With the announcement that Sweet Briar College will reopen this fall, the college’s future seems secure for the short term.
Now the advocates who kept the college open must meet their end of the deal: They have until September to funnel $12 million in donations to the college’s operating budget for the next academic year. Even though plenty of donors have pledged their financial support, meeting that mark may not be easy, fund-raising and finance experts say. And waging a longer-term campaign to replenish the college’s depleted coffers will be more challenging still.
Saving Sweet Briar, the nonprofit organization that rallied for the college, has already secured $21 million in pledges, according to Eric Cote, a spokesman for the group. But it has collected only about 5 percent of that total. To turn the remaining pledges into cash, a team of fund-raising consultants is working with 150 volunteers to reach back out to the people who made pledges, said David H. King, president of the fund-raising consulting firm Alexander Haas, who is acting as the lead consultant for Saving Sweet Briar. His firm has been working pro bono on the campaign since the start of May.
Mr. King said the bulk of the pledges were made on the condition that the money could not be collected unless Virginia’s attorney general brokered a deal to keep the college open.
So Saving Sweet Briar is shifting its goal from securing pledges to delivering on them. “Energy is focused at the moment at letting people know, Here’s the deal; the condition has been met,” said Mr. King.
Firing Up Fund Raising
Mr. King is optimistic that Saving Sweet Briar will end up “exceeding” the needed $12 million. He said donors who have pledged money received emails on Tuesday morning reminding them to make those gifts official. Volunteers have helped organize 75 fund-raising events across the country, he said.
Some donors were so excited to hear on Saturday that the college would reopen that they have since doubled their pledges, said Mr. King. While some donations were pledged to be paid out over two to five years, a majority are “front-loaded” to come in this year, he said.
Once the initial round of pledges is collected, Mr. King said, fund raisers will shift to longer-term goals: restarting the college’s annual fund and opening a larger capital campaign. That’s an essential shift in focus, but it is also a challenging one, he said.
Chief among the impediments: As the college’s future has been tied up in litigation, Mr. King said, Saving Sweet Briar has not had access to the college’s development office or its fund-raising arm.
“We don’t even know to what extent there is development staff left at Sweet Briar,” Mr. King said. “At this point we don’t have enough access to the college’s inner workings to know what is needed and what’s feasible.”
In the meantime, the nonprofit group has worked from a database of about 11,000 alumni, but that list has “holes,” he said. Compared with many institutions, the college’s base of alumni donors is small, but Mr. King said that “a significant amount of contributions” has come from graduates of women’s colleges elsewhere.
Before beginning a capital campaign, or even setting a goal, Mr. King said officials would need to analyze donor records and form a plan for how the college will be run. But turnover in the college’s leadership could complicate that. The agreement to revive Sweet Briar requires 13 board members and the current president to step down.
A new administration can still attract donors by asking them to “stay invested for another 114 years,” Mr. King said. Made properly, that pitch could bring in more donations than the college has ever seen before, he said.
“Alumni specifically can look at something that they perhaps have taken for granted,” Mr. King said. “But the realization it was about to go away reawakened in them the emotion and the impact the school has on them.”
A Long Road Ahead
That’s the vision. But experts cast doubt on the college’s ability to transform its rocky financial situation through fund raising alone — especially because Sweet Briar does not have a strong history of sustained philanthropy.
“I wouldn’t touch that thing with a 10-foot pole,” said Timothy M. Winkler Sr., chief executive officer and founding partner of the Winkler Group, a fund-raising firm.
“Their backs are against the wall, and they’re trying to do the best they can,” Mr. Winkler said. “Fund raising is not designed to bail schools out of stuff. It’s not supposed be the last-resort Hail Mary.”
One challenge Sweet Briar will face is that successful fund-raising operations “measure the progress in those areas in years, not weeks or months,” Mr. Winkler said. Just cultivating a donor can take at least several months, he said; building a successful capital campaign or a booming annual fund requires several years.
And before officials can start an ambitious fund-raising push, they’ll have to “mend some fences and build some bridges,” Mr. Winkler said.
“They’re going to have to launch a campaign to regain the donors’ trust — that would have to come before they reinvigorate or launch an annual campaign,” he said. “Their credibility is in the tank right now.”
To persuade donors to come on board, Mr. Winkler said, fund raisers at Sweet Briar would need to present evidence that the college won’t stay mired in financial trouble. That could be a hard sell if donors feel as if they are always being asked to rescue the college, he said.
“Who are your donors going to be?” he asked. “You just tapped $20 million out of whatever friends you have left. Who are you going to next, and what is it going to be for? And if you have those people who could give money, why isn’t it happening now?”
A Look at the Big Picture
Sweet Briar officials will also need to look beyond their initial fund-raising needs, financial experts said.
John A. Stevens, president of Stevens Strategy, a consulting group, said that because small institutions often struggle to maintain high donation rates over a long period, officials will have to come up with a plan to be “distinctive in the marketplace” to ensure steady tuition revenue.
“You’ve really got to understand your market and your position in it before you can have sustainable enrollment,” he said.
Of course, sustainable enrollment has been difficult for the college to achieve. By the time the Board of Directors decided to close Sweet Briar, the institution was discounting its tuition by more than 60 percent. Now the college’s prospects for tuition revenue are even more in doubt.
So officials should resist the urge to listen to alumni who want Sweet Briar to stay the same, Mr. Stevens said, because “that just doesn’t turn out to be sustainable.”
“The return people get when they give money to a college is the emotional satisfaction that ‘I’m helping something good,’” he said. “And if the institution can’t convince them that something good will happen with their money in the long term, then the money is going to run out.”
