If begging for change on social media is the most creative fundraising program that the UC Board of Regents could come up with, the university is in serious trouble.
People have been calling on the university to devise out-of-the-box funding schemes for years, but creative campaigns need to be feasible and appropriate. The “Promise Platform” fails on both accounts. As discussed by the regents at their meeting last week, the new program seeks to capitalize on students’ and young alumni’s social connections on the Web. Fundraisers would solicit donations in exchange for agreeing to perform specific tasks like dying their hair purple. Set to launch in October, it’s part of Project You Can, a UC initiative that aims to raise $1 billion by 2014 for student scholarships.
The program’s biggest flaw is that it is not realistic. It provides little incentive for students and alumni to participate other than the prospect of maybe raising lots of money and looking ridiculous while doing it. The program will likely fail to engage as many potential fundraisers as it expects because it’s just not an attractive opportunity.
Students will probably be averse to participation because of the program’s unbecoming tone. Rather than being an innovative fundraising platform, the program gives the impression that the university is desperate and pandering to the lowest common denominator. Transforming the process of fundraising into a whimsical, silly experience is a degrading prospect.
Perhaps to maximize its potential for engagement, the regents are turning to the Entertainment Industry Foundation, which board chair Sherry Lansing is involved with, to rope in celebrities. But asking Hollywood to plead for the university’s future in this way feels cheap. It might work better if the university appealed to celebrities who attended a UC campus, but that doesn’t look like the direction the program is headed in.
Aside from being inappropriate, the program is also overambitious. Status updates and tweets are highly unlikely to become mechanisms for raising thousands of dollars for public education. The program doesn’t feel like it was a carefully thought-out device for encouraging donations to the university; instead, it comes across as a haphazard last-ditch effort, as if the university couldn’t think of any better way of raising money.
The regents deserve some praise for trying to come up with an enterprising model for fundraising, and public engagement is the right direction to pursue, but they need to go back to the drawing board on this one.