Fundraising has become a crucial activity on the American higher education scene. Once the primary province of private institutions, public colleges and universities are now finding it imperative to develop organizational structures and activities to enhance their fundraising capabilities. Private gfts are necessary to reduce the level to which institutions must rely on tuition revenue (Gitlow, 19951, and they are essential for determining the level of educational, research, and public-service excellence to which the institution aspires (Campbell, 1995). Colleges and universities have a tradition of raising private funds for supporting outstanding faculty, and recruiting students by offering scholarships and other forms of student financial aid. Today, there is an additional expectation that some portions of institutional operating budgets will be met through alumni, corporate, and foundation contributions (Johnson and Rush, 1995).
More and more organizations-for-profit and not-for-profit-are turning to environmental scanning as a supplement to or as a systematic part of their planning. Educational institutions, in particular, are finding that they are not distinct organizations isolated from their environment. The economic, political, social, and technological changes occurring outside the walls of academe are requiring the concentration on external data for institutional decision making. Planning in isolation or focusing only on internal intent, therefore, as though the college or university is immune to external change, is not only inadequate planning but probably destructive. For example, most college ORcials knew, or should have known, that the birth rate of traditional-age college students was in decline. Those data were available eighteen years before the NEW MIECTDNS nx H i m E ~T K W .