The annoying thing is not that they're calling and asking for money. It's that the frequency with which they do so is abusive, and that they're marketing the most to the wrong group of people (i.e. people that just graduated, who are statistically likely to be digging themselves out of a gigantic student loan). Alienating your donor pool before they're even able or willing to donate is not a good long-term strategy for - you know - getting donations.
The actual communications themselves are not really conducive to getting donations, either. Instead of reaching out with the equivalent of "Hi, money plz. kthxbai.", send a monthly email newsletter with what the Boone fund is actually doing with that money, along with any future initiatives that they want to pursue, and information about their fundraising goals and progress toward those goals. Then - as a FOOTNOTE - ask for money to help further these goals. It shouldn't be a header. It shouldn't be the subject of the email. It shouldn't be the opening line on the phone. It should be the last thing that's mentioned, because the thing that donors really care about is how the money has been used, how it will be used, and the progress toward goals. I realize that the entire mission in life of the Boone fund is to collect money from donors and put it to good use, but that doesn't mean they have to be obnoxious about it.
On top of that, go look at the Boone Fund website: http://www.collegeofidaho.edu/giving/ways-of-giving/annual-giving/boone-fund (this is the first page I land on off of a Google search for "College of Idaho boone fund") If I, as a potential donor, wanted to know more about how my money is going to be used, this is what I see: http://take.ms/yr1zy Broken link, no concrete information for how my money would be used... Why should I even consider donating if there's no transparency around how it's going to be used? Even if I go out of my way to find out how my donation would be used, the information is hidden when it should be front and center (I did eventually find that the "Advance the Legacy Campaign" link had the information I was looking for - why is that a "Related page"? That should just be the page).
Compare that with the Red Cross fundraising page: http://take.ms/uXutx In addition to that landing page, they have extra information for people that can't contribute financially, but can volunteer their time to help coordinate fundraisers, work directly as disaster relief personnel, donate blood, etc. I realize that the Boone Fund is trying to collect money, not blood, but those other options are most important to the people they (Boone fund) are trying to market to the most (recent grads with little disposable income). I'm sure that with some creativity, a volunteer's time could be put to good use. Don't sit them down at a phone and have them call and ask for donations, too. There are musicians at College of Idaho that want to play music for people in public, right? Set up a way for those musicians to play for a guaranteed crowd (try starting with something as simple as street music at the Boise Market - work with the Market people to set up a consistent time/location for musicians) and in return for coordinating that, a portion of proceeds goes to the Boone Fund. Establishing good relationships around the Treasure Valley will allow these kinds of things to happen very quickly, and it's a win-win situation for everyone involved: musician gets exposure and some money for playing to a crowd, Boone fund gets donations without bugging people, and market-goers get to hear some nice music.
Let's skip ahead to the point where somebody has been convinced to give to the Boone fund online. Have you seen this form? https://www.collegeofidaho.edu/gifts/ I mean - have you really looked at it? It looks like it's from 1995 or something. Visual design matters when you're asking people for any sum of money, and it can have a measurable impact on your rate of conversion (if you don't already have analytics data telling you this, along with A/B testing to optimize your funnels, you're a decade behind).
Putting that aside for a second, though: the form itself is long, unfocused, and too cluttered with options and unnecessary information. Compare (again) to the Red Cross donation page: http://take.ms/S2LMj. Even on the page where you're essentially handing them money, they're still emphasizing the impact that you're making by donating. This is arguably the most critical point in your entire marketing campaign. If somebody gets to your donation page and decides at that point that it's not worth the effort to fill out the form, or they don't have a good feeling about what they're doing and ultimately navigate away, then all of your effort up to that point is lost.
