Local colleges buck poor fund-raising trend

You wouldn't know the nation is being buffeted by a major recession from the looks of Philadelphia University's bulging fund-raising coffers.

Donations in fiscal 2009 have totaled $8.7 million, up from $1.5 million last year.

The breathtaking increase is due partly to a $3 million gift long in the works that finally materialized. But the bulk came from standard fund-raising efforts, officials said. Even gifts to the annual fund, which supports continuing operations, spiked 47 percent.

"This was the most successful fund-raising year in the university's history in perhaps the worst fund-raising environment since the Great Depression," said James C. Garvey, vice president of development and alumni relations.

Several other universities in the area had a strong year, too. At Drexel University, giving went up 12 percent; at Ursinus, it rose more than 15 percent.

But they're bucking the national trend.

Education philanthropy - largely at colleges and universities - decreased 5.5 percent from 2007 to 2008, according to the Giving USA Foundation, an Illinois nonprofit that monitors charitable gifts. The decline was the steepest since 1975.

Some local schools have felt an even greater pinch.

Temple University's fund-raising take in the last fiscal year fell 30 percent. Lincoln University in Chester County suffered a 44 percent drop, as did Haverford College.

The University of Pennsylvania plans to release data today for the fiscal 2009 year. But the university confirmed that giving was down from fiscal 2008, when it broke its fund-raising record, bringing in $475.9 million.

Many schools were happy just to stay even.

"Some of us joke that flat is the new up," said Rodney Kirsch, senior vice president of development and alumni relations at Pennsylvania State University.

During the last fiscal year, Penn State took in $182 million, less than a 1 percent increase over 2007-08 and $6 million under its target. Still, more alumni than ever donated, producing the schools' second-best fund-raising year.

Year-to-year fluctuations are not unusual, experts say. The ups and downs can depend on many factors: whether a college is in a capital campaign, whether it closes on a major gift, whether its fund-raising arm is well-established or still developing or its donor base is particularly vulnerable to the economy.

Overall, however, fund-raising has taken a challenging and uncertain turn, said Rae Goldsmith, vice president of advancement resources at the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, a Washington nonprofit that comprises 3,400 colleges and universities.

"This is a very different environment, one that fund-raisers in our lifetime haven't faced," she said. "We saw a decline after 9/11, but nothing like this."

Schools such as Ursinus and Widener had a decrease in the number of donors or in the percentage of contributing graduates. Swarthmore, where alumni participation slipped from 57 to 55 percent, collected $4.3 million for its annual fund, a drop of 6.5 percent. Officials there did not release the total raised.

Elsewhere, alumni trends often took the same track.

Within a conference of 10 small Northeast liberal-arts colleges - Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Connecticut College, Middlebury, Trinity, Wesleyan and Williams - only two, Middlebury and Hamilton, had an increase in alumni participation.

At Trinity, in Hartford, Conn., the number of alumni who used to give $25, $50, and $100 dropped off. However, gifts of $2,000 to $10,000 were steady, said Ron Joyce, vice president of advancement. Consequently, giving was up in the last fiscal year by 7.6 percent, to nearly $40 million.

"Our hypothesis," he said, "is that smaller donors were being more careful with their money because they were unsure about their future."

Philadelphia University officials attribute their fund-raising success to the buzz around new president Stephen Spinelli Jr., the Jiffy Lube cofounder who took over in September 2007; the release of a strategic plan; a $3 million gift for its Kanbar Center; and concentrated pressure on alumni.

The sky-high percentage increase in contributions - more than 500 percent - can also be explained by particularly low donations in the previous year, when the school was coming off a capital campaign, according to its vice president, Garvey. The university usually averages $3 million to $5 million annually.

"When the economy started going south in October, we really tried our best to stay positive, with the idea that an economic crisis is a terrible thing to waste," Garvey said.

The university added an alumni reunion weekend that, along with homecoming, gave the school two "major anchor events," he said. It also hosted a Center City reception, two events in New York City, and a series of dinners at Spinelli's house.

"We really focused on alumni who hadn't been back in a long time," he said.

The number of donors increased 10 percent.

Margaret Maclay, a 1983 graduate who is a business coach in the New York area, donated $1,000, a lot more than in the past.

"The schools need support more than ever," she said.

Penn State also turned up the heat in its appeals.

"By year's end, we had made 1,200 more personal visits than the previous year," said Kirsch, the senior vice president.

Those visits amounted to 14,000 personal contacts, 24 percent of which were with people who had never before been solicited, he said.

To explain their success in raising $10.7 million, Ursinus officials pointed to a bequest from an alumnus who died, a state grant for its Kaleidoscope Performing Arts Center, and a $10,000 increase in donations from parents.

Drexel received $25 million from trustee Richard A. Hayne for its Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts and Design, the largest individual private gift in its history.

More than 20,000 donors gave a total of $67.2 million, a show of confidence in the legacy of the university's late president Constantine Papadakis, officials noted.

Among them were 1967 graduate R. John Chapel Jr. and his wife, Jinnie, who gave $2.5 million for the first dean's chair in leadership at Drexel's Lebow College of Business. They also gave $1 million to Penn State, her alma mater.

"We were both happy with what the schools were doing," he said. "And, quite honestly, we were in a position where we wanted to do something."

He said he had just sold his Virginia government-consulting company and had cash. And, he said, he was concerned about possible changes in tax law that could adversely affect charitable deductions.

Said Chapel, "It was a good time to give."

Colleges with double-digit drops remain optimistic.

Temple raised nearly $45 million, down from $64.82 million the year before, the best fund-raising year in its history. Nonetheless, it is on target to hit the $350 million goal of its 71/2-year capital campaign by Dec. 31, spokesman Ray Betzner said.

Lincoln took in $1.1 million, down from slightly more than $2 million the year before.

"It was primarily the economy, but we do have some timing issues, too," said Michael Hill, vice president of development and external relations. "Some major gifts that we had expected to come through will probably come through" in fiscal 2010.

Haverford officials were pleased that giving to its annual fund increased more than 13 percent, even though overall donations dropped from $22.3 million in 2007-08 to $12.3 million.

Michael Kiefer, vice president of institutional advancement, said the gifts from "alumni, parents, and friends are more important this year than ever before because the market value of the endowment is down, and so is income from it, and parents are straining and sometimes unable to meet tuition payments."