Universities contacting alumni for donations

Just got off the phone with a student who asked me all about my time at uni etc but at the end of the call it seemed that real motive was to ask for a donation. Any one else had this?

Yep, just ask to be removed from that particular listing in their database

Or give them a few mill and ask for it to be called the Caher School of Bicycle Maintenance

I first had this about 30 years ago, so its not  a new thing…………….

Not by phone. I’m sure I once had a letter/magazine from my former uni with info about stuff and a page where you could donate cash to their establishment. I doubt I’ll ever donate to the uni. Unless I win the Euromillions lottery and then I’ll donate £50. Winky eye emoji. ?

I first had this about 30 years ago, so its not  a new thing…………….

Oldest, sort of surviving one is from 597AD apparently

@susepic – that worked for Philip Harris, carpet-seller extraordinaire at Oxford, where his funding resulted in Manchester college becoming Manchester Harris college. Linacre was very recently planning to rename itself after a Vietnamese airline owner on the promise of almost £200M, bit it never showed up.

Oh dog yeah it’s been going on for years, though I haven’t had any calls recently.

Absolutely the norm – I get it from Nottingham Trent, where I graduated from in 2005, and Oxford Brooks, where I attended for about a month in 1987 when it was still Oxford Polytechnic!

Jnr did it when he was studying at Cambridge – mailshots went out in advance so people were expecting calls, he enjoyed the experience. And they get some BIG donations!

The university i work at (an ex-poly) has an alumni team of 5 people and spend about 10% of their time on fundraising.

I was chatting to a staff member of a Russell Group uni who said their alumni team was about 50 people, of which most were dedicated to fundraising….

I had the same from my secondary school, years ago. Nice enough conversation, shortly got to the subject of “we’re building a new [whatever department it was]…..” and asking for donations from its successful alumni as a way of “paying back”.

Yeah my place does that too. I went back and worked at the same uni so that got pretty funny, I ended up sending one of the fundraisers off to speak to a colleague because she was blatantly on the wrong course, and another one admitted she was stressed out by the calling so I got her a job in my team instead. And all the fundraiser convos ended with me going “I work for a university and therefore I have no money”.

Usually fairly easy money for the students though and can look good on a bare cv. I guess some might be actual volunteers, ours got the living wage. There was always kind of a weird subculture of “students who are totally failing their course but have made themselves essential to 4 or 5 different departments by working there part time” who you know fine well will never leave.

Jnr did it when he was studying at Cambridge – mailshots went out in advance so people were expecting calls, he enjoyed the experience. And they get some BIG donations!

One of our previous Chairman has a building named after him at Cambridge: https://www.hauserforum.com/about-us

£8m was just pocket money for him…

Ladt time i had it i

I and the rest of the rugby team donated enough to the bar we should have got a bar named after us.

university i work at (an ex-poly) has an alumni team of 5 people and spend about 10% of their time on fundraising.

What does the alumni team do for the other 90% of the time? Genuine question. I thought the whole point of an alumni team is fundraising.

I had the same from my secondary school, years ago. Nice enough conversation, shortly got to the subject of “we’re building a new [whatever department it was]…..” and asking for donations from its successful alumni as a way of “paying back”.

I’d definitely like to give my secondary school some payback…

Yeah I got a phone call once a few years ago. Nothing since although I am on the alumni mailing and emailing lists for magazine and events.

I don’t get phone calls but I do get mailings from my undergrad and post-grad unis. I’m normally very careful not to give permission to be contacted and on top of this I’ve moved house several times since graduation. How do they know where I am?

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What does the alumni team do for the other 90% of the time? Genuine question. I thought the whole point of an alumni team is fundraising.

So my guys were a smaller team but they also dealt with distribution of funds, they ran a bunch of scholarships and grants and such and also sometimes with bigger donations they’d be involved with those projects. Also ran the alumni club which was, fundamentally, fundraising with a bunch of extra steps, just a way of keeping people engaged and making them feel like they got something back personally from membership and donations.

It probably varies quite a lot, this, my place had very few rich and famous graduates so they were almost always chasing small funds rather than building sized donations. If you’re old money that’d change a lot.

Probably depends on the university, but at Cambridge Jnr got a bursary from the alumni set up due to our income, and was sort of allocated a “sponsor” who acted as an additional mentor.

Not sure he’ll earn enough to have a building named after him, but he’s been involved with outreach projects to schools in poorer areas to attract and support disadvantaged students, so it’s circle of life kind of stuff.

Oh dog yeah it’s been going on for years, though I haven’t had any calls recently

I get loads of these calls, constantly being hounded by them.

Yeah my place does that too. I went back and worked at the same uni so that got pretty funny

I got a PGCert in learning and teaching (effectively new lecturer training) from my current employer. So I get those calls and emails too, always amuses me.

What does the alumni team do for the other 90% of the time? Genuine question. I thought the whole point of an alumni team is fundraising.

A few bits – as someone said, there are scholarships and bursaries for those eligible to administer. There are also benefits for recent(ish) alumni, like career coaching, business support, even CV feedback, stuff like that.  The alumni team don’t run those obviously, but they promote them and do comms work to inform graduates about them. So they also manage the alumni content on the website (some of which is student-facing as well as external).

They also run an alumni database where successful alums can sign up to be contacted by younger alumni for advice or even mentorship.

Then there are certain events / meetups some of which they organise and others that they just attend, and the general ‘fostering of community’ angle with newsletters and updates. The main newsletter goes to around 100K people so a lot of work goes into that to make it look good and be interesting. And they try to keep tabs on all the alumni societies set up by former International students, just to ensure that they don’t go too crazily rogue with stuff that has our logo on it.

And finally there is the marketing angle – they try to keep up with any successful alumni who might consent to being on the website or in other materials, perhaps get a quote or even get them speaking at an event. But as an ex-poly this can be tricky! One of our more famous alumni is an extremely well-connected Baroness and member of the Chipping Norton/Westminster axis.  But she doesn’t like to publicly acknowledge that she when to a former tech…

I attended an alumni event a while back and this was discussed. The proposal was to increase student/alumni industry relations via mentorship initially as no-one had any spare funds anyway to donate. This seems reasonable, donating time instead of money if folk could do it. Obviously it will vary from subject to subject.

Yeah, had this several years ago from my old school asking for a donation to fund scholarships. I had spare cash and benefitted from a scholarship when I was there, so I said yes.

Never had it from Uni. I think they know I would say no.

Having gone to uni pre mobile phones and email addresses I’d imagine I’d be tricky to trace. Assuming those that get these calls bothered to join the alumni association (Loughborough – I don’t even recall there being one, let alone how you’d join) or list your uni in LinkedIn…or something…

I did this as a part time job whilst I was a post-grad student at Leicester University in the early 90s.
Effectively cold calling from old contact lists. It was brutal with callers getting sent home if they didn’t get a donation from one of the first 10 calls they made. It was outsourced to a US company IIRC but they wanted current students for authenticity.
I was actually pretty good at it, but it was stress inducing.

The only person I know who has given money was heavily involved in the Sports Union when he was there and so benefitted directly from the Alumni fund.  He’s not short of cash so I am sure will be using it to partially offset some tax too.

Thank you Northwind and Doris