In the last few weeks of my undergraduate studies, I donated to Senior Gift. It was a choice I very quickly came to regret, and one year later, I’ll share why.

The standard pitch delivered by Senior Gift representatives relied upon two motivations:

1. Support the Harvard undergraduate experience (or show gratitude for your time at Harvard)
2. Support Harvard’s financial aid initiatives (or show gratitude for Harvard’s financial aid)

For the purposes of bounding this discussion, I won’t go into whether donations to Harvard are important - I’ll assume they’re important enough to warrant the existence of the Senior Gift campaign.¹ However, I take issue with how the Senior Gift campaign is run: as implemented, Senior Gift does a mediocre job of achieving goals that are difficult to achieve as is, while at the same time incurring significant costs that I find unacceptable.

The goal: participation rate

Total donations weren’t the success metric for the Senior Gift campaign; instead, it was participation rate. Participation rate is what the campaign highlighted in reports to the class, and it’s also the first stat that gets presented in any official materials about Senior Gift. Perhaps understandable given the low fund size,² but there are a set of other reasons that underlie this choice:

1. Senior Gift primes individuals for a lifetime of giving. By encouraging students to donate in their senior year of college, they will get used to parting with their money for worthy causes. Maximizing participation rate means maximizing the set of charitable graduates leaving this institution.
2. Senior Gift primes individuals for gifts to Harvard. Like the above, encouraging students to begin donating early will help reduce resistance to donation solicitations later on, and it’s important to maximize the base of potential donors.
3. Senior Gift is a key barometer for current donors. If gratitude, for the undergraduate experience or for financial aid, is adequately demonstrated by the senior class in the form of donations, current donors will feel more inclined to donate to an institution that delivers valuable experiences to its students. Certain gifts may even be explicitly conditional on a high participation rate.

I don’t buy the “lifetime of giving” argument. Donating to Harvard is substantively different from donating to charity X. The special relationship I have with Harvard will never come close to the relationship I might have with the Red Cross, since after all, I will never spend four formative years with the Red Cross. Getting a Harvard student to donate to Harvard is significantly easier than getting a Harvard student to donate to the Red Cross, and because of this, I would argue there’s very little generalizable impact that applies to philanthropic intent as a whole.

Priming donations to Harvard is more reasonable given the reduced scope, but this becomes interesting when we consider what the distribution of Harvard alumni donations look like. I don’t have any evidence, but intuitively, I would expect a long-tail of donors, with a handful contributing a very significant majority of total alumni donations. If such is the case, this kind of priming is all about helping shape the inclinations of as many students as possible, thereby maximizing the chance that one of those students will be rich enough to be one of Harvard’s big donors. The big donor model mitigates the importance of priming: if all that really matters is getting one big-shot from my class to donate in 20 years, it seems like targeted development efforts in 20 years will be significantly more fruitful than a broad, class-wide initiative today.

I have no insight into the importance of the last point, but I would assume that the actual participation rate doesn’t matter that much for donations (I would find it odd if certain donors have explicitly tied their donation to a certain Senior Gift participation rate). In the world of giving, one does see matching donations and total donation thresholds, so it could be possible donors will match at certain thresholds (e.g. if Senior Gift hits $50k), but I doubt this too.³

The Senior Gift campaign might incrementally increase the amount of total alumni donations, compared to without the campaign, but the lift feels small, and perhaps insignificant if alternative development initiatives are considered in lieu of Senior Gift.

The cost: privacy and coercion

Unlike a standard nonprofit, which might use selective targeting to solicit contributions, the Senior Gift committee possesses unique power. They not only target, but they know precisely who should donate (all seniors) and who has yet to do so. Combine this information with incentivizing committee reps to maximize participation rate and the fact that the reps are the peers of those who they’re targeting, and the result isn’t pretty. A few tactics I have a problem with:

• Repeated solicitations. It’s one thing to receive a personal request to donate, it’s entirely another when those requests are repeated 5 to 10 times, in spite of requests to cease contact. If the purpose of donating is to show gratitude, that “gratitude” isn’t worth much when it’s under pressure from constant reminders. This undercuts all of the participation rate rationales discussed above as well.
• Bulletin boards. I donated, but it was never brought to my attention that my name could be used to convince others to donate. My house committee chose to put up a list of all who donated in the house dining hall. I’m not sure why my personal show of gratitude needs to be used to convince others to show gratitude, other than the obvious group coercion effect.
• Associates-level donations. If you donate more than a certain amount, you receive particular recognition and benefits. I thought that “all types of gifts are considered to be equal gestures,” but I guess not.

