The Proven Benefits of Friendship
How strong relationships help alumni realize the importance of supporting your fraternity
The world’s longest study on happiness explores what keeps people healthy and happy and the findings include an important factor to make sure your fraternity continues to thrive: friendships. The study is just one of several that proves the health benefits of good friendships. This information can help you make a strong case to alumni for supporting the fraternity.
Through your communications program, you have an opportunity to share this relevant information with your alumni and to draw a clear connection to the fraternity. By curating and presenting content about this subject, you can engage your alumni emotionally and rationally in their decision to lend their support to your fraternity.
It’s a fact: Strong relationships contribute to good health and happiness.
Robert Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard, is the fourth director of the longest-running study of adult life which explores the question: “What keeps us healthy and happy as we go through life?”
Since 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been following a group of 724 men through work, home, family and health. “The biggest lesson we learned is that it isn’t wealth, fame or hard work that matters. Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period,” Waldinger said. He added that the healthiest 80-year-olds turned out to be the ones who were most connected in their 50s. Those with good relationships had healthier bodies and clearer minds than their counterparts.
People who do not have vital connections show marked differences from people with good friends. In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam posits that participating in even one social organization and forming friendships could cut your odds of dying in the next year in half. Another recent report showed that loneliness registers an impact on your well-being similar to that of smoking 15 cigarettes a day and rivals alcohol and smoking as a cause of early death.
How do the health benefits of friendship relate to your fraternity?
Affinity Connection recently surveyed alumni of a fraternity that doesn’t have an active undergraduate chapter. The survey invited alumni to weigh in about the future of the chapter and the value of reopening the house on their college campus. The questions boiled down to one question: “Why?” What is the value of their chapter — or any fraternity or sorority — in today’s culture? Alumni responded overwhelmingly with a single word: friendship.
Fraternity groups are a training ground for leadership and hot spots of philanthropy and mentorship. But your fraternity’s most basic element is also its most valuable: the friendships gained during formative college years and last for decades. While they are making life richer and better, these friendships are actually making alumni healthier and happier and helping them live longer.
In the United States, friendship is actually on the decline. In fact, in the decades since 1990, the percentage of Americans who say that they have less than three close friends has doubled, going from 16% to 32%. Those reporting no friends at all? That number has risen sharply from 3% to 12%. Thought leader Scott Galloway reports that 1 in 7 men have no close friends at all outside of their family.
Viewed through the lens of the happiness study and our survey results, creating opportunities for alumni to continue to deepen and maintain these friendships is paramount. If your communications help alumni realize this importance, you can more readily gain their support.
Sharing content that moves alumni emotionally and rationally inspires their generosity.
Now that you know how vital friendships can be for your alumni, what can you do to motivate them to make sure the fraternity thrives? A frequent and consistent communications program enables you to share relevant and meaningful content and to encourage alumni to offer their support.
Donors most often give for emotional reasons, then use rational thinking to confirm their decision to give. You can provide both the emotional hook and the facts to support it. Here are some suggestions for content that fulfills both requirements:
Emotional
Profiles and photos featuring friendships groups from specific decades, then and now
Reunion photos and recaps
Survey excerpts about how fraternity friendships have impacted alumni
Rational
“Fast facts” (a few bullet points) from the happiness study or other research on the health benefits of friendship
Links to relevant articles like this one about how friendship impacts happiness and health
Easy ways for friends to connect through the fraternity, like a directory or your social media
You can share this content in your newsletter or email newsletter and on your fraternity’s website and social media pages.
The takeaway?
Fraternity friendships can improve the lives of your alumni and the fraternity can play an active role in keeping those friendships alive. If alumni realize the important role the fraternity plays, they are more likely to support your fundraising efforts.
Now, more than ever, when friendship is on the decline, fraternities can fulfill a void. By making this case to alumni in your communications, you can secure their support. Make sure your communications program shares emotional and fact-based content about the benefits of friendship and how the fraternity is making lifelong, meaningful friendships possible.
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