Sport

This study is designed to gather data regarding donor giving patterns to a large government university with respect to athletic donation patterns and academic donation patters.  The sample population includes donors to the University of Oregon from 1994-2002.  Three research questions are presented.  The first question seeks to determine the source of donations regarding athletic donations and academic donations.  The study finds that alumni tend to prefer giving to academic programs whereas non-alumni tend to prefer giving to athletic programs.  This data is not absolute, there is some overlap in giving patterns, and the Identity Salience Model of Nonprofit Relationship Marketing Success states that these donation patterns depend on the type of university involved.  The second research question seeks to determine whether athletic success functions to increase charitable donations.  The study finds that non-alumni donations increase as a result of athletic success but that alumni donations remain essentially neutral.  The final research question seeks to determine whether an increase in donations to athletic programs functions to create a corresponding decrease in donations to academic programs.  This study finds such a correlation, particularly with respect to non-alumni donation habits and patterns.  Overall, this study provides data for future research but is limited in that it is a large public university and not an elite academic university.

Part 1  Article Identification
Jeffrey L. Stinson and Dennis R. Howard in their 2004 article Scoreboards v. Mortarboards  Major Donor Behavior and Intercollegiate Athletics, published by the Spot Marketing Quarterly, sought to examine a number of questions pertaining to charitable giving to a major university.  The authors, one a doctoral candidate and the other a professor at the University of Oregon, approached these questions from a theoretical perspective derived from marketing generally and applied it through empirical analyses to a university sports context.  Specifically, the authors used data from their own university to test a number of research questions for which they argue the existing academic literature is either incomplete or contradictory in several respects one of the main goals of the article, in addition to securing and analyzing empirical data for purposes of attempting to answer the posited research questions, was to create an empirical foundation so that future researchers would be able to formulate research questions with more precision relying on the data derived from this study.

Part 2  Summary (Substantive Points and Methodology)
Contextually, this study was motivated by several facts, trends, and concerns related to charitable giving to universities more particularly, it is well-established that charitable contributions to athletic departments at Division IA schools have more than doubled over the past decade (Howard  Stinson, 2004, p. 129).  University athletic departments at these classes of universities have as a consequence increased fundraising efforts and also begun to depend to a far greater extant on donations than has been true in the past.  This trend has also raised fears that charitable giving to academic programs may suffer and to academic questions relating to the nuances of charitable giving in terms of actual facts, motivations, and impacts.  In order to contribute to resolving these facts, the authors engaged in an empirical study involving charitable donations made at the University of Oregon between 1994 and 2002.  Three main research questions were formulated, tested empirically and discussed.  The first research question examined charitable giving by alumni and non-alumni in order to determine donor behavioral patterns with respect to athletic giving and academic giving because the existing data is contradictory in certain respects.  The research found that both donor classes gave to athletic and academic programs, but that this giving varied to the extant that alumni made more substantial gifts to academics whereas non-alumni (such as boosters and sports fans) made more substantial gifts to athletics.  The second main question sought to determine whether and to what extant athletic success functions to increase charitable donations.  Here, the authors found that athletic success most significantly impacted donations by non-alumni whereas it was much more neutral with regard to alumni donations.  The final research question sought to determine whether an increased level of athletic donations necessarily resulted in a decreased level of academic donations the study found strong support for the assumption that giving to athletics undermines giving to academics, particularly for nonalumni (Howard  Stinson, 2004, p. 136).  This finding was incremental rather than sudden and implies a potential negative impact for increased athletic donations and the authors suggest further and broader research into this potential empirical phenomenon.

Part 3  Critique (Strengths and Weaknesses)
It is important to acknowledge, in the final analysis, that the authors concede several of their studys limitations.  The most significant limitation is the fact that only one major university was included in the empirical population.  The University of Oregon is not especially known as an academic powerhouse, it is not located in a major commercial center, and geographically it is on the fringe of the American continent.  It is therefore reasonable to suggest that the University of Oregon is not necessarily representative of alumni and non-alumni behavior at other universities with different geographical influences and academic strengths and weaknesses.  This, however, leads to one of the more interesting features of the article.  More specifically, the authors incorporate a marketing perspective into the articles structural design, The Identity Salience Model of Nonprofit Relationship Marketing Success, and this perspective provides persuasive logic regarding how alumni and non-alumni perceive their individual relationship with a particular university.  It is reasonable, for example, to see how alumni from an academic powerhouse such as a Columbia or Cornell (athletically-challenged institutions to be sure) might focus on an academic identity to the exclusion of athletic considerations.  These questions are effectively a question of focus to the extant that policy makers and administrators are concerned about athletic donations undermining academic contributions at major public universities as opposed to elite Ivy League institutions, for instance, the marketing perspective is valuable.  A major weakness, which is not directly discussed, is the extant and nature of indirect donations that are frequently hidden and unethical pursuant to intercollegiate ethics rules.  The study is too narrow to the extant that it assumes a transparent type of donation scheme to athletic programs.  The authors should have incorporated some qualitative perspectives in this regard rather than assuming an empirical model which ignores much donor giving in the intercollegiate context.   In sum, this article is worth to the extant that it discusses questions which remain unresolved in an empirical sense and to the extant that it provides some preliminary empirical evince for future researchers to build upon while ignoring the dark underbelly of donor giving to athletic programs and individuals in the intercollegiate context.