Colleges can sure take themselves seriously. They are important places, filled with important people, exploring important ideas, and not a lot is funny about that. Working to attract and retain students, colleges devote extraordinary effort to making sure that people know just how serious they are about education.
We all know that the people—well, most of them, anyway—on our campuses have more personality than the oft-portrayed stodgy, one-dimensional stereotypes. So why don’t more colleges reflect the personalities of those who work there? And what might be the result if they did? Something happened on my campus last year that offers a hopeful, even fruitful, answer to those questions.
I worked with our advancement office to start a direct-mail fund-raising effort for each department in the college. Being a newbie to fund raising, I learned that there are tested and proven approaches for writing fund-raising letters. While the specifics change, fund-raising letters often look remarkably similar.
Eager to have departments in my college raise as much as possible, I played the role of good teacher, sending out packets to all department chairs with instructions on how to write fund-raising letters, as well as examples they should follow.
Departments began submitting their fund-raising letters to be edited by the advancement office before being mailed out. Department chairs acted like model students and dutifully followed the directions and examples they were given. Then it happened: I got a call from the chair of the English department (Wouldn’t you know!), who said, “I’m sending you our fund-raising letter, and I just want you to know, we don’t want to change it.”
This is the opening paragraph of that letter, written by a professor of creative writing:
“I’ve come to relieve you of the burden of wealth, or at least hustle any spare change left in your tip jar. My English department colleagues have designated me to do this for reasons that continue to elude my understanding, though perhaps my long and ardently misspent youth on the streets and in various dens of iniquity has led them to assume I possess some secret ability to separate graduates from their disposable incomes, though if I were really graced with such powers I obviously wouldn’t be writing fund-raising letters, but rather deciding how to conceal the routing of electronic deposits between my Swiss and Cayman Island accounts.”
The rest of the letter continued in a similar tone. To say the least, this was an unconventional approach for departmental fund raising. Who did English think they were? Didn’t they get the instructions?
Those of us leading the fund-raising effort debated whether it was appropriate to send out this letter. After all, our campus’s alumni-participation rate, based on prior and more conventional approaches to fund raising, has been consistently one of the highest of our 23-campus system. But our advancement experts agreed to experiment with this “creative” approach to fund raising, after some minor editing. And so the letter went out, as much in the spirit of academic inquiry as in pursuit of funds.
Responses came quickly—and they were overwhelmingly positive. The chair of the English department forwarded numerous e-mails from alumni saying how much they enjoyed the letter, along with commitments to donate money. At the close of the fiscal year, we found that the English department had produced moderately more donors and money than the other departments in the college.
While this “experiment” was hardly scientific, it raised money, generated new donors, and got us thinking and talking about how we, as an institution of higher learning, interact with the world. And isn’t that what universities are supposed to be about?