Major donors are motivated both by the excitement of giving and the satisfaction that their money has been put to good use, finds Andrew Derrington on a recent fundraising study trip
Canada is a good place to learn about university fundraising because the giving culture is fairly similar to the UK, but its practice tends to be about 20 years ahead. So it was that I recently found myself on the annual CASE fundraising study tour, which takes groups of academic leaders and fundraising professionals from Europe to Canadian universities to learn first hand how they approach this trickiest of businesses.
At McMaster University, we learned about the motivations of fundraising's three main actors: development professionals, donors and academic leaders. Lorna Somers, vice president of McMaster University Foundation, told us about the transition from her early days at McMaster in the late 1980s, when academics treated her "like someone with advanced leprosy" and alumni would tell her that universities should look to the government for any money they wanted. Now academics are eager – sometimes too eager – to be involved. McMaster's annual fundraising target is $21m (£13.4m) and their last campaign raised $470m (£300m) in four years.
Donors have changed too, as we discovered when we met three of McMaster's most generous donors. All were alumni who had lost touch with the university and been attracted back, either to study or because they wanted to get involved in the running of the university. For each, giving was prompted by the realisation that they had the means to help the university do something exciting and extraordinary. This realisation is not the result of a fevered sales pitch but rather the culmination of a long relationship. Most of McMaster's top 20 donors started small, with less than $1000 (£640) and more than a decade elapsed between their first gift and their major gift.
McMaster was not the only place where we heard how important it is to manage, or steward, this relationship. Donors give because they want to make a difference. Once they have given, they need to be told what their gift has achieved. Then they may know that they can achieve more by giving again. Professionals who take the lead in donor stewardship involve academic leaders in generating and sustaining both the excitement that may result in a gift, and the satisfaction that the gift has been put to good use.
But not all academic leaders are good at this. We tend to get too hung up on the issue of asking for money. Some of us are terrified of the idea, others become too eager to askand become 'askaholics'.
John Kelton, dean of health sciences at McMaster, who has raised over $200m (£128m) in the last 10 years, told us about his relationships with major donors. Appropriately enough, our meeting took place in the 'floating' boardroom suspended in the atrium of the Michael G De Groote School of Medicine, a building funded by a donation of $105m (£672m), the largest single donation to a Canadian university.
Kelton's account of his work with donors made it clear that listening to donors and understanding what they are interested in, is as important as talking. Although our visits to three other universities confirmed everything we had learned at McMaster, in each of them we learned something distinctive and new. Max Blouw, president of Wilfrid Laurier University, told us how a successful campaign must be rooted in reality.
One of the first tasks he had set himself as president was to develop a story about the university based on the facts of the present rather than the myths of the past. As a result, Wilfrid Laurier's new mission statement, 'Inspiring lives of leadership and purpose', contains a strong component of business excellence that adds distinctiveness to its earlier bland image based on its origins as Waterloo Lutheran University.
Waterloo University, just next door to Wilfrid Laurier, tells a story of itself as producer of scientific and technological innovations that fuel a local high-technology economy. It encourages its staff, students and alumni to generate wealth, substantial chunks of which get fed back as donations. Waterloo alumnus and inventor of the BlackBerry, Mike Lazaridis, has given hundreds of millions to support research to develop technologies of the future in nanoscience and quantum computing. A Waterloo student donated the million dollars profit he made from selling his first business.
Despite these successes, only a small fraction of the alumni who could make substantial donations are disconnected from the university. Jason Coolman, director of alumni affairs, told us about his research on using 'elite' alumni to engage these disconnected former students and gradually get them on board.
On our last day at University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM), Gillian Morrison from the university's central campaigns office talked us through the stages of developing UTM's extraordinary $2bn'Boundless' campaign. The biggest in Canadian university history, this campaign is directly linked with academic mission, and shows that smaller universities can have no excuse for lack of coherence in their campaigns.
So could the UK emulate what the Canadians have achieved? The more I think about it, the more I think we could. And if we learn from their mistakes rather than repeating them, we could do it faster. An average sized, middle-ranking British university should be able to get to a point where they are raising £5-£10m per year from philanthropy within five to 10 years.
Andrew Derrington is executive pro vice-chancellor of humanities and social sciences at the University of Liverpool – he blogs about university management and grant writing
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