March 22, 2007 | Read Time: 6 minutes
$2.5-billion campaign by U. of Michigan nears its goal, thanks to the tenacious efforts of its leaders
Five years ago, the University of Michigan faced some potentially devastating problems at the start of its campaign to raise $2.5-billion: The president, Lee C. Bollinger, suddenly decided to leave his post, having been lured away by an offer from Columbia University — and he talked the university’s chief fund raiser into going with him. To top it off, the economy had just taken a nose dive, and contributions dropped to $168-million annually, $50-million less than they had been before the departures.
The University of Michigan’s campaign, which has now raised more than $2.4-billion, or 97 percent of its goal, might have seriously foundered. But it had two advantages: One was the unflagging fund-raising efforts of the campaign’s volunteer chairman, Rich Rogel, who founded a Michigan health-care company. He is known to hop aboard his private plane, which bears the university’s logo, and fly to solicitation meetings with prospective donors in cities across the country.
The second was an early decision by Mary Sue Coleman, who became the University of Michigan’s president in 2002, to recruit Jerry May as its new vice president for development early in the following year.
Many fund raisers would agree that Mr. May was an inspired choice. Not only had he been a senior development officer at the University of Michigan during its first billion-dollar campaign, which raised $1.4-billion in 1998, he had also worked at Ohio State University, where he had just finished leading a campaign there to raise $1.2-billion.
Now in his third campaign to raise at least $1-billion, Mr. May has spent all but a handful of his 27 years as a fund raiser working on big drives. “I feel like I’ve been in a campaign my entire career,” he says.
But even with all his experience, keeping the University of Michigan’s current campaign on track was not easy, especially in the beginning. It is particularly hard to lose a president in the initial stage of a campaign, when some of the largest and most important gifts are typically made, says Mr. May.
One of his first decisions after coming back to Michigan was to postpone publicly announcing the university’s campaign. Ideally, the campaign’s quiet phase would have ended in 2002, after two years of privately seeking gifts, says Mr. May, but that stage ended up being closer to four years long. The delay enabled Mr. May and Ms. Coleman to spend most of their time revamping plans for the campaign and securing many of the biggest gifts.
While the campaign’s success is assured now, Mr. May worried early on about the effects that lengthening the drive could have. Initially planned for seven years — including two years of quietly seeking donations — the campaign will stretch to nearly nine by the time it ends in December 2008.
“Eight and a half years is too long,” Mr. May says, adding that he would have preferred a seven-year drive, the maximum period in the campaign standards recommended by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Campaigns that go on for longer than that can be wearing on staff and volunteers, Mr. May says: “We need to give people a break now and then.”
400 Fund Raisers
In managing the campaign, Mr. May has worked with more than 400 fund raisers; 135 of them report directly to him, and another 275 work in the development offices of individual schools and other parts of the university.
A total of 160 of the fund raisers actively seek gifts from individuals. And 14 full-time fund raisers do nothing but plan events for donors.
That has enabled the university to conduct blitzlike campaign appeals in cities nationwide. For example, Mr. May, accompanied by other fund raisers, volunteers, and university faculty members, recently descended on Palm Beach and Naples, Fla., to conduct 25 events in five days. The events include a dinner with a dean for about a dozen donors, a reception hosted by Ms. Coleman for 150 guests, breakfasts, lunches, and afternoon-long seminars where 700 people listened to faculty members talk about their scholarship on topics such as stem-cell research, China’s economic stature, and space exploration. And that’s not counting the nearly 50 one-on-one meetings that Mr. May and other campaign leaders held with potential campaign donors.
In the last few years, the university has made an effort to get its deans and other faculty members more involved in soliciting money from donors. To that end, Mr. May interviews candidates for deanships to determine whether they would be willing and able fund raisers.
“Some deans are comfortable doing that and some aren’t,” he says. “But more and more, when they come to the job, they are expected to raise money.”
To help them do so, the university’s fund raisers hold a two-hour orientation for all new deans to help them feel at ease with some of the nuances of soliciting gifts for the campaign.
Those solicitations sometimes include asking donors to make bequests to the university in their wills. Unlike some institutions in billion-dollar campaigns that don’t count bequests, or count only those received from an estate during the campaign, the University of Michigan has decided that $400-million of its $2.5-billion goal will come from bequests.
To that end, fund raisers count bequests that donors have promised to make at the bequests’ full face value, even though the university may not receive the money for decades.
While some organizations have been criticized for counting bequests or by including too many of them in reporting campaign totals, Mr. May says that he is careful to tell donors, as well as faculty and staff members, that the university wants $2.1-billion in cash and other liquid assets such as stocks to finance immediate needs. Bequests, on the other hand, which are reported separately, are intended to be a “pipeline” of future support for the university that will pay for costs that arise decades after the campaign ends.
One thing that billion-dollar drives have taught Mr. May is that bringing about the biggest gifts can take a very long time. He and other University of Michigan fund raisers typically visit a donor seven to 10 times over a period of a year or two before asking for a large gift, even one in the $100,000 range, which is relatively small in the context of a billion-dollar drive.
Mr. May says he has also learned to think of donors in terms of age groups.
“You have to focus on generations of people,” he says. “We are working harder and harder with people in their 30s and 40s” who might be capable of giving $100,000 over five years to the campaign or making a five-figure gift now. “As they get into their 50s,” he adds, “they will be big donors in the next campaign.”
