Muhlenberg College's fundraising ROI: Top 10% on Spending, Modest gift results

Name: Muhlenberg College's fundraising ROI: Top 10% on Spending, Modest gift results
Uploaded: 2025-09-03T01:06:27+00:00
Duration: 1 min 14 s
Channel: Gary Stocker
Description: In this commentary, the speaker highlights that Muhlenberg College is allocating approximately $4 million to fundraising—placing it in the top 10 % of…

3 Sept 2025 · 1 min

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1:14

In this commentary, the speaker highlights that Muhlenberg College is allocating approximately $4 million to fundraising—placing it in the top 10 % of institutions of comparable size—while its unrestricted gift revenue remains relatively low. The speaker questions the return on investment (ROI) of such high fundraising expenditures, suggesting that the college should examine whether increased spending has actually driven higher gift revenue. If no clear link is found, the speaker recommends cutting back on fundraising costs, emphasizing that spending should only continue if it generates more revenue than it consumes.

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Fundraising, fundraising expenses at Muhlenberg are off the charts for their revenue and off the charts for their size. That is, that's a lot. They're spending $4 million just on fundraising. That's not normal for their size and for their revenue. They're way off here. This is probably top 10% in the country. Again, you want to compare that against Gift revenue. Gift revenue is normal. Okay. So Muhlenberg is spending in the top 10% on fundraising and their actual unrestricted gift revenue is not nothing to be bragging about. It's actually a bit low. So you just wonder about ROI there. Ideally, what they would do is take a look at some of the changes they've had in spending and see if that's affected at all. Perhaps there's like zero link between the spending and the actual gifts they get, which would mean Probably cutting back on the fundraising expenses. There's, you don't do it just to do it. Like there's no point in spending on advertising if it's not giving you more revenue, right? It has to give you more revenue than you spend on it. Same with fundraising expenses. You're still going to get some gifts even if you do nothing on fundraising.