It is a balmy February evening here in the Grand Ballroom of the PGA National Resort & Spa, where Villanova University is treating 135 alumni and other guests to drinks and dinner as they listen to rousing speeches about the suburban Philadelphia institution’s ambitious fund-raising campaign.
Uplighting bathes the walls of the cavernous ballroom in Villanova blue, and sweat trickles down the spires of an elaborately carved ice replica of St. Thomas of Villanova Church, the university’s signature building. Nearby a tray of sushi glides, luge-like, from its fast-melting ice pedestal and clatters to the floor.
It is perhaps the only unscripted moment of the evening, the fourth regional-launch event of Villanova’s $600-million capital campaign, “For the Greater Great: the Villanova Campaign to Ignite Change.” The university unveiled its campaign in October, and it is using the nine regional events to connect with alumni and other prospects around the country.
But the success of the events—and the campaign—hinges on incremental tasks carried out by a traveling party of about 20 top administrators, academic deans, development officers, and others who research and meet privately with prospects and try to gauge when they are ripe to be solicited for gifts and how much to request. The elegant events are the showy pep rallies to the nitty-gritty of development work.
Neither Michael J. O’Neill, vice president for university advancement, nor anyone else at Villanova will reveal how much the university is paying to stage and staff the regional launches. (“I would like to know that, too,” one alum confided at the event here.)
Mr. O’Neill, the campaign’s architect, is nonetheless adamant that Villanova must spend money to make money: “We are extremely careful stewards of our resources, but we are choosing to invest wisely in the message and in the asking.”
The regional events—two in California, two in Florida, and five more to follow in April and May, in New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago, and Philadelphia—are open to all Villanova alumni, parents, and friends. “Then we have a very focused approach to donors and prospects who we would like very much to invite to be our partners in this campaign,” Mr. O’Neill said in polite understatement.
Deep Pockets
Fund raisers are notoriously cagey when it comes to discussing prospect research, the examination of both publicly available and fee-based databases to determine the giving capacity of prospective donors. But Mr. O’Neill acknowledged that Villanova had made a special effort to persuade prospects with a giving capacity of $100,000 or more to attend one of the regional events. Forty-six of the guests at the Florida events were “targeted” as being at that level. Wealthy donors who didn’t RSVP for one of the regional events probably got a call or visit from a development officer, trustee, or Villanova supporter, he said.
Villanova’s focus on major gifts could prove to be savvy, but for now it is playing catch-up with colleges whose endowment values soared above $1-billion with the long-term historical growth of the American stock markets.
According to the 2013 Nacubo-Commonfund survey of endowments, Villanova’s was worth $419.25-million last year. The Council for Aid to Education’s recent “Voluntary Support of Education” survey showed that gifts were up by 9 percent and that two-thirds of the money given to higher education—often in the form of major gifts—went to colleges with endowments above $1-billion. Colleges with $100-million to $500-million funds took in 17 percent of total gifts.
The survey further pointed out that while total giving by alumni was up 17 percent over a year earlier, the proportion of alumni who give to their institutions has continued to slide and now stands at 8.7 percent. That pattern has led many colleges to de-emphasize broad efforts like annual funds and focus solely on major gifts. Such institutions are essentially eating their seed corn, and Villanova has strived to work both approaches simultaneously.
“The typical donor who makes his first $1-million gift has made 23 prior annual gifts, the first one being about $50,” said Mr. O’Neill. He noted that Terence M. O’Toole, a $10-million donor to Villanova’s current campaign and one of its co-chairs, had followed that curve with near precision over the years, as his giving capacity and inclination rose in tandem.
“It’s all about creating habitual and elevated donors,” Mr. O’Neill said. He said that Villanova’s percentage of alumni giving at the close of the 2013 fiscal year was 24 percent, and that the goal over the course of the campaign was to exceed 30 percent.