In short, the tactics used by the Senior Gift committee are fundamentally at odds with the spirit of what the campaign is trying to achieve. If Senior Gift is about priming individuals for future donations to Harvard, presumably by having students (voluntarily) associate their positive feelings toward Harvard with the act of donating, how do repeated solicitations contribute to this end? Squeezing the donation out of someone doesn’t necessarily mean that this link has been made, or to simplify, if you need A –> B, seeing B doesn’t mean A –> B happened. If Senior Gift is about showing other donors how grateful Harvard students are for their undergraduate experience, isn’t it disingenuous to solicit donations by resorting to blatantly coercive tactics? The expectation is very clear: if you aren’t grateful (where being grateful == donating), you should be, and the committee will beat that into your head as best they can.⁴ In juxtaposing these two goals, there’s an interesting dichotomy: in order to properly prime students to donate, there cannot be coercion, but in order to maximize donations to persuade older alumni donors, coercion is quite valuable.

In addition, if we assume that the Senior Gift is about showing gratitude for the best financial aid program in the country, attempting to convince people to show this gratitude is doing the exact opposite of what the financial aid program is supposed to achieve. No one who donates to Harvard’s financial aid program expects that they be recompensed, and no reasonable donor would expect that their donation to a student’s education comes with strings attached (e.g. the student must write a letter showing gratitude, or the student must donate $10 to Senior Gift). The point of financial aid is to give disadvantaged students the resources they need to proceed with their educational experience on as equal of a playing field as possible. If, at the end of four years, Senior Gift comes rolling along pushing the point that financial aid depends on these donations (which is of course only nominal), and gratitude for that financial aid is key, who gets impacted by this? This solicitation has no personal impact on the rich student who has nothing to do with financial aid. Instead, this disproportionately impacts those on financial aid.

This would be more ok if the campaign didn’t target and instead used class-wide tactics⁵, but the Senior Gift committee has the exact list of those who haven’t donated, and they use this list to full effect. The committee is able to target anyone who has initially refused to donate, and this target list very likely includes those who are economically disadvantaged.⁶ This is unacceptable, both as a privacy violation and for the coercion that results. The committee members were my peers, members of my college community, and they have no business possessing a list of fellow peers who have yet to donate, whether because of economic standing, principled resistance, or just being too lazy to show appropriate gratitude. To then act off this list and use repeated, targeted solicitations only further propagates the pernicious idea that recipients of financial aid should be grateful. Regardless of the exact makeup of this list of non-donors, there inevitably exists a meaningful subset of students who are on financial aid, and forcing them to show gratitude with this targeted approach incurs a severe cost.

This same line of reasoning doesn’t apply to thankathons, since they (1) don’t track attendance at the individual level, (2) they use class-wide solictations, and (3) they’re not asking for money. Conveying gratitude through a hand-written note is perfectly reasonable. But conveying gratitude by donating money? Especially when that gratitude is for having received financial assistance to even be at Harvard? It would be like asking cancer patients struggling to pay for chemotherapy to donate to the American Cancer Society to show their gratitude.

As Matthew puts it:

I am told to be grateful. The implicit message remains that I don’t get full financial aid because I deserve to be here; I deserve to be here only because someone covers my full financial aid. I am told that I had better be grateful. That’s how Harvard actually makes me feel.

I feel guilty when I’m back home, where my closest friends are struggling through community college. Here, I feel uncomfortable and small. I am reminded over and over again not only of my economic status but also that my economic status separates me from other, more fortunate students.

I feel like I should keep silent, because I feel that I have been made silent—I feel small. And because of Harvard, I do feel like a poor student.

This is precisely what robust financial aid was supposed to guard against: removing vestiges of old Harvard’s classism that would limit the experience of disadvantaged students. Yet ironically, Harvard has decided that the most effective way to support their financial aid fund is to run a campaign that improperly brings class distinctions to the fore. This is marginalization, and as a community, we should strive to minimize any form of marginalization. The problem is, so much rah rah and “gratitude” gets mixed into this discussion that a reasonable critique like Matthew’s is met with extreme hostility, which coincidentally fulfills the coercion argument.

The minimal benefits that might come with a high participation rate do not at all justify the privacy and coercion costs incurred by Senior Gift. I don’t need to demonstrate that there are 10 or 50 students that feel the same as Matthew - one student is enough. Matthew legitimately felt coerced, and no school-sponsored initiative should lead to such consequences.⁷

I accept the idea of Senior Gift, of having classmates organize a school-sponsored campaign to collect donations. But since it’s school-sponsored, the campaign should not reinforce class divisions by rewarding students who donate large sums with private events. Likewise, since the Senior Gift committee is composed of classmates, the committee should not have possession of the list of donors and conversely, the list of those who haven’t donated. Finally, the rhetoric used to solicit donations and to shame those who haven’t donated, by intertwining gratitude with donations, is inexcusable.

I valued my time at Harvard, and my special relationship with Harvard would be reason enough to donate. However, having my own peers co-opt the rich tapestry of student relationships built over four years to apply social pressure and targeted coercion for something with questionable value - that’s an outcome I’m unwilling to support, and it was my mistake to not have realized this sooner.