“We Were Ready.” Behind the American Indian College Fund’s Impressive Fundraising Surge

Margarita, of the Navajo Nation, is a film student at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Every year, the American Indian College Fund provides scholarships to thousands of Native students and critical funding to a network of tribal colleges and universities. Credit: the American Indian College Fund.

Back in July, Inside Philanthropy’s Michael Kavate looked at the evolving relationship between institutional philanthropy and Native communities in a space where support for Indigenous issues has long hovered around 0.4% of total foundation funding.

“A lot of interesting new leaders have come into the field in Indian country” in recent months, Erik Stegman, executive director of Native Americans in Philanthropy, said at the time. Despite this momentum, Stegman told Kavate he’s still trying to push a lot of these funders to make larger, more impactful investments. “If there was ever a moment for true systems change, it’s right now.”

The American Indian College Fund serves as an encouraging case study of one organization pushing for meaningful change, and attracting some serious funding. Launched in 1989, the fund looks to boost the number of Native American students who have college degrees. This figure currently stands at 14%—less than half the national average. The fund has provided over 140,000 scholarships and $237 million to support Native communities. 

In 2013, NancyJo Houk joined the fund as its chief marketing and development officer. For the next seven years, she and her team shifted its focus from institutional fundraising to person-to-person fundraising, expanded its brand and ramped up its digital presence.

When COVID-19 hit, the groundwork the team had done in the years prior made the fund well-positioned to communicate to donors and corporate funders how the crisis was disproportionately impacting Native American students struggling with housing and food insecurity, health challenges and unreliable internet access. “It was the easiest pivot in the world,” Houk told me. “All of the things we were talking about, the things that were holding back Indians, were front and center.”

In the second quarter of 2020, the fund increased digital donations by 15 times and grew digital revenue by 17 times, compared to Q1. The amount the fund will distribute in 2020-2021, which includes direct financial assistance to students and funding for tribal colleges and universities, is up 45% over 2019-2020. The pandemic, Houk said, provided the fund with an opportunity to share the inequities facing Native American communities more broadly. “People responded.”

Toward Data-Driven Fundraising

Houk’s 30-year career in nonprofit management includes stints with the Women’s Foundation of Colorado, the National MS Society, Alzheimer’s Association and Big Brothers Big Sisters. When Houk joined the Denver-based College Fund seven years ago, leadership tasked her with breathing life into its development department, where annual revenues had plateaued at roughly $16.5 million.

She told me her first order of business was to get a handle on current donors and “think about what we could say differently to appeal to a broader pool of people.” Houk knew that rigorous quantitative research and stakeholder interviews had to be part of the equation. She reached out to an old acquaintance, Meredith Vaughan, the CEO of the Colorado-based ad agency Vladimir Jones, and asked if the firm would help. Vaughan agreed, and the fund’s team was in place.

It wasn’t always smooth sailing. Houk told me that in the early days, some of her staff weren’t sold on the strategy’s marketing-based approach. Her goal was to make fundraising “more data-based and less emotion-driven,” and once her staff “understood the value of the data, they were excited.”

Creating a “Brand Voice”

Beginning in 2014, the fund and the Vladimir Jones team began identifying cohorts. They learned that highly educated and affluent women had what Vaughan called a “predisposition toward how to affect system change in any cause.” Once the team identified this core behavior, they looked across the U.S. to see where this audience was concentrated.

Houk and her staff then created content demonstrating how support for the fund could change lives. This represented a shift in fundraising strategy. Previous messaging primarily focused on the experiences students would have at certain Native American colleges—emphasizing that they would get a great education on a campus where they could “practice their ceremony and live their culture, which doesn’t happen when you attend a mainstream college,” Houk said.

It’s a powerful message, but ultimately a limited one. Market research revealed that prospects and donors are “more interested in talking about students who attend,” Houk said. The fund’s strategy zeroed in on what she called “the idea of what an education really means and what it does for individuals, communities and the world.”

The fund compiles these stories and videos at standwithnativestudents.org, explaining to donors and prospects how their support will assist students during the pandemic. For example, its “donate” page profiles Natasha of the Chippewa-Cree tribe, who talks about her struggles to provide for her family while attending college. (Click here to see an example of a piece of marketing collateral courtesy of Vladimir Jones.) The fund is also active on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Equipped with market research, the fund “completely changed what we talked about,” Houk told me. “We worked hard to create a brand voice and a presence that reflects our donors and students.”

Understanding Donor Motivations

Houk and Vaughan also created engagement strategies—dubbed “communication tracks”—based on donor motivations. The first and most popular track is the “student” motivator. More than anything, donors want to help students succeed. The other two tracks are “social justice” and “history and culture.”

