How 6 Institutions Became Winning Fund Raisers

By NICOLE LEWIS

The Council for Advancement and Support of Education has presented its ninth annual awards to educational institutions that have shown strong improvements in their fund-raising activities.

The Circle of Excellence 2001 Overall Fund-Raising Improvement Awards were given to 17 colleges and universities and 9 private schools.

Institutions cannot apply for the award. Instead, winners are determined based on financial data that the schools, colleges, and universities provide to the Council for Aid to Education for its annual survey on education fund raising.

A committee of senior development officers reviews the data from the schools and determines the winners in different categories based on schools’ size and type. The judges don’t know the names of the institutions when they are reviewing the data.

Among other factors, judges seek institutions that increase the number of alumni who give and that obtain income from a variety of sources so that the winners aren’t just the lucky recipients of a big gift or two. A full list of the winners is available at http://www.case.org.

Following are some of the strategies that were used by winning institutions.

Florida Atlantic University. The excitement of starting something new is driving fund raising at this university in Boca Raton, according to Susan Peirce, associate vice president for advancement and campaign director.

The 35-year-old university plans to nearly double its enrollment to 44,000, to start a football team, and to build a medical center. Those ambitious goals have helped the school raise $155-million for a capital campaign that began in 1997 and ended last month — $55-million more than the original goal.

Thank-you notes from students have also helped raise money.

Three years ago, the school started asking students who benefited from gifts to write personal letters or to meet with visiting donors, says Ms. Peirce. The university helped students by showing them sample letters from previous years. Ms. Peirce says that after one donor received such a note thanking him for a $50,000 scholarship, he proceeded to underwrite three additional scholarships worth $450,000.

The Hackley School. This private high school in Tarrytown, N.Y., educates its students about the importance of giving before they graduate, says Katherine Valyi, director of development. The development office invites small groups of seniors throughout the year to share a pizza and talk about what the alumni association does and the importance of private donations to the school. Ms. Valyi and other school officials also try to make the alumni association’s benefits tangible to the students by informing them that the association helps underwrite the senior class retreat, a final weekend of activities before graduation, as a welcome into the association.

In the five years since this program started, the school has seen senior class gifts rise from a total of $400 to $7,000 last year. The Hackley School also won the award based on its improved fund raising from alumni; those gifts increased from $463,000 in 1998 to about $2-million in 2001.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Whenever Charles M. Vest, the institute’s president, travels on any type of university business he devotes time to meeting with alumni and other potential donors, says Stephen A. Dare, director of resource development.

The personal visits from the university’s leader, along with the surging economy of the late 1990’s, has contributed to the success of the school’s current capital campaign, says Mr. Dare. The campaign, which has raised more than a billion dollars since its 1997 inception, plans to have brought in $1.5-billion by 2004.

Other high-level senior employees, including the provost, follow the president’s personal approach to fund raising. “They are the decision makers and also the people with the vision for the future,” Mr. Dare says. Donors are not hearing appeals “filtered through a staff member,” he says. “It is the leadership, and M.I.T. alumni in particular value that.”

Montana Tech of the University of Montana. The university in Butte increased its gifts largely by making its phonathon more effective, says Dorothy Czehura, interim president of the Montana Tech Foundation, the fund-raising arm of the school.

In the past, only students who were paid placed calls to alumni seeking donations, and the money raised was pooled for general use by the university. Two years ago, however, the foundation started encouraging the school’s various departments and undergraduate clubs to recruit students and faculty members as volunteers to call their alumni and request donations for specific uses, such as scholarships or new desks and chairs. After the changes, the average phonathon gift rose from $135.70 to $231.05. All faculty members and some students donated their time. Some students opted to be paid, but donated their wages back to their department or club.

Although the new approach has slowed unrestricted giving, Ms. Czehura views it as an investment in the future. “Relationships that are being built and fostered through these interactions are well worth the unrestricted dollars lost,” she says.

The University of North Carolina at Asheville. In the last three years, the university nearly doubled the percentage of alumni who made gifts, says Alex Comfort, assistant vice chancellor for development. The university relied on a lot of strategies that are “old hat to the big universities,” he says, “but we are doing them for the first time here.”

Recent donations were motivated in part by the school’s first comprehensive campaign, for $8-million. As part of the campaign, which has already raised $7.4-million, the university hired a telemarketing company to help it reach its 10,000 alumni. The campaign is expected to end next spring, a year ahead of schedule, says Mr. Comfort.

The university has also created an alumni page on its Web site that provides news and the option of donating online.

The University of Rochester. Annual fund raising has more than doubled in the last three years at this New York university — to $62-million last year — largely because of the school’s decentralized approach to fund raising, says Holly Budd, vice president for development.

Following the university’s last campaign, which ended in 1996, the administration split up its development staff into divisions that include the medical school, business school, and undergraduate college. A member from each development team attends regular meetings to coordinate strategies with other university fund raisers. Each school’s dean sets fund-raising priorities, so several mini-campaigns occur simultaneously instead of one large schoolwide campaign.

This approach not only fosters a “collegial competitive spirit” among development officers, says Ms. Budd, but it also appeals to donors because it makes it clearer how the money will be used. “When you have these enormous comprehensive capital campaigns,” she says, “people lose sight of what you are trying to raise money for, and the dollar amount becomes the focus rather than the need.”