Gifts to the annual fund at Juniata College, in Huntingdon, Pa., grew this year after two recent graduates produced a YouTube parody of a popular ballad.

The video entitled Just Five Bucks features a performance by 2007 graduates Brenton Mitchell and Brandon Long, who ask others who graduated from Juniata in the last decade (in song) to donate $5 to JC, as the college is known.

The video, also posted on the college’s Facebook page, raised $73,000 from May 28 to May 31 after it was included in an e-mail appeal sent to alumni. That was an 18-percent increase over what was raised with a text-only e-mail sent during the same period last year. Young alumni who graduated in the last decade gave a total of $29,000, an 81-per-cent increase over their donations in 2008.

The JC grads’ video performance is an imitation of the romantic ballad “More Than Words,” released by the funk-metal group Extreme in 1991.

In their parody, Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Long, wearing college T-shirts, sit on stools with the same posture as the original performers did in their own video. Rewriting Extreme’s original lyrics, they sing:

Just five dollars is all you have to give to make it real
Then you wouldn’t have to say that you love JC
Cos we’d already know
What would you do if we said not one or two?
Just $5 will show you feel
That your love for JC is real