As colleges calculate their fund-raising totals for the fiscal year ending June 30, fund raisers are predicting that private money raised during that time will be about 4 percent less than the amount raised the year before, according to a survey by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education released Thursday. The fund raisers surveyed said they expected that trend to start turning around sometime in the next year.
According to the CASE Fundraising Index, senior fund-raising officials at colleges, universities, and private schools estimate that giving will be down 3.9 percent for the 2008-9 academic year. The last time the survey was taken, in early January, fund raisers predicted giving would decline 1.7 percent for the 2009 calendar year. CASE is conducting the survey every six months, asking fund raisers to look backward and forward one year to predict giving trends.
Other surveys of philanthropy have started to register the negative effects of the economy. Last month Giving USA reported a decline of 5.7 percent after adjusting for inflation, the steepest decline in 50 years of conducting the survey.
Looking ahead, fund raisers who responded to the CASE survey saw some positive signs for the future. They predicted that giving will start to rise again in the coming year, by an estimated 2.5 percent. The finding echoed what some fund raisers and consultants were saying at CASE's annual leadership conference last week in San Francisco, that donors are beginning to appear more willing to talk about making gifts. After the financial markets collapsed last fall, many fund raisers said donors became skittish about meeting and asked them to come back later, when things appeared more stable, to talk about making a donation.
The CASE survey had 157 respondents, representing more than 7 percent of CASE's 2,100 member institutions in the United States. It was conducted online this month.
