Does trust play a role when it comes to donations? A comparison of Italian and US higher education institutions
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Does trust play a role when it comes to donations? A comparison of Italian and US higher education institutions Barbara Francioni1 · Ilaria Curina1 · Charles Dennis2 · Savvas Papagiannidis3 · Eleftherios Alamanos3 · Michael Bourlakis4 · Sabrina M. Hegner5 Accepted: 9 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Higher education institutions (HEIs) have experienced severe cutbacks in funding over the past few years, with universities examining options for alternative funding streams, such as alumni funding. Identifying the factors influencing their alumni’s intentions to invest in their alma mater can be of significant importance when establishing a sustainable revenue stream. Within this context, empirical research on the potential role of trust is scarce. This paper aims to deepen the analysis of the relationship between alumni trust and engagement as well as three outcomes, namely support, commitment, and attitude toward donation. A structural equation model was tested on two samples of US (n = 318) and Italian (n = 314) alumni. Although both countries are affluent and developed countries, the USA has an established tradition of alumni donations, which is not such a developed practice in Italy. For both countries, results confirm that engagement is an antecedent of trust, which in turn leads to the three investigated outcomes (support, commitment, and attitude toward donations). In contrast, the effect of commitment on attitude toward donations is significant only for the USA universities. The paper has interesting theoretical and managerial implications. From a theoretical point of view, the study aims to address a gap concerning the role of trust in the HE context. Managerially, the study has significant implications for universities that want to change alumni attitude toward donations. Keywords Higher education institutions · Engagement · Trust · Commitment · Support · Attitude toward donations
Introduction Over the past few years, higher education institutions (HEIs) have experienced severe cutbacks in funding from government sources (Stephenson and Yerger 2014). Such austerity measures, as part of public funding reviews coupled with increasing international competition and new entrants, as well as events exogenous to HE, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, have had an impact on traditional income sources. As a result, universities depend ever more on private * Barbara Francioni [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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donors, who have become an important part of the financial mix and the well-being of HEIs (Tsao and Coll, 2005; Weerts and Ronca 2009; Iskhakova et al. 2020). Even though alumni contributions have always represented a significant source of university funding (Baruch and Sang 2012; Durango-Cohen and Balasubramanian 2015; Stephenson and Bell 2014), encouraging such a practice can make a positive impact on the stability and longevity of an HE institution. Given the above, it has become cruc
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