Newcomers to academic fund raising often ask me to define the arcane terms that flow so freely in staff meetings, interoffice memos, and coffee-break chitchat. Like those in most professions, we employ our own jargon designed to befuddle people outside the field. These terms, though, can be easily comprehended by anyone with 10 or more years of development experience. Let me thus draw on that experience and offer a few definitions:
Annual Fund: An ongoing effort to convince donors to make contributions every year. A barometer of how much alumni appreciate the institution, the annual fund operates on the assumption that ‘tis better to give often than to give much.
Benefactor: A particularly generous donor who usually attaches his or her name to a building, a scholarship, an athletic facility, or a development officer’s offspring.
Capital Campaign: An intensive effort to raise large sums in a defined period. Capital campaigns never fail to achieve their goals because development officers take great care to count all gifts, pledges, bequests, spectators at football games (and their cars), leaves falling from trees, and forks in the cafeteria.
Challenge Grant: A commitment from a donor to give money only if an institution can raise additional (or matching) dollars from other sources. The “challenge” here is to the development officer, whose wages can be garnished to fulfill the match.
Corporate Relations: Contrary to popular belief, companies do actually distribute profits beyond shareholders. Corporate philanthropy -- considered an oxymoron by some -- operates on a principle called “quid pro quo,” which translates from Latin roughly as “we want everything.”
CRIT/CRAT/CRUT: Acronyms for Charitable Remainder Interest Trust, Charitable Remainder Annuity Trust, and Charitable Remainder Unit Trust -- estate-planning devices that simultaneously benefit the nonprofit institution and the donor, assuming both parties can align their interests either vertically, horizontally, or diagonally.
Development: A euphemistic term that fund raisers use to avoid having prospects end phone conversations in less than five seconds.
Donor: The sine qua non of fund raising, without whom we’d all have normal careers.
Eleemosynary: A fancy term denoting an institution that receives charitable gifts -- namely, yours. Use this one on friends and relatives and don’t tell them you mean “college.”
Endowment: An interest-bearing fund whose corpus is retained in perpetuity. An endowment demonstrates an institution’s financial health, leading to the ubiquitous conference question, “Just how well-endowed are you?”
Feasibility Study: An objective report to determine if a college is capable of starting a capital campaign. If it’s favorable, the fund-raising office can declare, “We’re ready!” And if it’s unfavorable, they’ll instead exclaim, “We’re ready!”
Fund Raising: A concept so well understood by professionals in the field that they cannot agree on whether to call themselves fund raisers, fund-raisers, or fundraisers.
Grantsmanship: The art of crafting proposals, concept papers, reports, and other fine works of fiction to secure money from foundations and government agencies.
In-kind Contribution: A gift from a donor seeking a tax deduction for an item no longer of any use to anyone.
Inquiry Letter: Correspondence to a grant agency that lets you invite rejection in two pages instead of 10.
LYBUNTS, SYBUNTS: Meaning “Last Year But Not This (Year)” and “Some Year But Not This (Year),” these acronyms classify donors who give sporadically. Some newbies mistake the terms for Star Wars characters, at which point I refer them to our annual fund director, Jar Jar Binks.
Major Gift: A large commitment, usually falling in the $25,000 to $500,000 range. People often give “major” gifts during a campaign’s “private” phase, but not to the “general” fund.
Moves Management: An intricate set of actions designed to shepherd an individual along a path to giving. Many times this strategy employs carefully orchestrated, calculated steps that carry a prospect from education to engagement to empathy to enlightenment and, then, to a simple “no.”
Quiet Phase: Also known as the “private phase,” this term refers to the early part of a campaign, during which fund raisers tell as many prospects as possible to keep news of the campaign quiet.
Philanthropy: The emotional impetus behind giving, marked by the desire to improve humankind through charitable acts and donations. This altruistic phenomenon owes its existence to a long-established tradition in American culture: tax laws.
Planned Giving: The art of putting off until tomorrow what you probably couldn’t have afforded today, anyway.
Prospect Research: A sophisticated effort to uncover a potential donor’s asset base, thereby determining how large a contribution a fund raiser can expect. Researchers use the following intricate formula to derive this figure: income plus property plus stocks times giving history divided by inclination equals anyone’s guess.
Private Foundations: Nonprofit organizations established to give away money generated by an endowment. Some folks confuse these with institutionally-related foundations associated with state universities. Those, by comparison, are nonprofit organizations established to give away money generated by an endowment.
Program Officers: Staff members at private foundations charged with determining who gets grants. These empathetic individuals readily acknowledge that our job (asking) is tougher than their job (giving), but delight nonetheless in treating us like dirt.
Proposal: A document prepared for a grant agency in which you promise to undertake certain activities with the money. The proposal consists of a one-paragraph executive summary, a one-page budget, and 10 to 15 pages of stuff no one ever reads.
RFP: A “Request for Proposal” from a foundation or government agency detailing exactly what information you can submit to them so as to elicit a rejection.
Stewardship: The practice of thanking donors with flowery letters, recognition in brochures and annual reports, invitations to special events, lunch with the president, and requests for more money.
Summer: A verb used to indicate where a wealthy individual spends June, July, and August -- as in, “He lives in Palm Beach but summers on the Cape.” This of course implies the prospect is wealthy enough to own at least two homes. “Summer” has special connotations for faculty members as well, but they still consider it a noun. Even though “fall” and “spring” already are verbs, no one uses them to describe a prospect’s actions (“He falls in Maine” doesn’t quite work).
Trustee: An elected or appointed board member who oversees an institution’s finances and policies and offers such sage insights as “All we need is someone like Bill Gates to take a shining to us,” or “If every alum gave us five bucks we’d have ...”
Unrestricted Gift: A donor’s attempt to support scholarships, academic programs, faculty development, and curriculum enhancement while actually helping to pay the electric bill, the oil bill, and 600 other vendor contracts.
Volunteer: An individual who works, without compensation, to advance the cause of your college or university. While some prove wonderful, others sustain the adage that you get what you pay for.
Winter: See “Summer.”
Mark J. Drozdowski, director of corporate, foundation, and government relations at Franklin Pierce College in Rindge, N.H., writes a regular column about careers in university fund raising and development.