When she was a student at Middlebury College, Ansally N. Kuria learned that raising money is no cakewalk. Working as a phone-athon caller for the annual fund, Ms. Kuria occasionally received rude responses, she says, and spoke with alumni who felt uncomfortable giving, since they could offer only a small contribution.
But through a program that Middlebury started last spring, she has also seen how generous the college’s network can be: In just 12 days, more than 70 people helped Ms. Kuria raise $2,000 to help finance a service project she designed in Kenya. The college’s program, called MiddStart, is a microphilanthropy effort that connects donors to students who need small amounts of money for service work, art projects, and early-stage business ideas.
Students submit a proposal to a small committee, which helps them refine the plans and communicate their ideas to donors. There are 10 projects now posted on Middlebury’s Web site, including one that aims to raise $2,000 to start a garden at a public school in the South Bronx, and another that has already reached its $2,500 goal to buy a refrigerator for a house that students are building for the national Solar Decathlon competition.
By eliminating some of the barriers between students and their supporters, and integrating the site with online social media, the college hopes to tap into previously unengaged alumni, particularly recent graduates.
Like other small, elite liberal-arts colleges, Middlebury has faced financial challenges in recent years, including significant hits to its endowment, which still has not completely recovered from the economic downturn. Multiyear commitments from donors, which tend to be earmarked for the endowment and which provide future revenue for the college’s operating budget, have also been down.
Although not intended as a big moneymaker, MiddStart will support student initiatives without putting added strain on the budget. The college also hopes to use the program to highlight how students are using their liberal-arts education in entrepreneurial ways.
The idea for MiddStart came out of a larger effort to foster entrepreneurship and teach creative leadership skills to students. In February 2007, Middlebury’s president, Ronald D. Liebowitz, announced the Project on Creativity and Innovation in the Liberal Arts, which now provides classes, studio space, mentorship, and networking opportunities for students interested in starting a business or nonprofit organization.
Supported almost entirely by donations and grants, the program grew quickly, says Elizabeth H. Robinson, the project’s director.
“We were trying to find small pools of resources for students so they could go do these incredible projects,” she says, since most students needed only a bit of seed money to get started.
As they were seeking new revenue streams, Ms. Robinson and others connected with the project heard about a trend in charity work toward small gifts and loans. A representative from the microlending Web site Kiva came to the campus to give a talk, and Ms. Robinson decided to set up an online-giving system to help Middlebury students carry out their plans.
Reaching Young Donors
Over the past decade or so, microphilanthropy has become an increasingly popular way for people to donate money. Organizations like Kiva, Kickstarter, and DonorsChoose have taken advantage of the multimedia capabilities and viral possibilities of the Internet to raise money through small donations. Microphilanthropy Web sites showcase the people and projects that need support, establishing an immediate relationship between donor and recipient, and clearly outlining how the money will be spent.
“If there’s been a trend of any kind,” says James R. Keyes, vice president for college advancement at Middlebury, “more and more people want to know exactly where their gift is going, or they want to give to something special that is a passion of theirs.”
“MiddStart,” he says, “encourages people to give when they might not give otherwise.”
Until recently, microphilanthropy had not often been used in higher education. CO-Fund, a scholarship program that seeks small donations to help students in Rhode Island meet their college-tuition needs, may be the closest example.
Ms. Robinson and others involved with MiddStart recognized its potential to expand Middlebury’s donor base, especially among younger alumni. Recent graduates, she notes, are harder to engage in campaigns because they are more transient and have less-stable incomes than older alumni. Because all profiles on the MiddStart page have modest goals—the maximum requested amount for most projects is $2,000, or $10,000 for scholarships—gifts of $25 or $50 can have an impact. And since many alumni fresh out of college still have friends at Middlebury, they are more likely to give to support the work their former classmates are doing.
When alumni give to the general fund, “there is a big picture, but you don’t really see it,” says Muchadei T. Zvoma, who graduated in 2007 and now works for the college as assistant director of annual giving.
The MiddStart site lists the names of the donors to each project and shows how far the project has advanced toward the target amount, which Mr. Zvoma says draws in new supporters. “On MiddStart you can see exactly who else is giving. You can see that there is a tangible goal.”
Mr. Zvoma has donated to a scholarship fund so that more international students like him will be able to benefit from a Middlebury education. In giving through MiddStart, he says, “you feel like you’re part of something.”
Giving and Receiving
Students whose proposals are posted on MiddStart are urged to use social networking and e-mail requests to get more donors (sometimes from outside the Middlebury network) and keep them updated on the progress of the project. The college has begun to send out links to MiddStart pages to groups of alumni who might be interested in donating to a specific cause.
A project that would distribute soccer balls to children and adolescents in Ghana, for example, was pitched to past members of the Middlebury soccer team. Another initiative, to find new markets for the goods produced in a Malian women’s cooperative, was advertised to alumni of the gender-and-women’s-studies department.
The appeal of MiddStart is that it “gives you a return on your emotional investment,” says Robert V. Sideli, a member of the Class of 1977 and chair of the annual fund’s executive committee. He notes that communicating the importance of giving toward the general maintenance of the college can be a challenge. “When I walk around campus, I wonder if my money paid for that light bulb,” he says, but a lot of people don’t understand that approach to giving.
Still, the college needs light bulbs, and unrestricted gifts keep Middlebury running. And while there are some concerns that earmarked donations to MiddStart could cut into support for the annual fund, college officials say the microphilanthropy contributions are small enough that they don’t present a threat.
Rather, the college hopes that by keeping young alumni wired into the campus, MiddStart may entice them to give earlier and more consistently. Building a broader donor base, officials say, will help alleviate some of their immediate financial concerns and could have a big payoff later on.
Small gifts, including those to MiddStart, can also help raise the alumni participation rate, which is a factor in national rankings. Middlebury’s alumni-gift-giving rate of 60 percent in 2008 and 2009 placed it on the list of the nation’s “Top 10 Most Loved Schools” compiled by U.S. News & World Report, and grabbed the attention of some of its competitors.
Because MiddStart donors come back to the Web site frequently to watch the progress of projects, officials believe that could lead to more general gifts to the college. “While they’re looking at MiddStart, they might start finding other ways to give,” Mr. Keyes says.
For students involved with MiddStart, the generosity of the donors has inspired them to give back to the college. Evan Masseau’s proposal to build an art piece that illustrates the workings of the human brain in lights was financed by more than $1,000 in MiddStart dollars. Mr. Masseau says it felt like a “validation from the alumni community” that his work was important. He plans to donate to the program as soon as he gets a steadier job.
The experience has had an influence on Ms. Kuria as well. “When I graduate, I will make a point to always give something,” she wrote in an e-mail from Kenya, “because I know how it feels being on that other end trying to convince [donors] and hoping that someone gives.”
