OK, given the hoohaw on Kagan’s Senate hearings, or whatever, i noticed that her wonderful, captivating personality generated 306 million clams for Harvard. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_kagan_the_fundraiser;_ylt=AlerRFmJv16O83VITuR1KzBH2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTNjMDkyZHFjBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAwNzA3L3VzX2thZ2FuX3RoZV9mdW5kcmFpc2VyBGNjb2RlA21vc3Rwb3B1bGFyBGNwb3MDNARwb3MDNARzZWMDeW5fdG9wX3N0b3JpZXMEc2xrA2thZ2FuaGFydmFyZA--
Kagan may be charming, but I think that I could find someone better to amuse me, and for a lot cheaper price. Even if I paid 306 dollars to be charmed by her, she would still need 999,999 more people to work her magic on. OK, I want to keep this kind of thing on a sane (hopefully, non-partisan) level, but, let’s be real. If her personality can generate 306 million, wouldn’t she be much better serving the country on some sort of talk show, or in the H of R, where she could charm the US into giving the government much higher rates of tax revenue?? Send her to the Al Qaeda leaders, and let her work her magic with them?
C’mon! There’s just a bit too much PR going on to make this credible.
Question being, what’s the scoop on fundraising at this level? How do people generate this kind of money? What kind of tete-a-tete takes place? How does one set the dollar amount? How does one get an appointment to put the touch on someone?
To make it comfortable, please don’t turn this into a political about what a bunch of crooks Obama, Halliburton, Cheney, Nixon, or Mayor Daley are/were. I want to know how all megafundraisers manage to do it.
Well, in Kagan’s case, she’s not raising money for the “I love Kagan’s personality fund”; she’s raising it for Harvard University*, which has a little reputation all on its own. You or I could raise millions of dollars for Harvard, just by sending postcards to everyone on the alumni list.
Or perhaps just the Harvard Law School. Same difference.
As to how it works, there’s usually a whole range of approaches. At the bottom level, there’s the fundraising letters, paying undergraduates to make phone calls to alumni, and maybe some small charity events attended by low level deans or whatever. As the size of donations move up the scale, you start getting phone calls from full-time fundraisers, visits from staffers or professors or university leadership, and then visits by the University Presidents and on up to negotiations about what is going to get your name on it. For non-profits smaller than Harvard, being asked to serve on the Board of Directors is often a way to get you invested in donating (and helping to raise more money by asking your friends…)
You get on the list for the mid to upper ends of the scale by giving a big amount at the lower levels, or by being recommended and given an introduction by a friend, business partner, or whatever. So you send in a check for five grand in response to direct mail, you’ll probably get a personal phone call from a university employee next time around. Give the caller ten or twenty grand, and maybe next time the university asks if they can visit you to thank your for your past support (and of course discuss how you can help make Harvard better in the future…). Start indicating that six or seven digits are a possibility and maybe you end up meeting with Kagan or the like.
Or you’re yacht racing with one of your buddies and mention that you think higher education is really important for the country, and he remembers that so he invites you when he’s golfing with the President of Harvard. Which is where the President’s fundraising abilities come into play: he’s impressive enough to make you want to support him, while being shrewd and subtle enough to extract the money from you while making you feel good about it.
And how much to ask for is really one aspect of the fundraiser’s art, at every level. If he gave $100 last year over the phone, should we ask for $500 hoping he’ll fell like $250 is a bargain, or would that send him right back to what he gave last year, and asking $150 would mean we’d get it? Pretty much the same calculation as you add zeros, just the asking process goes from a couple sentences on the phone to a weekend tour of the campus meeting professors and bright, attractive students.
It’s unlikely that Kagan herself did that much for the fundraising other than appoint a fundraising staff (and most academic institutions have one), give a lot of speeches to audiences of potential donors, and have a certain number of private meetings with some of those donors. Fundraising is considered a significant part of a college’s (or a law school’s) president’s job these days. Although the college fundraisers do most of the day-to-day work, the president is expected to set the overall policy and join in the work at times. Harvard is always getting large donations. There’s nothing terribly surprising about the fact that over her time as president she (or people working under her) could have raised that much.
None of this carries over to any comparable government jobs. Harvard is a private institution. It constantly has to worry about how much to charge in tuition, how much it can raise in donations, and how much grant money it can get. None of that has any parallel in the U.S. government.
I’m not even sure why the undergraduate school worries about tuition costs - they’re an entirely needs-blind admissions school. A very interesting article for those stressing about paying for their children’s education, and a new incentive to get them ready for the Ivy League:
Yeah, but I wasn’t talking about whether the students’ parents had to worry about paying the tuition. I was talking about whether the university had to worry about setting the tuition level.
Yes. But my point was that a) “here’s an interesting-if-slightly-off-topic article that’s tangentially related to the topic at hand people might want to read about Harvard, tuition and fundraising” and b) there’s not much “constant worrying” when you’re asking parents making $180,000/year to pay for ~35% of tuition and having the endowment pick up the rest of the tab. Tuition is a tiny drop in the bucket for offsetting major university expenses, even moreso at Harvard.