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Annual Giving 2018-2019To: Class of ’72 Executive Committee I am pleased to report that the Class of ’72 has completed another outstanding year in Annual Giving. For the Annual Giving year 2018-19 – our 47th Reunion year – the class gave $261,000, while achieving a participation rate of 64.7%, with 521 out of 805 classmates participating. At more than $261,000, our dollar total slipped a bit from recent non-major-reunion years. It may be because classmates are increasingly entering retirement. Our participation rate of 64.7% marks the twenty-first year in a row that the Class of ’72 has been above the magic 60% level, a feat that no other class in our decade has come close to achieving. Our participation was almost 17 percentage points above the average for the other nine classes in the decade of the seventies, including two major-reunion classes. Our participation rate was 64.7%; the average for the other nine classes in our decade was 48.0%. Put into a larger context, the Class of ’72 participation was the third-highest of the 49 youngest classes, a cohort that includes nine major-reunion classes. The graph below says it all.
Overall Campaign Results. Annual Giving results were close to last year’s totals, bucking a national trend for giving to decline year-over-year. At 55.4%, participation was close to the results of last year, and the $68.6 million that was raised was among the highest ever. Both statistics make Princeton the envy of universities worldwide, and it is gratifying that the Class of ’72 adds to them the way that we do. Class of ’72 Efforts. Our success validates, I believe, my central philosophy on solicitations – that we need to make our solicitations more personal, not more numerous. It is a message that I try to deliver to my colleagues on the National Annual Giving Committee. It is tempting – and easy – to hit classmates with a never-ending barrage of Princeton emails and other solicitations. I will not let that happen. For example, in June’s Class Numeral Challenge, classmates could have received as many as seven emails. I limited it to two, and we still finished second in our decade with our results of the contest. For our Class, “personal” means a personal phone call – even if it rolls to voice mail – and a personal handwritten note. I made 165 phone calls in the months of May and June. I wrote 244 personal hand-written notes, often following up on a phone call, in that same period. I also sent 168 emails in May and June, but I made sure that each one was personalized – for example, I would make the subject line “One Week Left, Mike” and start the body of the email with “I hope things are good in Boston”. That way, no one felt that they were on the receiving end of a mindless blast email. This was the fourth year that I have written a personal thank you note to each of our donors – 521 of them this year. The Annual Giving office printed up notecards for me with a photograph of the lighted “72” sign that we have been using at our Reunion events. I received a number of compliments on the card. I tried something new this year. It occurred to me that, as terrific as the Class of ’72 note cards are, the only classmates receiving them are Annual Giving donors. What if I used them to ask for gifts from chronic non-donors? With that in mind, I sent hand-written cards featuring last year’s note card – the one that featured the Class of ’72 Dining Room – to 83 classmates who had given between 10 and 38 times, but not at all in the past five years, saying “We haven’t received a gift from you in a while; won’t you participate this year?”. For all of that, we received five gifts. That is pretty poor return for all of that effort, but that is the kind of effort that keeps our participation on top of the leader board. This was my 27th year as Class Agent. It was another challenging year, but made easier by more than a dozen classmates who made calls and/or organized phonathons: Ron Brown, Daryl English, Marty Franks, Doug Harrison, Barbara Julius, Chris Loomis, Rod McNealy, Merc Morris, Robby Robinson, Mike Schneider, Rob Smart, Ed Strauss, Tony Tichenor, and Bob Wright. The Class of ’72 volunteer team has embraced the philosophy of making solicitations personal, fostering and continuing personal relationships with their chosen classmates. Their outstanding results reflect that. Beating 64% participation, especially in an off-year, is gratifying. Outstanding participation in Annual Giving can be very hard to sustain – it seems that with every passing year, more classmates grow distant from the University and the class. Retrieving those classmates and bringing them back into the Annual Giving fold can be a real challenge. And let’s just say that the Admissions Office has not been our friend. But we benefit from a Class leadership that believes that our Annual Giving results are a unifying theme that brings the class together. Classmates leave, but sometimes they do come back. We had one donor this year who gave for the first time – 46 goose eggs and then a gift. Go figure. In the Annual Giving office at Princeton, Traslyn Butler and her sidekick Wendy Dunn supplied us with everything we needed to be as productive as possible. Since I started my class agent work 32 years ago, I have seen the Annual Giving office transition from mail to fax to the Internet – from printouts to downloads. The AG Office continues to evolve with the times, now fully exploiting the available technology in their mission. Recent technology developments have made it easy to share documents, and thus to share “Best Practices”. In that spirit, working with Traslyn, I posted many of my materials on a University-sponsored Google Docs site: a tutorial I created for new Class Agents, my instructions to my class volunteers, some of my better solicitation letters, and scans of the thank-you note cards that I have used. Traslyn made the materials available to the other Class Agents in our decade and beyond, and she received enthusiastic reviews from the people who accessed them. The Class of ‘72 continues to be in an excellent position to extend our string of successful Annual Giving results as we continue in our fifth decade as alumni and head towards our 50th Reunion. Cheers, Tom ________________________________________________________________________________ 2015-2016 Annual Giving Report
To: Class of ’72 From: Tom Hoster ‘72 cc: Bill Hardt ‘63, Traslyn Butler Date: July, 2016 Re: Annual Giving Results 2015-2016
The graph below says it all.