If, for example, a prospect or donor’s assigned motivator is social justice, the “social campaign will have a social justice message, and you’ll be directed to the website entry point featuring disparities between Native American education statistics and other ethnic groups, and student videos with stories demonstrating those disparities,” Houk explained to DMCNY’s Ginger Conlon in 2018.

Houk and Vaughan continually test their assumptions. “We constantly want to know what people are interested in, what they’re thinking about and care about, and how we can align with that,” Houk said.

In 2019, Vaughan and her team audited the state of the fund’s “best opportunity” donors. Crunching the market research data, they identified new cohort groups, including young families, that were well-represented in the fund’s database but had greater potential.

The team also discovered new opportunities to expand its messaging. For example, Houk cited growing interest in “history and culture” motivation, specifically around Native American history or the history of Native American lands. “Things that haven’t always been interesting to a lot of people are suddenly becoming interesting,” she said.

Houk told DMCNY that the fund implemented “paid social campaigns that complement both acquisition and retention efforts and use a combination of paid social, SEO and SEM, directly supporting our traditional channel outreach.” The fund also embraced always-on digital marketing, allowing it to pivot and roll out targeted messaging around milestones like end-of-year giving and Native American heritage month.

The Pandemic’s Effect on Native Communities

The fund’s new strategy generated impressive dividends, long before the surge in attention this year. From 2015 to 2020, the College Fund realized 15-35% year-over-year revenue growth. The fund also saw December 2019 donations grow 130% over the previous year. “When COVID hit,” Houk said, “we were ready. We had prepared for the moment in time when people started looking at Native communities differently.”

Houk and her team discussed the propriety of making “the ask” during the uncertain early days of the pandemic. They held off at first. “It just didn’t make sense,” she said. “There was too much panic everywhere.” However, once Houk and her team grasped the pandemic’s impact on Native communities—housing shortages, food insecurity and poor access to healthcare—“the alignment was obvious and clear.”

For instance, CDC data from 23 states found that between January 22 and July 3, the infection rate for American Indian and Alaska Native people was three times higher than whites. Donors were particularly concerned about the digital divide, Houk said. “Trying to move 38 tribal colleges to online learning in geography areas with limited internet access was incredibly challenging,” she told me. “Many of our student sat in parking lots at their college to get Wi-Fi, or attended class on their phones.”

The fund’s younger family cohort, further refined by Vaughan and her team in 2019, was especially receptive to the fund’s messaging. “Kids couldn’t go to school, so now a lot of families could suddenly identify with what Native American students were going through,” Vaughan said. “This wouldn’t have been relevant pre-COVID.” Houk and her team were also able to tie the fund’s messaging to social and racial justice issues that took the spotlight this summer.

Disruption is Necessary

The fund also ramped up its public relations outreach. College Fund representatives were quoted in Teen Vogue, Montana Public Radio and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

In March, the College Fund announced the American Indian College Fund Emergency Relief Fund. A month later, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation contributed $4 million. In May, College President and CEO Cheryl Crazy Bull told The Nation’s Mary Retta, “We’re deeply concerned that the momentum that we’ve built to support students and support these already-fragile institutions will be lost because of this crisis.”

Two months later, Exxon Mobil announced the fund would receive an undisclosed donation as part of the company’s employee and retiree matching gift program. In September, the Hechinger Report published a piece by Cheryl Crazy Bull and Sara Goldrick-Rab, professor of sociology and medicine at Temple University, exploring the pandemic’s ongoing impact on tribal colleges. (Inside Philanthropy readers may remember that Goldrick-Rab was an especially vociferous critic of Michael Bloomberg’s $1.8 billion financial aid gift to John Hopkins.)

Some of the other funders that provided support over the summer include AT&T ($350,000 for scholarships), the VF Foundation ($25,000 for scholarships), Henry Luce Foundation ($250,000 for remote learning), United Health Foundation ($430,000 to expand the fund’s Tribal Scholars Program) and $1 million from the family foundation of Amazon executive Jeff Wilke for the fund’s Tribal Colleges and Universities Computer Science Initiative. Houk told me the fund has also received “several large gifts from older, new donors who had heard about us through digital channels.”

Add it all up, and the fund’s annual revenue grew 74% to an average of $28.7 million in the five years since the new strategy went live. Between 2018-2019 and 2019-2020, the fund decreased its cost per dollar raised by 22.5%. The fund also received the second-highest number of scholarship applications (5,788) in the organization’s history, second only to 2019-20 (6,425). 

I asked Houk what advice she would give her fellow fundraisers. “Adjust your strategy to tell the story people want to hear (as opposed to the story you want to tell),” she said. “Be relevant, listen to what matters to your donors, and put your needs in that context. At this time in history, when the whole educational construct has been disrupted, we need to also disrupt the way we appeal to donors. The traditional focus on institutions and the improvement/growth of campuses and facilities may not be relevant ever again.”