Working year-round, the men and women of the advancement team start their yearly cycle on July 1, just a month before students start trickling back on campus. An important arm of the institution, the team focuses on garnering philanthropic donations that are crucial in the fiscal operation of Wabash.
In particular, a key item on the balance sheet of the college every year is the Annual Fund, a collection of donations collected from July 1 of every year until June 30 of the following year.
“Everything given towards the Annual Fund is unrestricted giving,” said Emily Vetne, Associate Director of Advancement Initiatives. “We can spend it on anything. So theoretically, if a student has an emergency and is $300 short on tuition, the Annual Fund could cover that.”
Last year, Vetne and her colleagues, Director of Advancement Initiatives Susan Dyer and Associate Director of Advancement Initiatives Hugh Vandivier ’91 were tasked with raising $3.75 million, which accounted for around 7–8% of the last year’s annual budget. However, the team managed to surpass this goal, raising just over $3.98 million, exceeding the expectation by over $230,000.
What is arguably more impressive is that the team managed to accumulate donations from 40% of current alumni for the 12th consecutive year.
“We can count on one hand the number of schools that are above 40% [of alumni],” said Vandivier. “We started June 30, the last day, with around 150 alumni to reach, and by dinner time we had met our goal. It’s an effort, but we managed to do it because we’re Wabash.”
One of the most important efforts in reaching the Annual Fund goal on a yearly basis is the yearly Day of Giving, a daylong event that the advancement team banks on to return results.
“This past Day of Giving raised $1.8 million of the total $3.98 million,” said Vetne. “So about half of the Annual Fund was raised in one day alone.”
The 2025 campaign, dubbed “Sing Thy Praises” saw over 8,270 gifts to the College in the 24 hour event on April 30, with over 3,400 unique donors making a contribution to the College.
The importance of events like the Day of Giving and yearly efforts to raise money for the annual fund cannot be understated. Given recent developments of state funding cuts towards education, such as recent cuts towards Frank O’Bannon Grants, it is even more important that the advancement team reaches the target amount of the Annual Fund.
“To have raised over and above the Annual Fund last year, knowing that the O’Bannon Grants were going away, added a personal layer [to our job],” said Dyer. “The funding cuts were about $600,000, but we were able to recapture about a third of that with our alumni, friends and neighbors’ generosity.”
When looking into the distribution of donations by size, the Advancement team realized something even more powerful: donations to the College that were smaller than $250 totalled nearly $217,000, almost equating to the $230,000 that the team beat the Annual Fund goal by.
“That’s strength in numbers,” said Dyer. “There were nearly 4,000 different accounts from nearly 4,000 different donors. That’s the power of community.”
But while the Advancement team can look back to the 2024–2025 fiscal year with pride, the team is not slowing down as they are already into the third month of this year’s fundraising cycle.
“We’re already well underway into our “new year,” said Vetne. “We’re no longer really thinking about that $3.98 million, because as of today our Annual Fund is only at $188,000. When we think about the life cycle of how long it takes us to raise all of those millions over the course of the year, it really is a second semester push.”
With the team shifting focus from the successes of last year towards the hard work needed this year, fundraising efforts have already started.
“We did a campaign coinciding with the first day of classes,” said Vandivier. “We sent out an email campaign to reunion classes – classes ending in ‘01 or ‘06 – commemorating the first day of their senior year.”
With smaller campaigns already having been started this year, the team is preparing for the eventual push that will start in the spring semester.
“The closer and closer we get to mid to late April, the more and more the entire campus begins working with us on the Day of Giving,” said Vetne. “Then after the Day of Giving, we are chasing down the remaining alumni to hit the 40% donation mark.”
With a successful year in the books, raising money for this year’s Annual Fund is still as important as ever. The changing landscape of the economy and government funding bring new challenges every day, but one constant will always be the power of the Wabash community to pay it forward.