Good Fundraising, Bad PR

I noted with great interest a story on the Washington Post website this week about the University of Maryland’s plans to build a new official residence for their President. This is projected to cost somewhere in the range of $7.2 million US, including the cost of knocking down the old official residence and preparing the site. This probably wouldn’t draw much attention, if not for the fact that the University is undergoing some rather heavy budget cuts at the moment, and they’re talking about cutting a number of very popular programs – including as many as eight NCAA sports. The new residence will be paid for out of donations from alumni and friends, not State or University funds, but people associated with the school are asking why those same donations couldn’t be used to save the sports programs – or, you know, for academics, if it comes to that. Right away, I was transported back to thirty years ago, in a place called Santa Barbara…

For those of you joining us late, the University of California has ten campus locations, one of which is in Santa Barbara, about 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles. I went there for my undergraduate degree from 1982 to 1986, and while I was there the Chancellor decided to upgrade the kitchen in his house. As I remember the story, our Chancellor was living in a house that he and his wife had purchased for themselves, partly because the official on-campus residence was not really suited to full-time living quarters, and partly because it was located in the swamp, next door to a dining commons and the dorm I lived in. The remodel was to be paid for from University funds, and every student group on campus was protesting because student services had just been cut for the hundredth time. Unfortunately, while the Chancellor was a world-class scholar and a fairly good administrator, he wasn’t all that great at public relations. Telling the student groups that he wasn’t answerable to them wasn’t a good tactic (he was answerable to the President of the University, who was answerable to the Governor, who was answerable to the taxpayers – many of whom send their children to the University of California), and telling them they didn’t understand the financial complexities of the situation wasn’t a good idea – although it was probably the truth…

Now, we should probably note that one of any university president or chancellor’s primary duties is raising money for the school, and that this includes throwing a variety of parties and receptions, ranging from dinners for a dozen or so guests to gala events of a hundred or more. This can be difficult to accomplish in a single-family home built before 1960 and never intended for such duty; in Maryland if the President wants to host more than two dozen current or potential donors at a time, some of them will be eating in a converted garage, and the off-campus residence in Santa Barbara in the mid-80s wouldn’t have done that well. In the current case, less than a third of the project is actually going towards the President’s living quarters anyway; of the total some $5.2 million is going to create the meeting, banquet and conference space that the President’s office will use for fundraisers in addition to other official functions. But that isn’t stopping people from raising cane at the costs involved…

I don’t know off hand how much money the President raises for the University of Maryland every year, or how much more effective those fundraising efforts would be if he had a better facility in which to hold those events. But traditionally, fundraising events have been more effective if the President invites people to his or her official residence (development officers call it the “house effect”), and the higher up the scale one goes, the more likely donors are to respond to such factors. I can’t tell you for a certainty that the University will make its money back; only that this is the way to bet. And I can’t tell you if the current President will deal with the inevitable backlash correctly as the project goes forward, but he would be well advised to look up the events in Santa Barbara thirty years ago – and then try anything else…