Longer term donor relations are important, too. After the Red Cross has gotten a donor, they don't continue to badger them at inconvenient times asking for even more money/blood/whatever. If you donate blood, they call you back when the waiting period has elapsed, and they usually open with "This is the Red Cross. Thank you for donating blood on [whatever date]. As a reminder, your blood donation has gone toward [statistics about lives saved and other warm fuzzies]. We see that your waiting period is almost over. Would you like to make another appointment?" -- again, they ask for your donation as the last thing in their communication, and only after giving you a good feeling about your previous donation.
On the topic of long-term donor relations: make recurring donations an easy thing. As a donor, perhaps I want to provide $100/month to the Boone fund. As it stands right now, I would have to manually go submit that payment through the form on the website every month. Remove a barrier between you and my wallet, and add an option to process that payment on an ongoing basis (monthly, yearly, weekly, daily - it doesn't really matter). If you can't make it easy for me to give you money frequently, why should I bother with doing so? Note that I don't have any data about how often the average donor contributes or the average amount (both of which would be good data to put on the website, by the way), so I don't know how much this could help you. Every modern payment gateway supports it, though, so there's no reason from a technology standpoint that this can't be added. From a fund management standpoint, this also allows you to project ahead a little bit and have some insight into how you can best apply the funds.
If repeat donations are pretty common, you might also consider tracking the donations over time, and providing special recognition to donors that hit certain thresholds over the entire course of their lifetime. For instance, if I donate $100/month, and eventuall get to the point where I've contributed $10k to the fund, a really low-cost yet personal touch is to just send out a postcard saying "Thanks for donating $10,000 to the Boone Fund. Your contributions have been used for x, y, and z, and have impacted the lives of thousands of students. You're part of what makes the College of Idaho alumni great." It's simple and very inexpensive, but shows donors that you care about their contributions enough to at least track them and say thank you. Again, you might do this already, but I don't know. There's nothing on the website or any other marketing materials about it.
And for the love of everything good in this world: if somebody tells you not to call them again, don't call them again. That's just common courtesy. I don't think either of us (Alli & I) have explicitly opted out of Boone fund calls (we do intent to donate eventually when the time is right for us - probably not when we're saving for a wedding, paying off student loan debt, and after we just bought a house. There are tools that can tell provide this kind of data to telemarketers - Boone fund should use them). Jillian (above) has mentioned that the callers refused to remove her from their calling list unless she donated. The callers are telemarketers, plain and simple, and they are still bound by federal law. Getting sued is not a good way to meet your fundraising goals. See https://www.fcc.gov/guides/unwanted-telephone-marketing-calls for more information.
Perhaps the most important thing here - even if the Boone fund is taking all of the other recommendations above - is that encouraging people to give out their credit card/bank account information over the phone for any reason is no longer a good practice to follow. Most telemarketing fundraising drives like this have moved to a pledge model, where the only thing that the caller asks for is a commitment to go online and submit a donation through the website, with a follow up call or two if there's a commitment and no donation is received, and definitely a follow up if the donation is received (at any time). I cannot stress this enough: if you're asking for payment information over the phone in 2015, you're doing a disservice to every person that has been conned out of their personal information over the phone, and subsequently had their identity stolen, and you're opening people up to the idea that random people will call them up and ask them for payment information, which is doing nothing to help the problem of identity theft and bank fraud in the future. Why is that your problem, you ask? Because you're asking for money the same way that people did 15 years ago, and you have a responsibility to do it in a way that protects your donors' information. If you call me up while I'm sitting in a coffee shop, and I read my credit card number to you over the phone, not only can somebody directly access that information from the phone line if they have physical access on either end of the connection, but anyone sitting in the coffee shop can hear it too.
The above may sound harsh, but it does come from a place of wanting the Boone fund (and by extension, The College of Idaho) to succeed in it's fundraising goals. In order to do that, though, they need some serious marketing help. Every single person that I've talked to dreads seeing the Coyote Callers number pop up on their phone, and you can even see from the comments on this post that people are going out of their way to avoid talking to them. That's not a good position for anyone to be in, least of all the Boone fund.