Overall Campaign Results. Annual Giving struggled a bit this past year. At 58.4%, participation fell below 60% for the first time in six years, and the $59.3 million raised fell a bit short of an ambitious goal. While both statistics make Princeton the envy of universities worldwide, the challenges of the past year make our Class performance just that much more impressive.
Class of ’72 Efforts. This was my 24rd year as Class Agent. It was another challenging year, but made easier by fifteen classmates who made calls and/or organized phonathons: Ron Brown, Daryl English, Marty Franks, Doug Harrison, Barbara Julius, Chris Loomis, Rod McNealy, Merc Morris, Robby Robinson, Mike Schneider, Rob Smart, Ed Strauss, Sandy Stuart, Tony Tichenor, and Bob Wright.
What is remarkable about that list – beyond the fact that they took 251 names off of Tiger Tracks and chased those classmates down – is that these individuals already perform huge service to the class: as Class President, Class Historian, Class Associates Leader, Class Secretary, Class Treasurer, Class Scholarship Chair, and so on. I think that that fact makes their Annual Giving work just that much more remarkable.
I did something new this year. In the interest of engaging more fully with classmates, I asked the Annual Giving office to print up notecards with a photograph on it of the Class of ’72 Ivy plaque on the back of Nassau Hall. They did, and I hand-wrote 537 thank-you notes to our classmates who gave this past year. It was a real labor, but perhaps it will encourage classmates to give next year and subsequent years when we ask them to.
Beating 65% participation, especially in an off-year, is gratifying. Outstanding participation in Annual Giving can be very hard to sustain – it seems that with every passing year, more classmates grow distant from the University and the Class. Retrieving those classmates and bringing them back into the Annual Giving fold can be a real challenge. And let’s just say that the Admissions Office has not been our friend. But we benefit from a Class leadership that believes that our Annual Giving results are a unifying theme that brings the Class together. In the Annual Giving office at Princeton, Traslyn Butler supplied us with everything we needed to be as productive as possible. Since I started my class agent work 29 years ago, I have seen the Annual Giving office transition from mail to fax to the Internet – from printouts to downloads. The AG Office continues to evolve with the times. In particular, the "Tiger Tracks” volunteer database has taken much of the friction out of the volunteer process, allowing volunteers to focus on their solicitation efforts. The Class of ‘72 continues to be in an excellent position to extend our string of successful Annual Giving results as we continue into our fifth decade as alumni. Cheers, Tom
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2012-2013 Annual Giving Report MEMO These results are excellent, but they are particularly good given that our 41st year is a "hangover” year – the year following a major reunion. Dollars. At $400,000, the dollars that we raised are off the charts by Class of ‘72 standards. We typically struggle to get above $300,000 in off-year giving – we had raised more than $300,000 only four times in forty years. Getting above $400,000 in an off year is truly an outstanding result for the Class. Memo Participation. Our participation of 64.1% marks the fifteenth year in a row that the Class of ’72 has been above the magic 60% level, a feat that no other class in the decade of the seventies has come even close to achieving. Our participation was an amazing 14 percentage points above the average of the other nine classes in the seventies, including two major-reunion years; while our participation was 64%, the average for the other nine classes of our decade was 50%. Our participation results allow us to continue to claim to be THE class of the seventies in Annual Giving. I think that this graph says it all: 
Participation Track Record. One of the statistics that the University tracks is the record of classes that that have achieved participation above the 60% level for ten or more years in a row. As I mentioned, our participation this year of 64% marks the fifteenth year in a row that the Class of ’72 has been above the 60% level. Cumulative Totals. The Annual Giving Office also keeps track of the cumulative Annual Giving totals from each class. With this year’s results in the bank, the Class of ’72 has given more than $20 million – $20.9 million in fact – to Annual Giving. That puts the Class of the ’72 in the #8 position on the list of all-time cumulative giving, another remarkable achievement in itself. Overall Annual Giving Campaign. For the University, this year’s Annual Giving campaign was big success. The campaign raised $57.0 million, second best ever. Overall participation was 61.1%, which was the fourth year in a row above the magic 60% level. These participation results, of course, make Princeton the envy of universities worldwide. Class of ‘72 Efforts. One aspect of this past Annual Giving year stands out. We were thrust into the "Cane Spree Challenge” in April, where we were pitted against the other seven non-major classes in the seventies, with the class that collected the most new donors in April taking home an additional $10,000 from an anonymous donor. I found out about ten days into the contest that the Class of ’76 had decided that they were going to win the contest. (In fact, one of their co-Class Agents told Bob Murley as much at a gathering in Chicago.) Well, that was all it took. We rallied the Class volunteers, and got 163 classmates – a staggering 19.5% of the Class – to give in the month of April. By the end of the month, we had walked away with the victory and the $10,000. Much of the credit for our outstanding AG results goes to my predecessors – Franks, Murley, Strauss, and Murphy – who nurtured AG giving right from the time of our graduation. Believe it or not, they have almost as many years of Class Agent work (20 collectively) as I do. And we benefit from a Class leadership that believes that our Annual Giving results are a unifying theme that brings the Class together. The Class of ‘72 continues to be in an excellent position to extend our string of successful Annual Giving results as we continue into our fifth decade as alumni. Cheers, Tom |
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