Most organizations have limited resources, such as financial resources, production capacity and employee work-hours. To best utilize these limited resources, an organization typically attempts to accurately predict spending behavior of a targeted group of people then produce its offerings in advance of actual consumer-spending activity. The matching of an organization's limited resources to potential consumer spending requires that organization's marketing personnel manage the marketplace demand via its marketing strategy. To manage marketplace demand, an organization must predict, with a degree of accuracy, the future-spending behavior of well-defined groups of consumers then craft a marketing strategy customized to each targeted group of buyers. Therefore, of particular interest to an organization's decision-makers would be determining those factors which purport to impact and predict specific consumer behavior of a specific group of buyers.

Colleges do not typically have tangible products for sale to raise revenues. They instead offer for sale the services they perform, which are funded by student tuition fees, governmental grants or entitlements, and institutional or individual donations. Operating budgets of colleges are therefore dependent upon and fluctuate with the largess of patrons and donors. Shortages in a college's budget often must be made up by increased and better solicitation efforts for donations.

Many compelling reasons exist to conduct research on college fund raising. Some of the compelling reasons for this research include funding cutbacks by governmental agencies and private foundations and as college general operating costs and resistance to increased tuition charges escalate, budgetary shortages must be covered by other revenue sources, such as alumni contributions. As a subsection of the overall college education sector, private colleges and universities are more dependent upon voluntary funding than their public counterparts; therefore, they are in more dire need of research to help improve their fund raising efforts.

Of particular interest to me are private colleges because they face unique problems not encountered by for-profit organizations or their public college counterparts. The ability to glean information on those factors which could impact alumni's decision making process holds promise to aid a private college in its planning and implementation of a solicitation campaign.

The purpose of my research, then, was to identify and correlate discrete characteristics of alumni that may impact their willingness to donate to their college alma mater. Specifically, the research attempted to identify alumni donation attitudes, intentions, and behavior by analyzing selected factors, which may impact a willingness to contribute to their alma mater. To determine which alumni characteristics may impact donation intention and actual donation behavior it was necessary to investigate specific internal, external, and behavioral variables held by alumni, which may impact their donating in general and donating to their alma mater specifically. Therefore, as a result of this research, the creation of effective solicitation campaigns developed for specific targeted alumni groups may have a potentially positive influence on the total support offered by these groups.

The research results indicated that the theory base used to conduct the study was parsimonious, rigorous, and robust in its ability to discern some of the factors that might impact alumni's donation attitude toward their alma mater. Specifically, affinity to one's alma mater as well as the antecedent factors had high Pearson correlations at the .01 alpha significance levels. Factor analyses indicated which specific components of each construct variable accounted for the bulk of the respective variances with Eigenvalues of at least 1.0.