Fundraising for Sport: A White Paper

Given the increasing importance and the potential of fundraising to college athletic
programs, an understanding of how best to acquire and retain donors and motivate them into
giving larger gifts is an essential skill for sport managers. Yet this is a skill few sport
managers have mastered (Wanless, Pierce, Martinez, Lawrence-Benedict, & Kopka, 2017).
This white paper explains how best sports managers might go about this important task of
fundraising. It outlines evidence-based best practices and points out some of the unique
challenges of fundraising for sport. But first, an illustration of the rising importance of
fundraising to college athletic programs.
Fundraising has emerged as the leading source of revenue among some of the largest
college athletic programs in the country. For example, among institutions that are members of
the NCAA’s Football Super Bowl (FSB) division, the median annual revenue from
fundraising activities is $9.53 million (compared to $8.99 million from ticket sales and $6.08
million from NCAA Conference distributions) (Wanless et al., 2017). For FSB institutions in
the top 25%, the share of income generated from fundraising activities is even larger, at 28%
of total athletic department income. This proportion works out to an average of $26.72
million a year. Meanwhile, when one considers that an athletic department can sell only a
limited number of seats and must compete with other athletic departments for a limited
number of attractive corporate sponsors, the fundraising option becomes all the more
attractive.
Having established the importance of fundraising to the financial health of athletic
departments, we now turn our attention to practical methods that sport managers can use to
solicit funds from the general public. Sports managers have identified these methods as best
practices (Wanless et al., 2017). It is also worth noting that, in many ways, fundraising for a

3
sport is similar to fundraising within the broader not-for-profit sector. Therefore, fundraising
for sport follows the broad stages of the fundraising life cycle: planning, prospecting,
cultivation and, ultimately, a solicitation. Another implication is that practitioners of
fundraising for the sport will find useful much of the literature, research and guidance on
fundraising outside the context of sport.
That said, best practices for fundraising for sport can be usefully grouped into two
categories: best practices for donor acquisition and best practices for retaining donors and
increasing their gift sizes (Wanless et al., 2017). In the first category are 42 best practices that
are further divided into nine categories. These nine categories entail best practices for 1) the
activities an athletic program may undertake to ensure the success of its sports program, 2)
researching and prospecting for donors, 3) promotion and solicitation, 4) targeting of specific
groups from which to solicit donations, 5) obtaining referrals from existing donors, 6)
messaging donors and potential donors, 7) donor incentives and benefits, 8) partnerships with
stakeholders external to the athletic department (including the mother university’s central
advancement office) and 9) the internal operations of the athletics development office.
The second category of best practices; for retaining donors and getting them to give
bigger gifts, has 38 best practices which are further divided into seven categories, namely
best practices for 1) sports program success, 2) the athletic development office’s internal
operations, 3) marketing practices that seek to build long-term donor relationships, 4)
messaging existing donors, 5) the donor renewal process, 6) demonstrating accountability to
donors and 7) donor incentives and benefits.
While there are 80 best practices in total, practitioners involved in fundraising for
sport are in agreement that methods that emphasize one-to-one interactions with donors and
potential donors are the most effective (Wanless et al., 2017). Thus, methods and practices

4
like visiting donors and potential donors in the places of work (where feasible), sending
customized emails, sending highly personalized direct mail pieces and offering prioritized
parking to donors during matches consistently deliver superior results compared to methods
targeted at the masses. Here, athletic development offices will do well to partner with their
universities’ central development offices. Typically, these offices use sophisticated customer
relationship management (CRM) technologies and processes, which means they have access
to a wealth of personal data that could make easier the athletic development office’s
prospecting efforts.
Earlier it was noted that fundraising for sport is similar to fundraising elsewhere in
terms of the process followed. However, it is helpful to point out at this juncture that
fundraising in the sports environment presents a unique set of challenges (Wanless et al.,
2017). For instance, one of the unique features of fundraising for sport is that the
performance of an athletic department’s teams has a great influence on the department’s
ability to fundraise. Generally, the better the teams’ performance, the easier it is to convince
people to give. Yet, the athletic development office has no control over the department’s
sports success. Under these circumstances, a savvy sports fundraiser should try to steer a
donor’s motivation to give away from sports success and toward altruistic motives like
impacting student-athletes.

5

Reference

Wanless, L., Pierce, A. D., Martinez, M. J., Lawrence-Benedict, H. J., & Kopka, N. (2017).
Best Practices in Athletic Donor Relations: The NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision.
Journal of Applied Sport Management, 9(3), 24-37.