EVERY GIFT MATTERS: THE CASE FOR PARTICIPATION

Participating in the Alumni Fund is an opportunity for alumni to express tangibly how much they continue to value their Williams education. Many of us believe our Williams education has contributed mightily to our current situation in life. Here is a chance to show your appreciation. Each gift signals to other alumni that Williams is deserving of their support, too.

Your gift supports a first-rate faculty. The Alumni Fund not only pays salaries, but also gives our faculty the best tools for teaching: libraries, laboratories, and technology.

Williams has top-notch leadership. We have a dynamic president in Morty Schapiro, and your gift supports his effort to listen to students, faculty, parents, and alumni and then to enhance the Williams experience. Other top administrators and our Board of Trustees are knowledgeable, prudent stewards of Williams’ future.

Williams wants to listen to and interact with you. You have a standing invitation to come back to campus and see what this institution has accomplished in recent years. We seek donors who are engaged with the College – to support what we are doing and to tell us how we can be even better.

No one has ever paid the full price of his or her Williams education. The cost of educating a Williams student is far higher than the tuition paid. Our generous predecessors subsidized our education; now it is time for us to do our part to continue this grand tradition of philanthropy.

The Alumni Fund is, in its essence, a collection of individual gifts. All these gifts add up to a considerable resource for Williams, accumulated one gift at a time. The 2004 Alumni Fund raised $8.2 million from more than 14,000 donors.

You alone are responsible for your own participation. The size of gifts may vary, but each of us counts the same for participation.

The fact that we give is as important as the amount that we give. Some alumni feel that if they can’t afford to make a “meaningful” or “significant” gift, the College doesn’t value their effort. Not true! All we can ask a classmate is to do the best he or she can for the Alumni Fund. Consider this: Two classes each give $100,000, one class with 86 percent participation and one with 40 percent participation. Which class shows more commitment to Williams? Every gift is an important demonstration of support for the College.

High rates of alumni giving help Williams get high ratings. Whatever you think of the various college ratings systems, you have to admit that a great many people pay attention to them. U.S. News & World Report, which in 2003 ranked Williams the number one liberal arts college, states that “The percentage of alumni who gave to their school…is an indirect measure of alumni satisfaction.” And alumni satisfaction is a factor in the rating process.

Establishing the habit of participating in the Alumni Fund is the key to increasing support for Williams over the long term. If you look at the lifetime giving of thousands of Williams alumni, you will see a similar pattern: small but regular gifts that, over the years, grow to be big gifts. Men and women who consistently donate to the Alumni Fund are more likely than anyone else to make bequests and take part in planned giving. The efforts you make to establish your classmate’s the giving habit can have tremendous implications in years to come.

Gifts open doors. Support from the Alumni Fund helps students who otherwise could not afford this level of education. They, in turn, enrich our student body, bring honor to the College, and go on to accomplish great things in life. A third of the recipients of Rhodes, Fulbrights, and the other most prestigious honors were recipients of financial aid. If we did not have the resources to bring these remarkable students here, they would have gone to other highly selective institutions.

If we don’t care about and support Williams College, who will? In the whole world, there are just 23,000 Williams alumni. That’s one out of every 27 million people. In this country alone, we are one out of every 13,043.

Nothing succeeds like success. A gift from one classmate inspires a gift from another…and another…and another.

And if all else fails…as soon as you make a gift, you move from the non-donor list to the donor list – and those cards and letters asking you to give stop coming!