to support your research. Although the proposal strategy I discuss is commonly used in successful proposals, most junior faculty (and many senior scholars) in political science and other social sciences seem to be unaware of it. I dispel myths about funding, and discuss how to find funders and target…

The author shares the story of La-Keya Williams, a junior at Spelman College who has found a donor willing to help her out for the funds she needed to continue her education. Shortly after classes ended last summer, Ms. Williams realized she would have a hard time coming up with the roughly $36,000 needed to pay for her junior year. She took a…

The new strategic paradigm of resource development described in this paper recognizes that there are a number of important resources, in addition to financial ones, that are important to support the mission and to achieve the vision of a nonprofit organization, such as a college or university. It acknowledges and utilizes board members, with…

YoungStar is a program of the Department of Children and Families (DCF) created to improve the quality of child care for Wisconsin children. YoungStar is designed to: (1) Evaluate and rate the quality of care given by child care providers; (2) Help parents choose the best child care for their kids; (3) Support providers with tools and training to…

This monograph examines the philanthropic contributions of individuals through the existing literature and proposes future philanthropic and fundraising research that can help fill the theoretical void in the literature, thereby improving future research and fundraising in higher education. It covers the major approaches, topics, and theories…

The author examined the relationship between alumni giving and membership in a dues-based alumni association. The researcher used the chi-square test of association to analyze population data derived from the database of a public doctoral-granting research university in the South. The study unveiled a relationship between membership and giving,…

There is growing acknowledgement in higher education, particularly among institutions experiencing a steady decline in giving by graduates, that alumni donors need to be cultivated while they are students. If a school wants to have a generous alumni body giving time and money once they graduate, they need to be aware of the importance of…

The current discourse on community college leadership makes much ado about the "new normal," or the collective influence of the social, economic, and political conditions under which people advance their organizations. To succeed in a changed environment, community colleges--many confronted with drastic budget cuts--must find ways to raise money…

Multiple contexts interact to position any school on a spectrum from cumulatively advantaged to cumulatively disadvantaged. This article discusses a study of the contextual advantages and disadvantages experienced by primary schools in the south east of England, concentrating especially on schools in the least deprived 5% of schools nationally.…

Peter Wylie is a man of many contradictions: a statistician and a storyteller, an introvert who loves an audience, and a self-described data geek with a passion for his work and the people it helps. Wylie is one of the pioneers of predictive modeling, the statistical analysis that uses data to drive educational institutions and nonprofits toward…

"Commerce" and "finance" are not the broadest or most dynamic words in the lexicon of business. And yet, when this author became dean of the business school at Villanova University in 2005, that was precisely the language the school was using to advertise itself to the world. The Villanova College of Commerce & Finance, as…