The Dean as Fundraiser

Kenneth C. Randall^*

Today’s dean must be an effective fundraiser. Fundraising is part of the dean’s external leadership responsibilities. A dean will not be successful only by being a good fundraiser; there certainly are several other key parts of the job at which a dean also must excel. But a dean cannot really be successful if he or she cannot secure philanthropic funding. Improved financial resources are essential to improve support for faculty, students, and staff and crucial to the advancement of the institutional academic mission. A good plan for using resources is obviously needed, as is wise spending and fiscal integrity and accountability. An institution, however, cannot initiate or implement a progressive plan without the reality of renewable resources. There are limits on the traditional resources of tuition and public appropriation.

Yet many law deans are without fundraising acumen. The external or institutional advancement parts of their job may be novel to them. The environment or culture at some institutions may not be sufficiently supportive of active philanthropy.

Legal academics typically are neither educated nor experienced in fundraising. Universities have different administrative structures for fundraising, with varying levels of centralization versus academic-unit responsibility. Whatever the fundraising model, however, schools of law usually bear a significant portion of the responsibility for raising funds from the legal profession. If a law school is to raise funds, the law dean must not only pitch in but must lead.

This essay first explains how fundraising is necessary for academic excellence at law schools (or, for that matter, at any educational institutions). It then offers five fundraising principles for law deans (and really for all academic leaders). Deans should spend at least one-quarter to one-fifth of their time on fundraising, institutional advancement, and external relations. I try to provide a primer on the virtues and values of fundraising; suggestions on how to raise funds; a framework for linking philanthropic and academic resources; and a conception of how the dean’s fundraising role fits with his or her other leadership responsibilities.

A. The Need to Raise Funds

Private law schools historically have augmented tuition revenue with philanthropic dollars. Tuition at private schools is expensive, but there is a tuition ceiling beyond which schools lose the very students they need in order to help balance the budget. "Tuition-driven" private schools must raise funds to ensure a quality academic program for a diverse and academically talented student body. Philanthropy can help a school address the Catch-22 of needing students who can write big tuition checks and wanting a student body commensurate with its qualitative and institutional goals. Raising student scholarships can help ease the tuition struggle. Fundraising for the panoply of institutional needs - - e.g., faculty support, library, technology - - also reduces tuition-dependence.

Public schools, too, have witnessed the pressing need to raise private funds. State schools do not rely as heavily as do private schools on tuition, since they receive a public appropriation. Indeed, the very nature of "public education" should guarantee affordable schooling for the citizenry. State support, however, is no talisman for public law schools. Public appropriations vary each fiscal year, depending on both the political and economic climate. There are many competing needs for the public dollar. State budgets provide inconsistent support. Universities constantly lobby for a bigger pie or a bigger piece of the pie for their schools or units. Many so-called "state" institutions really are just "state-supported" or "state-assisted" institutions, in the sense that a significant part (if not most) of the institution’s budget derives from sources other than state dollars. Private fundraising can and now often must make up the difference between what it really costs to educate each law student the often-inadequate state appropriation. Fundraising ideally should not be needed to help pay for basic operating-and-maintenance expenses - - which should be the state’s responsibility - - but should bring the "extra" dollars to make the institution academically "special." Philanthropy optimally enhances the education we offer students, rather than being an excuse for lessened public or campus support.

To be sure, public campus leaders must champion their institutions before the legislature. Such advocacy usually is undertaken by the central administration. However, the time has passed when deans simply can bemoan the lack of state dollars. They instead must be active in seeking alternative resources and in generating philanthropic, grant, and entrepreneurial initiatives, just like their counterparts at private institutions. For example, fundraising dollars can endow chairs to attract accomplished senior scholars. They can fund professorships to recognize and assist existing faculty. They can provide support funds for faculty travel, research assistance, and summer research grants. It is the rare public institution today that can offer such enhancements and incentives without decanal fundraising prowess. If deans are "enablers" of great work, they must not only appreciate their colleagues’ innovative ideas but also find the funds to support such efforts.

Because the academy and profession place new demands on legal education each year, the demand for financial resources only will increase at all law schools, both private and public. Expensive technology is absolutely necessary. Law schools today must support and constantly update computer labs, wireless network systems, and multimedia classrooms. They should provide for a panoply of skills opportunities, responding to generations of alumni who complained that law schools failed to show them how to get to the courthouse door. Integral to legal education in the twenty-first century are offerings in trial and appellate advocacy (including intercollegiate competition teams); an array of important clinical programs; and well-supervised externships. In addition to practical introductions to legal work, such offerings should afford outstanding opportunities for reflection about issues of professionalism and legal ethics. They can help instill a sense of the law as a public service and sensitize students to the duty of all lawyers to help others in our community. Of course, those courses require a low student-faculty ratio and are resource-intensive. Putting 100 students in front of a lecturer in a theater-style classroom may still "work" in a limited number of required core classes, but the limits of such pedagogy are quite obvious. To teach students adequately, law schools increasingly need laboratory-like settings to akin to those used by other disciplines; small sections and multiple offerings require more faculty.

The curriculum is expanding in multiple directions. Not only are there more skills offerings, but simultaneously there are more theoretical courses, providing an invaluable policy background to the law, at a time when a student has the luxury to think deeply about the legal system, its norms, and context. Law schools today need resources to link up with academic programs in other campus disciplines (political theory, history, business, philosophy, economics, to name but a few of many examples). Different philosophies, critiques, and schools of thought have multiplied. Resources are needed to teach upper-level courses in business; tax; environmental law; international law; intellectual property; privacy; law-and-technology; and white-collar crime, among others. We constantly add elective courses - - and, thus increase instructional costs - - but we still need to teach the core, required courses. International programs are proliferating. What good school does not have institutes, centers of excellence, and graduate and specialized programs? Law schools must cover the entire geography of the older and newer curriculum, but also should try to claim to be "special," or have a "niche," in one or more subjects. Law faculties teach and research in an abundance of subject areas; they offer expertise to their campuses and communities.

