Strategies, Performances and Profiling of a Sample of U.S. Universities in 2012

Angela Besana, Annamaria Esposito

Department of Business, Economics and Law, IULM University, Milan, Italy.

DOI: 10.4236/ojapps.2015.53008                

Abstract

The global economic crisis is affecting performances of not-for-profits. At the same time donors are targeted by a pressing good-cause related marketing, so that the competition for philanthropy is particularly keen. U.S. universities can be public, not-for-profit and for-profit. U.S. not-for-profit universities are confronted with different marketing, fundraising and revenue diversification. Above all, marketing concerns customers and their segmentation and their purchasing-power exploitation; fundraising aims to gain the trustworthiness of donors, instead. The aim of this paper is the analysis of the revenue diversification of a sample of 100 U.S. not-for-profit universities according to IRS (Internal Revenue Service) Forms. These 100 U.S. universities had the highest 2012’s revenues for the Guidestar ranking (www.guidestar.org). The cluster analysis gives evidence that the highest gain and the highest solvency are both connected with the implementation of revenue diversification for one profile. The most crowded cluster is the Marketing Expert with the second highest gain.

Keywords

Economics, Marketing, Performances, Cluster, U.S. University

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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