The news that promised philanthropic donations for 2015/16 will amount to more than €73 million comes as a welcome boost to a university struggling to balance the books. As government funding decreased in recent years, students spoke out vocally against loan schemes, and Trinity invested more in developing itself internally and externally, alternative funding models have become necessary. Exploring philanthropy from College’s 86,531-strong alumni network has evidently paid off.
In fact, it appears that Trinity ranks first, in comparison to UK universities, on funds raised from alumni as a percentage of their overall budget, according to a presentation made to College Board in December 2015 and seen by The University Times. Given that one might expect that universities like Oxford and Cambridge would have large alumni populations who are willing to donate to the university, Trinity’s success is particularly intriguing. This trend isn’t likely to slow as Trinity prepares to launch its “Campaign for Trinity” in 2018, and it seems that, regardless of the level of state funding, these philanthropic campaigns will be here to stay.
Dramatically ramping up its efforts to attract alumni donations, via the Trinity Foundation, will have increased donations purely by virtue of reaching more people who wouldn’t otherwise have thought to donate. However, if this is the only reason for increases then at some point Trinity will probably hit a saturation point – an upper limit at which alumni willing to donate will be exhausted. But the finding that donations proportionally exceed those of UK universities suggest that our alumni differ in some way and not just because they may not have been asked to donate before.
Operating as it does in a country where a greater proportion of the population are third-level graduates, Trinity probably has the advantage in this regard. However, it may also be explained by more unique factors – a smaller university, in a small country, will always find it easier to develop an alumni network and encourage them to donate. Trinity is also, luckily, going through a period of dramatic change – everything from the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute (TBSI) and the Engineering, Energy and Environment Institute (E3) Institute are all projects that must, to graduates used to a much smaller, old-fashioned campus, sound exciting.
As positive as this €73 million increase is, Trinity can drive even more funding by exploring – and potentially exploiting – the unique characteristics of Trinity that evidently leave its alumni happy to give back.
