[Final reflections]: Leader revolutionized university fundraising

It was the day after UCLA ended its record-setting,
multi-billion-dollar fundraising campaign that the e-mails started
pouring into Michael Eicher’s inbox.

Eicher, the UCLA vice chancellor of external affairs, received
messages from colleagues at universities all over the country
““ people who, like him, dedicate their time to chasing
ever-crucial dollars from donors and alumni.

In the high-stakes game of university fundraising, campaigns
that ratchet up into the low one or two billions are not uncommon.
But no one had yet seen numbers that compared to UCLA’s: In
nine years, the university had raised over $3.05 billion.

Now, other schools wanted to know one thing from Eicher: How had
UCLA done it?

“People said, “˜Wow, that was cool. Tell me
more.’ I could have gone on a lecture circuit,” Eicher
chuckled.

There is no one answer to how UCLA raised what it did. Many
features of the school contributed, from academics to athletics to
simple name recognition.

But there is one man who served as the linchpin in what has
become one of the most successful fundraising endeavors in the
history of higher education: Chancellor Albert Carnesale.

It was Carnesale who raised the goals of the campaign,
increasing it twice from its original target of $1.2 billion. It
was Carnesale who helped expand fundraising duties to the deans, a
move that reaped hundreds of millions of dollars from donors.

And it was Carnesale who shook hands and hand-wrote notes to
donors, regardless of whether they gave $2 million or $2,000, a
personal flair that officials credit with giving donors a reason to
come back and keep giving.

Now, as he prepares to retire on June 30, Carnesale is leaving
the fundraising machine that he helped to build at UCLA. It’s
a machine that other universities look at and hope to emulate.

“When a place like UCLA … comes out of the blocks with
those kinds of numbers, it certainly gets everybody’s
attention,” said Peter Weiler, the vice president for
development at Pennsylvania State University.

“When we benchmark, UCLA is one of our
benchmarks.”

A model

Two things impress other schools about UCLA’s fundraising:
the way the work is balanced between the central campaign and the
different deans, and the precision with which it is executed. Both
are traits Carnesale has helped bring to campus.

When Carnesale came to UCLA as chancellor in 1997, Campaign UCLA
was already on the tracks. It had gone public in May 1997, just a
couple months before Carnesale took office, and had already raised
$400 million. Its goal was to raise $1.2 billion by June 2002.

Some UCLA officials voiced concern over saddling a new
chancellor with a major campaign right as he came into office. But
Carnesale, flush with fundraising experience from his time at
Harvard as provost, was undaunted.

He quickly set about pushing fundraising responsibilities down
to the volunteer networks and deans of the different schools. The
previous UCLA fundraising campaign had relied on a more central,
chancellor-driven model. Carnesale was changing it.

The decentralization of the campaign encouraged deans and their
staffs to focus on getting donations and endowments for specific
schools.

And they yielded results: The School of Arts and Architecture
received $23 million from Eli and Edythe Broad; the
Neuropsychiatric Institute received $25 million from Terry and Jane
Semel; and the largest single gift to Campaign UCLA, $200 million
from media magnate David Geffen, went to the School of Medicine in
May 2002.

Meanwhile, UCLA’s central campaign office honed its
strategies, creating complex and carefully coordinated networks of
donors and alumni around the country that solicited donations. The
precision of UCLA’s fundraising apparatus means even the
names of volunteers are catalogued and stored, and can be called up
for mobilization.

“If you asked most places, they wouldn’t know how
many volunteers they have,” Eicher said. “They would
say, “˜Wow, a lot.'”

Eicher and his staff compiled a precise “alpha list”
of UCLA’s 1,700 volunteers, which he keeps in one of his
cabinets. And he knows the university can tap into a network of
4,300 more.

“We count, we track, we measure all of that,” he
said.

The meticulous detail with which UCLA orchestrates donation
drives is not lost on other universities.

“They have done as good as anybody has in making a science
out of what we do for our work,” Weiler said. “They
spend a lot of time understanding why people do what they do, and
then dissecting it.”

The Harvard connection

UCLA is not the first university at which Carnesale has worked
where he blazed new trails in fundraising.

When he served as provost of Harvard, Carnesale played a crucial
role in that campus’s first and only university-wide
fundraising drive, building the prototype for similar efforts in
the future.

