The Fine Art of Fund Raising

Federal aid and foundation grants are not enough to keep a college on the move. As campus expenses continue to climb, the nation's institutes of higher learning are stepping up their appeals for private gifts from alumni, corporations and anyone, in fact, who has a dollar to give. What's more, they are finding the money with surprising ease. Private gifts to the nation's 50 best-known colleges and universities have jumped at least 50% over 1960-61's $343,621,000.

That looks like pennies compared to what lies ahead. The University of Chicago is seeking $360 million over ten years, and even though the campaign started only in October 1965, Chicago already has $80 million in the pot. Columbia is after $200 million in three years, Northwestern $180 million in five. Duke hopes to raise $100 million in less than four years, while Yale and Long Island University are pursuing the same amount in a decade. In 1961, the University of Southern California set out to pick up $106 million over 20 years, wound up with $117 million in just five, so it promptly launched a new $34 million drive.

Thinking Big. Even the small schools are thinking big. California's six Claremont Colleges, with just 4,100 students, have a 1972 target of $86 million, and $35 million is already in hand. Williams last October completed one drive with $17.6 million, now hopes to reach $25.4 million by 1970. Connecticut's Wesleyan University, although blessed with an impressive $150 million endowment, is pursuing $38 million for expansion.

How do they find such huge sums? For advice, most colleges turn to professional fund-raising firms, the best of which already are too busy to take on any more schools this year. The pros candidly tell a college what it can realistically hope to raise, usually scale down inflated goals, since it is psychological suicide for a drive to fail. Before mapping out a campaign, Manhattan's John Price Jones Co., Inc., a firm of fund-raising consultants, prepares a detailed statement--sometimes 300 pages long --of the college's specific needs and underlying educational philosophy, a "case" that can be broken down to stir the interest of specific donors. "If the need is not there and the facts are not there, there is no case," says John Price Jones's chairman Charles Anger.

The college, rather than the fund-raising pros, must nail down the donors. Operating on the rough rule that 90% of most drive proceeds will come from 10% of the donors, schools work on their wealthiest friends first. Early announcements of big gifts often entice other affluent donors to follow suit, although the approach has its hazards. One Midwestern multimillionaire kept complaining when a college stalled its announcement of his $100,000 gift; school officers could not tell him that they had expected $10 million and feared his example would induce every potential $100,000 donor to scale down his own gift.

No More Candlelight. Petting the fat-cat donor until he purrs is a delicate business these days. Dinner by candlelight in the presidential mansion, while hi fi hums the college hymn and moonlight silhouettes the campus oaks, seldom works any more. The sentimental pitch, contends Beloit President Miller Upton, is "passe--people are too sophisticated for that." The best approach, says Northwestern Vice President Franklin Kreml, is "a very straightforward, factual, honest effort to arouse a potential donor's interest."

Nurturing that interest takes time and tact--and making sure that the right man to ask sees the right man to give. While anyone likely to give a six-figure gift to Harvard can reasonably expect a social call from President Nathan Pusey, college officials are not necessarily the ideal men to handle the highly personal negotiations over the precise size of a gift. According to Washington Educational Consultant Robert L. Gale, excellent results can most often be achieved if the final request is made by "a peer of the prospect or, even better, someone just a bit higher in the business or social scale whose attention he will find flattering."

The trick then is to play it cool. A small-college board chairman recently dined a fast-rising businessman in an exclusive club, pegged him as good for $250,000. After detailing the college needs, he popped the question: "Now, what do you think you can do?" Hesitantly, the donor said he would give half a million. Deadpan, the chairman said quietly, "No, John, that's not enough"--and came away with a pledge for $750,000.

Although schools can generally count on their wealthy trustees to get a campaign off to a fast and profitable start, no drive succeeds without broad support from its alumni. The big donor shies away from a school that cannot demonstrate the confidence of its graduates. Alumni are increasingly counted on to give annually, rather than just in the big drives, and Yale's President Kingman Brewster is well aware that he netted $4,000,000 that way last year. Yale lures its graduates by seeking their opinions on educational matters, bringing them back for convocations, assigning at least ten agents in each class to maintain personal contacts.

Honor for Cash. Although most donors deny that they want recognition for their gifts, schools try mightily to return honor for cash. At most colleges, anyone who provides 50% or more of the cost of a new building stands a reasonable chance of seeing his name carved in stone above its portals. Ohio State has picked up more than $8,000,000 from its President's Club, which costs $10,000 to join, but provides members with 50-yard-line ticket options at State's home football games and campus parking privileges. Brandeis, which has garnered $150 million in private gifts since its founding in 1948, has a wide range of titles for donors, scaled to donations, including "foster alumni," "fellows of the university," "councilors to the president," and even a proposed "Brandeis acreage holders."

For all the schools' careful calculation of potential givers, plenty of money still comes in, as Fred J. Lauerman, a University of Minnesota fund director, puts it, "over the transom." Florence Dailey of Rochester, N.Y., a stockholder in Eastman Kodak, left an estate of $19 million to Notre Dame and Georgetown when she died last year. No official from either school had ever met her, and except for the fact that she was a Catholic, no one has yet discovered her special attraction to the two universities. When the University of Redlands began a fund drive in 1965, an alumnus at IBM casually sent a newspaper clipping about the campaign to retired IBM World Trade Corp. Vice President James G. Johnston. Although Johnston had never so much as seen Redlands, back from Cannes came his check for $1,500,000.

Sometimes the school is so unprepared for the unexpected gift that the donor almost gets away. In 1959, for example, Karl D. Umrath, a retired cash-register salesman, rang up the switchboard operator at St. Louis' Washington University one Saturday morning and told her that he wanted to give the university $1,000,000. Some-what dubious, the operator tried in vain to reach Chancellor Thomas H. Eliot, got no answers from several other officials. Umrath was just about to hang up when she finally connected him with the dean of the college of liberal arts. "I want to give a million dollars and there's nobody to talk to me," Umrath complained. The startled dean talked soothingly until Umrath calmed down, discovered that his caller was a non-alumnus who had come to admire the school through attending its concerts and plays. Said delighted but flabbergasted Chancellor Eliot: "We had never asked Mr. Umrath for money; we had never even heard of Mr. Umrath"--who eventually came through with a gift of $1,200,000.

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