Master of Science / Department of Journalism and Mass Communications / Todd F. Simon / Cultivating relationships with millennial donors -- individuals born between 1982 through 1995 -- has become a topic of interest for researchers, organizations and fundraisers. Kansas State University had begun creating a “giving-back culture” among current students through a student-led campaign, in the hope of augmenting alumni donations to the university in the future. This study explored current students’ motives to give back to their university, determined the factors influencing their decision-making process, and discerned the effects of a student-giving campaign on postgraduates’ giving behavior. Roger’s Diffusion of Innovations model helped explain the influence of communication channels and opinion leaders on the decision-making process of millennial donors, both alumni and current students. This study found that millennials are motivated to donate based on several campaign factors, such as the mission, how the money is be used, the receiving of a gift for their donation, and pride in the institution. Friends and close colleagues have a positive influence on millennials’ donation decisions. Millennials also were found to have a preference for the traditional medium of newspaper, along with a high degree of influence for campaign events with face-to-face communication. The lack of apparent effect for students’ self-reported preferences for social media seems to indicate that either diffusion is not at work for this campaign, or that the diffusion process has yet to accelerate for giving back. These findings support previous research on alumni-donor motivations as well as build a foundation for future studies on millennial-donor motivations.

abstract: Native American students often enter postsecondary education as means of serving a broader community. Studies among a broad base of tribes found that the desire to serve a larger community acts as a motivation to persist through college. However, institutions of higher education often center on individualistic empowerment rather than focusing on how to empower tribal communities. Due to the lack of quality datasets that lend to quantitative research, our understanding of factors related to American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) postsecondary persistence has primarily been based on qualitative studies The purpose of this study is to understand how the desire to serve a larger community influences current and former Cocopah and Quechan undergraduate students’ college persistence. The study adds to the Native American postsecondary persistence literature base, that up till now, has not quantitatively examined students’ desire to serve a larger community as a persistence factor while intentionally sampling two smaller tribes with tribal enrollments less than four thousand. This dissertation presents a Native American persistence model and alternative method of sampling small Indigenous nations, establishes construct validity for an instrument measuring the proposed persistence model and provides evidence the proposed model predicts postsecondary persistence and academic performance. The design of the model derives from a review theories and scholarship on Native American persistence. Subsequently, construction of an instrument measuring the model emerged from the theories, literature, expert feedback, and pilot testing. Using data collected from an online survey of a sample of Cocopah and Quechan students (n=117), the study provides evidence of construct validity of the instrument through an exploratory factor analysis. Following the instrument validation, regression analyses indicates that AI/AN postsecondary persistence within both two-year and four-year institutions is positively associated with student desire to give back. The evidence further suggests that researchers, practitioners, and administrators should expand programs that center on nation-building to increase the persistence of Native American students while simultaneously meeting the needs of tribal nations. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Educational Policy and Evaluation 2018