Celebrating Success: Prof Savvas Papagiannidis and Dr Eleftherios Alamanos

Congratulations to Professor Savvas Papagianndis and Dr Eleftherios Alamanos on their paper ‘Does trust play a role when it comes to donations? A comparison of Italian and US higher education institutions’ which will shortly be published in Higher Education.

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 USA (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.