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Forgotten alumni: online learners as donors.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

The article encourages university development officials and leaders in the field of distance education to actively view online learners as future members of the alumni community. This paper synthesizes literature related to alumni giving, highlights the dearth of attention given to distance education alumni and provides suggestions for encouraging philanthropy among such alumni. Suggestions include modeling solicitation processes after historically Black Colleges and Universities, ensuring student satisfaction, promoting a familial concept within programs, and reexamining the roles currently assigned to students by development offices.

"It is important that universities look at distance education and giving, or 30 years down the road they are going to get caught." (Schejbal & Lescht, 2002, p. 8)

Introduction

Active alumni fulfill an important role to their alma mater, acting as evangelists for prospective students, community liaisons for existing students and as critical sources of income. Both college and university administrators and their development officers readily acknowledge the importance of alumni as the financial backbone of educational institutions (Mael & Ashforth, 1992). According to Dennis (2003) federal and state funding for higher education is likely to decrease in the future, leaving colleges and universities with little choice but to rely on other forms of revenue, including alumni donation. Alumni donations have also become more scrutinized in recent years because alumni participation rates are increasingly viewed as a measure of alumni satisfaction with an institution (Porter, 2000).

As distance education becomes more prevalent, so does the need to examine whether alumni graduating from online programs will affiliate themselves with their alma maters and become active members of an alumni community. Unfortunately, according to Schejbal and Lescht, in 2002 no development offices in the US were addressing the distance education alumni audience. Yet, approximately 72 percent of colleges and universities offer distance education courses (Morrison, 2003) and 53.6% of schools participating in the Sloan Consortium's 2004 survey agree that online education is critical to their long-term strategy. The growth of online education only points upward as approximately 2.6 million students were expected to study online in 2004 (Allen & Seaman, 2004). This paper synthesizes literature related to alumni giving, highlights the dearth of attention given to distance education alumni and provides suggestions for encouraging philanthropy among such alumni.

Ignoring an emerging student population

The majority of research within the field of alumni development focuses on traditional undergraduate student populations at private and public universities (Pumerantz, 2005; Okunde and Berl, 1997; Okunde, 1996; Clotfelter, 2001; Mosser, 1993; Monks, 2003) ignoring the growing body of non-traditional students who are increasingly filling classroom rosters. Nontraditional students are defined as those of multi-ethnic backgrounds, first-generation college students and those from a low-economic background. These students may attend college on a part-time basis and are typically over the age of 22. In...

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