Before the campaign, each of Harvard’s schools was largely
left to its own devices when it came to fundraising. This meant
that some of the larger schools, like the Harvard Business School,
were much better endowed than smaller ones because they could tap
into wealthier alumni.

When then-Harvard President Neil Rudenstein decided to launch a
university-wide fundraising campaign in 1994, the job of uniting
all of Harvard’s fragmented fundraisers ““ namely the
deans of each school ““ fell to Carnesale. And he tackled it
with gusto.

“Al has a nature of bringing people together and getting
them to be better than they would have been if left to their own
devices,” said Tom Reardon, Harvard’s former vice
president for alumni and development, who worked closely with
Carnesale when he was on the East Coast.

At first, some of the deans resisted, especially those in the
larger schools who worried they would be shortchanged if their
dollars were spread to the smaller ones.

But Carnesale kept the deans on track. He sat in on each
campaign planning session, prodding people to raise money as a
group. He even wore out his own shoe leather, travelling with
Reardon to places such as Hong Kong and Japan to solicit from
alumni overseas.

When the campaign ended, it had raised $2.6 billion, $500
million more than its original goal.

Reardon, now the senior adviser to the Harvard president, said
he has no doubt that the university will use the work of its former
president and provost as a model for any future fundraising
campaigns.

“We’ll be able to move farther in the same
directions because of the work done by Rudenstein and
Carnesale,” he said.

A personal touch

But for all the foundations Carnesale has laid in fundraising
campaigns that other universities look to as models, there is
something else that he gives donors that is unique: his own
time.

Carnesale consistently made time to meet and mingle with donors
who only give a few thousand dollars annually, a constituency that
proved crucial to the success of the campaign. Of the 225,000
donors who gave to Campaign UCLA, 222,000 gave less than $50,000
each.

Donors who give a certain amount of money to UCLA every year
earn titles such as “Chancellor’s Associates” or
“Chancellor’s Cabinet” and are eligible to attend
exclusive events such as special lectures by UCLA professors, golf
tournaments and backstage tours of the Rose Bowl given by UCLA
football coach Karl Dorrell.

Sometimes, the chancellor will be on hand at events. Before many
of the home football games, Carnesale hosted gatherings with a
buffet and an open bar for donors at which anyone can come talk to
him, said Andy Katz, a chancellor’s associate and one of the
principle volunteer leaders for the UCLA Fund.

“The more he has made himself accessible, the easier it is
for us on the fundraising side to get more people involved, because
they have a great feeling of direct connection,” said Katz,
an attorney in West Los Angeles.

“And even though they know they can’t influence any
decisions, just the knowledge that they can tell friends, “˜I
was at an event and chatted with the chancellor,’ aids in the
process of getting alums and chancellor’s associates a
feeling of connection and relationship with the
university.”

Katz said he didn’t recall former Chancellor Charles E.
Young, who preceded Carnesale, making himself as available to meet
with donors as Carnesale, but added that he wasn’t very
involved with fundraising under Young.

Eicher said he didn’t want to critique Young’s or
Carnesale’s leadership styles. “Al’s very good at
this. Chuck (Young)’s very good at this,” he said.
“They had different styles. What Al brought was a fresh
energy.

“Al comes in, and this is new, this is fresh. That
freshness worked for us in ways I didn’t
anticipate.”

The benchmark

Fundraising in higher education is an ever-escalating contest.
Experts and analysts predict it won’t be long before a
university announces the completion of a $4 billion or even a $5
billion campaign.

But until then, UCLA and Carnesale find themselves at the
top.

“Everywhere I go, people know what we did,” said
Eicher. “There are a lot of folks who see this as a new
benchmark and try to beat it.”

Eicher said he might have a hard time definitively proving to an
outsider that Carnesale was the impetus behind Campaign
UCLA’s success. “We could probably go back through the
minutes of the campaign cabinet meetings and my notes and we could
say, “˜Ah-ha, at Jan. 15 of this year, he made this
decision,'” he said.

But to do that, Eicher said, misses the bigger fundraising
structure and support network Carnesale built during his tenure at
UCLA. Then Eicher pointed to a corner of his office.
“There’s a banner over there that has “˜$3.05
billion’ on it that we used to announce this.”

“The proof is in the numbers.”