Alumni Group Funding: 2017 Alumni Group Survey Insights Part IV
In this installment of our series about local alumni group data, we’re going to look at how local alumni clubs are funded and how that affects (or doesn’t affect) their success. The data we’re exploring was collected and analyzed as part of our Alumni Group Survey — the largest survey of alumni group leaders ever conducted — in which we profiled 398 groups about their traits, challenges, activities, relationships, success and digital tools.
We’re sharing our findings over 6 weeks, covering these areas:
In this post, we’re going to take a look at local alumni group funding — how much groups receive and how it impacts their success. We asked group leaders to describe the quantity and type of funding they receive from their national association and, as with all topics that involve money, we’re sure there are two sides to the story. But our focus is on group leader perspectives, so we’re analyzing the data they’ve given us, without trying to check it against association staff perspectives (though we are considering this as a strategy for future research).
A quick look at group funding tells us that most groups receive very little direct financial support. Of those that reported funding data, 69% of groups receive $500 or less from their national association each year. But for those who do receive substantial cash support, they are seemingly well-funded, with 22% of groups getting more than $1,000 per year and the lucky few 5% receiving over $5,000 per year.
As all associations are constantly hunting for better ROI data, we wanted to analyze these funding numbers to see if the funding a group receives affects its overall “success” — in our case, again measured by the number of events held in a year. Anecdotally, most leaders and association staff we spoke to expected there to be a fairly direct relationship between funding and success — while more successful groups tend to raise a lot of their own money, they also have large events or supply needs. However, we found almost no correlation between funding and success — in the end, the correlation coefficient was approximately .13 (a value of 0 would mean no relationship at all, 1 means perfect 1:1 relationship).
We found almost no correlation between funding and success, but we are not saying “don’t give money to your clubs.”
In fact, if we look at those outlier groups who receive more than $5,000 each year, 40% host fewer than 10 events each year. Most of them are reasonably successful, hosting an average of 14 events a year, but to see 40% not able to reach the threshold of reasonable success is lackluster to say the least. It is also interesting that while these highly-funded groups are in markets of all sizes, about half of them are in areas with significant alumni populations. And while most groups in areas with very large alumni populations tend to be amongst the most active of their peers, those who are receiving significant funding are holding nearly 65% fewer events.
So while we’ve focused on those groups receiving outlandish sums of money, we see similar results down the line — groups that receive more money than their peers actually tend to underperform when considered by how many events they host in a year.
Now, we are not saying “don’t give money to your clubs.” In fact, underfunded groups tend to be the very small, barely active groups from small remote areas. These groups could probably do a lot more with some additional funds to jumpstart their efforts. But we are seeing a lot of evidence to suggest that mid-to-large sized groups, adding funding has limited impact on their success. Instead, there are huge opportunities to boost their success and jump start that cycle of self-sustaining engagement by focusing on providing the tools and services they need to solve their most pressing challenges.
In two weeks, we’ll look at the tools groups use to manage their digital presence and keep in touch with their members.
Subscribe on Medium, follow us on Twitter or sign up below to get our emails to keep up with this series- we’ll send you just 7 emails, one for each post.
If the results of this survey confirm or contradict something about your alumni association, we would love to hear how you are using the data — it helps us tailor future research and add real-life examples to the numbers.
