This 190 page study presents data from 50 college athletics departments in the United States about their spending on advancement and fundraising. The report helps its readers to answer questions such as: how much are athletics departments spending on fundraising? How much do they rely on their own staff and how much do they rely on the college’s general advancement staff? What are the most useful fundraising vehicles and strategies? What has been the impact of social media? How much is being raised through naming rights, auctions, bequests, brick campaigns and other means? What are trends in in-kind contributions? How common are incentives such as preferential access to practices or coaches? The report also looks at the dynamics of fundraising giving extensive data on staff size, salaries and budgets for athletics department advancement. And much much more. Data is broken out by athletic division, type of college, enrollment, and other useful variables.
Just a few of the report’s many findings are that:
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38% of survey participants say that the general college advancement office includes employees specialized in athletics fundraising.
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A small majority of the schools said their Athletics Departments do receive in-kind contributions of food and nutritional items.
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36% of survey participants believed that blogs were an important channel for raising money for athletics departments.
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Over the past ten years the research universities in the sample had earned a mean of $67,000,000 for naming rights to athletic facilities.
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Booster clubs for 4-year colleges in the sample raised a mean of $2.13 million over the past year.
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For private colleges in the sample, funds raised from former athletes and their families accounted for a median of 29% of all funds raised.
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44% of colleges in the sample gave some donors preferential access to coaches as an incentive in raising funds.