Among those in Florida for the Naples and Palm Beach events were Mr. O’Neill; Villanova’s president, the Rev. Peter M. Donohue; five academic deans and five professors; a number of school- and program-based development officers; and the campaign’s co-chairs, Mr. O’Toole and James C. Davis. The two Florida events, on a Tuesday and a Saturday, bookended a dizzying flurry of development activity by the members of the traveling party.
As he tried to recount his week’s schedule, in which he met with donors and prospects in four Florida cities over five days, Mr. O’Neill turned to Jonathan Gust, Villanova’s director of media relations: “Yesterday was Thursday, right?” No, today was the day of the Palm Beach Gardens event, a Saturday.
Mr. O’Neill shrugged.
Measuring the success of a particular fund-raising trip is not as easy as simply counting the dollars raised, he said. Instead, he advised, look at the amount of development activity, the number of meetings with prospects. Every meeting is logged in a “customer relationship management” database, along with assumptions about the prospective donor’s timeline and likelihood of giving. The California and Florida trips, he said, resulted in 85 to 100 meetings with individual prospects with the capacity to give $100,000 or more.
Mr. Davis, the campaign co-chair whose own $50-million gift to Villanova’s business school had made him the lead donor, played down the importance of capacity as he described a day spent with a group of alumni in Jupiter, Fla. Graduates spanning five decades played golf, had dinner with Father Donohue and Mr. O’Neill, and then watched the highly regarded Wildcats’ men’s basketball team beat Seton Hall, 70-53.
“It wasn’t just people with deep pockets,” Mr. Davis said. “There were some, for sure, but it was a mix. What’s important is that they all bleed the blue of Villanova.”
Event Marketing
Two hours before tonight’s event, in the mostly empty ballroom, Mr. O’Neill stands in the beam of a spotlight and practices reading his speech from a teleprompter: “We must do this because, make no mistake, this campaign represents the last missing component in the arsenal of a great national Catholic university.”
He makes a reference to Father Donohue’s vision in embarking on the campaign and his stubbornness in insisting on its success. “That line never gets the laugh it’s supposed to,” Mr. O’Neill tells the woman scrolling the teleprompter. She is an employee of FreemanXP, the event-marketing company that Villanova hired to plan and execute last fall’s public launch of the campaign and the nine subsequent city visits.
The company is more accustomed to doing product launches and shaping corporate brand strategy, but Stacey Turner Gromlich, a director of experience marketing, said the higher-education “vertical” was a likely growth area for companies like hers. FreemanXP has developed multimedia presentations for Southern Methodist University and the University of Pennsylvania.
“Every vertical has its nuances, but it’s really no different than Coca-Cola,” Ms. Gromlich said. The soft-drink company, she said, wants consumers to buy into a feeling and to associate certain attributes with drinking Coke.
“For Villanova it’s similar,” she said. But “as most people with a good brand are, they’re protective of their audience.”
Villanova was chiefly concerned about conveying information without being ostentatious, she said. “A big production for the sake of production” was out, Ms. Gromlich said. But an “augmented-reality station” developed by FreemanXP technicians was in: Alumni could hold a tablet computer in front of a cube representing one of the campus structures that is to be renovated or built as a result of the fund-raising campaign—a residence hall, the library, the basketball arena, or a new performing-arts center—and watch the building grow, brick by brick, on the screen.
But the gadgetry was upstaged by remarks, delivered sans teleprompter, by faculty members like Helene Moriarty, a nursing professor who movingly described her research aimed at helping military veterans who suffer from traumatic brain injury, or Robert L. Nydick, a management professor who told of taking students to the Gulf Coast to help local residents recover from Hurricane Katrina.
Then came Mr. O’Neill’s turn in the spotlight. He said of Father Donohue, “He is focused, he is committed, and if you don’t mind my saying so, Father, he is very, very stubborn.”
The audience members delivered the laugh he had worried about. They also seemed to be coming through with the cash. As of last week, the campaign had pulled in a total of $310-million in pledges—$25-million above what had been raised during the quiet phase, said Mr. O’Neill. “I’m very pleased with that number.”