Contributed by the 2024-2025 Collegiate DECA Executive Officer Team.
Let's explore fundraising in collaboration with the Alumni Engagement and Advancement Offices on your campus. What resources do they provide? How can they connect your chapter to the community? How can they set up a financial account to raise those crucial funds?
What is an Advancement Office / Alumni Engagement Office?
Depending on your college campus, these offices may have different titles or may be interchangeable. These offices are a goldmine for alumni contacts and connections, donation links and even ways to interconnect with your school’s fundraising efforts. Advancement Offices are tasked with connecting back with alumni or local community members to “Advance” the school's mission. These faculty members are seasoned professionals in fundraising and collaborative efforts.
How Do I Know if my School Has One of Those Offices?
First, search on your school’s website in the search bar “Alumni” or “Advancement Office.” One of those keyword searches should pull some results. If not, another approach is to email your business school’s dean or administrative assistants. Sometimes, depending on the college, your business school may have its own dedicated staff member who works through Advancement to raise money for business education-related offerings.
What Should Our Chapter Use Them For?
There are many collaboration opportunities with your Advancement or Alumni Engagement offices.
Provided below are just some of the ways that you can increase your engagement with community stakeholders and former students to boost your fundraising efforts:
- DECA Alumni Outreach: Your engagement office may be able to pull records from former students and see who was involved in either our high school or collegiate divisions. By reaching out to these particular alumni, you could strike a chord and reopen a line of communication for donations or assistance in the future. Then, take that relationship further and register them as official DECA alumni members through the membership portal!
- Giving Campaigns: These offices can often help create donations or gift drives to boost your chapter's financial status. Crowdfunding efforts such as “Day of Giving” can be beneficial for fundraising. Increase your engagement with potential donors by working on social media content and other PR efforts, and maximize your exposure to these contacts.
- Gift Accounts / Donation Links: As the Butler University DECA president, we worked with our Advancement Office to create a “Gift” link. This link allowed for tax-deductible donations through Butler and would send the funds directly into our student organization account. This gave us an upper hand in reaching potential donors and getting them in a giving mood through easy and seamless payment options. I highly recommend one of these links, as it will make your donation process easier to promote to alumni and community members alike.
- Naming Opportunities: We have title sponsors for events in Collegiate DECA, so perhaps offering up naming rights to leadership programs, workshops or chapter-specific activities would bring in potential donors. For example, your chapter may have an end-of-the-year banquet that needs funding. Maybe a donor or two would like it to be named the “XYZ Chapter Banquet Provided by John Doe.” Or the “XYZ Family DECA Speakers Series.” Giving their name a space in the program can be a nice, personal touch to get the conversation moving.
- Non-Monetary Efforts: One way your office may be able to help is simply by getting you in contact with potential speakers. Many of the speakers we have brought in over the years at our chapter have been thanks to connections and contacts we made through Butler’s Advancement Office. Money isn’t everything regarding chapter support, and this is a great way to combine school and chapter marketing for a one-of-a-kind collaborative effort.
Make Sure to Say “Thank you!”
Always thank faculty and donors for their help with your fundraising efforts. Each time we had a donation come into our chapter, we ALWAYS sent a handwritten card to thank the donor and would have our chapter officer team sign it. (Shop DECA sells DECA-branded cards and envelopes for something like this!) You may need to look up how to address an envelope, but I promise it provided a personal touch that will leave an impact.
