Looking Ahead | University fundraising on track

The "Making History" campaign is living up to its name, Penn administrators say.

With $1.69 billion in the bank, the five-year fundraising effort is already at over 48 percent of its $3.5 billion goal after being launched publicly this past October.

The campaign, which is proposed to end in June 2012, has already surpassed expectations.

"It's a little bit ahead of where we thought we would be now," said Vice President for Development and Alumni Relations John Zeller. "To be looking at around 50 percent in the first year of the public campaign is really great."

With three times the number of $1 million or more commitments compared to last year, "we are doing exceedingly well," he added.

And experts agree the public phase of the campaign is off to a good start.

Michael Nilsen, Public Affairs Director of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, said the campaign is "right on track," especially because of a particularly successful quiet phase of fundraising, which began two years ago and brought in about $1.6 billion from big donors.

The campaign began "with a bang," Nilsen said.

Gutmann attributed part of Penn's "landmark" success to the "whirlwind series of campaign rollout events" that began in Boston in November with over 300 people in attendance.

The regional launch events will continue for the remainder of the academic year everywhere from Hong Kong to London.

"The goals have resonated very well with our constituencies," said Zeller, calling the support and generosity of alumni "a vote of confidence."

But while the reception thus far has been highly positive, the next challenge is to maintain that momentum.

Gutmann "has said this isn't a sprint - it's a marathon," said Zeller. "And we still have four and a half years to go."

By the end of that time, half of the money raised will go toward Penn's endowment and the remainder will be divided between "current use" activities like academic programs and research and several large construction projects that will amount to $924 million.

Penn's goals, while ambitious, are not unheard of. Billion-dollar fundraising campaigns are becoming more common among universities - Brown, Cornell, and Columbia Universities, as well as Dartmouth College are all involved in billion-dollar campaigns of their own at the moment.

After the initial influx of donations, fundraisers must use key donors as examples to stir up excitement among the rest of the membership to get past the lull of the middle of a campaign, Nilsen said.

The key is to remember that "fundraising is a constant process of cultivation," he said.

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