Note: Nelson Bowman III, director of development at Prairie View A & M University, coauthored this blog post.
Unless you haven’t picked up a newspaper, read an online publication, watched TV or been on Facebook in the last couple of years, you have heard that the demographics in the United States are changing — by 2050, minorities will be the majority. Despite this fact, many traditionally White colleges (TWIs) and universities have yet to engage their alumni of color. Students of color have been attending TWIs for decades so engaging alumni should not be a new initiative. There are several reasons for this lack of engagement:
1. A dearth of knowledge on the part of fundraisers — they don’t know how to engage alumni of color.
2. A lack of fundraisers of color — although it’s not the job of fundraisers of color to be the only ones engaging alumni of color, they are more likely to keep the issue on the table.
3. An assumption that people of color are recipients of philanthropy rather than givers.
So, let’s look at these reasons a bit more closely. Most fundraisers lack knowledge as to why alumni of color give or how to approach these populations. Of course, some of the same strategies that are used with majority populations can be employed. However, there are many cultural differences among racial and ethnic groups and these differences play out in the fundraising relationship.
