Social Identities and Marketing: Relationship Building and Alumni Engagement in Higher Education

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 69
  In Roundtable Session: Higher Education Branding as a “Sea of Sameness” Demands Actions by Institutional Leadership and Management

Abstract

University advancement officers are tasked with engaging the public in order to create and further relationships and to increased donations. There is a complex strategy at most US colleges and universities that leads to the engagement of alumni and others.  These relationship strategies can be view as a form of marketing (Andruss, 2001; Block, 1998; Remley, 1996; Selladurai, 1998). Historically, American higher education, like much of the nonprofit sector, engaged all of its constituencies in very similar ways, with some differences mattering on the size of donation. However, as higher education continues to diversify and becomes less homogeneous, more nuanced strategies, that take in to account social identity and cultural difference, are needed.  This paper explores existing literature on why social identity should be considered in higher education marketing.
Social identities, such as race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, are some of the organizing characteristics of how a person identifies themselves (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). The paper argues that often those who have marginalized social identities have strong affinities for their identity based on the experience of exclusion (Shen & Dumani, 2013). By engaging alumni through appealing to their social identities and acknowledging how they see themselves and what is most important to them, advancement officers are able to tap into what Daphna Oysterman and colleagues (2010) have called the identity-based motivation (IBM) model.
Building upon the IBM model, social identity (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), and social distance theories (Bogardus, 1925), the study shares results from the National Alumni Giving Experiment (NAGE) where the author found that respondents who share at least one marginalized social identity with students profiled in a fundraising solicitations are more likely than others to assign more importance to the cause and to give greater amounts. The author uses these findings to explore how advancement officers might use these concepts in their marketing and alumni engagement to further both the universities goals and the goals of their alumni. The author argues that by using relationship marketing techniques coupled with identity-based philanthropy strategies, universities can build more responsive and larger alumni donor bases. In order to do so, the study will discuss the concepts philanthropic identity and its intersection with branding in Higher Education. The paper concludes with recommendations for practice.   

Author

• Noah Daniel Drezner, Teachers College, Columbia University