Finally, law libraries represent another growing demand on resources. Many fiscal years have seen double-digit inflation in the acquisitions budget, with law schools struggling to allocate at least a fifth of their resources to new titles rather than buying only serials and serial updates. In a year with just a 10% inflationary rate, a million-dollar book budget requires a $100,000 book increase to ensure just flat buying power. Dual-degree librarians must be hired to help support the needs of all patrons, and technology staff somehow must be appointed and retained despite the better compensation that private industry offers. Libraries serve multiple constituent groups. Great teaching from great faculty, as well as student research production, demand an equally great law library. Neither private school tuition nor public school state appropriations can meet such growing demands.

The bottom line is that the fiscal challenges facing law schools today (tuition ceiling at private schools, unreliable state appropriation at public schools) have become apparent just when legal education is more expensive than ever. Fundraising is a most- important response to that challenge. Academic progress in legal education requires law deans to be enthusiastic fundraisers. Deans should be glad to receive and contemplate new ideas for their schools. Some ideas may be self generated, but most come from faculty, students, staff, alumni, and other campus leaders. Deans must find the money to enable the new ideas to flourish. Academic leaders cannot be facilitators unless they can successfully raise funds. The role of fundraising is part and parcel of the dean’s portfolio as an academic leader.

So far, we have agreed on the absolute importance of the dean as a fundraiser. The next part of the essay offers five principles for successful fundraising. No one has all the answers and every institution has its own mission, history, size, staff, context, and future. Nevertheless, the following recommendations are sufficiently broad to provide a framework for effective fundraising.¹

B. Five Fundraising Principles

1. Stick to the fundamentals of quality leadership. Though deans have different administrative styles, all academic leaders should adhere to a few basic tenets in all aspects of the job. Certain values and approaches to one’s duties should remain constant whether dealing with alumni in fundraising or with colleagues or students on any matter. In other words, whatever traits make a good internal dean are equally important to the dean’s external duties.

Basic integrity is first and foremost. Approach all potential donors (as well as all advancement staff) with complete candor about the school, its goals, its fundraising program, and the many uses of private dollars. As much as fundraising involves selling and marketing, do not shade any fact about the institution for which you are seeking a gift. If a donor asks a tough question about your school, answer it directly and honestly. If a donor brings up a hard question about past return on the investment of philanthropic dollars, or exactly what the gift will pay for, again, answer it candidly, and, if you don’t have all the information at hand, gather and convey the information. Draft all memoranda of agreement clearly and fairly. Though you must call on potential donors when you know they are situated to make a gift, do not try to manipulate or take advantage of individuals. Of course, when a gift comes in, the dean ultimately is responsible for overseeing that the school uses the fund exactly as it was intended. Handle money with the assumption that one day the entire world - - including campus officials, the police, and anyone whose opinion of you is important to you - - will have access to complete information about your and your institution’s use of funds. If you would not want to see something you did reported in the local and national news, then, in a word, don’t do it.

In addition to the basic value of integrity, stick to the other fundamental skills and virtues that make you an effective academic and campus leader. Be organized and prepared for fundraising calls. Learn about the donors you will see, including what is important to them. For example, before meeting a donor for the first time, review any biographical information; speak with alumni leaders who know the donor. Many gifts involve finding the particular project the donor finds important, so listen to what they have to say. Be responsive and follow up with donors. Thank potential donors for their time within a day or two of seeing them, just as you promptly congratulate a faculty member or student on an accomplishment or promptly thank the provost, president, or chancellor for a gesture of support for your law school. Within a week or two of most visits, follow up with a proposal, draft agreement, or request for information.

Just as deans should be humble and modest in their dealings with colleagues and students, they should conduct themselves that way in fundraising situations. To be sure, a potential donor wants to be confident in the dean and his or her competence and character. Most donors presume that the dean is a person of ability because of the position the dean holds. Stability and continuity in deanships help with a donor’s perception of the school. But particularly after potential donors get to know the dean, the dean can spend less time putting the spotlight on himself or herself.

While the dean should be prepared to tell a donor about five or six key positive items of news about the law school, the dean should couch such progress as institutional success, rather than as decanal success, always giving due credit to others. The dean must have at his or her fingertips essential information about the current state of the law school, but should give the donor an ample opportunity to talk about his or her own experience in law school and in practice. If anyone is going to brag personally during fundraising calls, it should not be the dean. So just as one should be a good and responsive listener in other components of the dean’s job, one must be a respectful recipient of what a donor has to say. The fundraising call is not about the dean - - though his or her presence is important to donors. The call is about the donor’s support for the school. Once the law school receives a gift, the dean must continue to express appreciation for and recognition of the gift.

Finally, as in the other parts of a dean’s job, he or she must handle both the big and the little picture of fundraising. The dean cannot afford to be only a big-picture person or only a detail person. Today, deans must be both. The dean must understand and articulate how a particular gift fits into the universe of the school’s fiscal and academic situation, but also must attend to details. Its important not only to understand exactly what an endowed faculty chair will mean to the law school academically and fiscally, but also to remember the name of the donor’s spouse or significant other and the year he or she graduated from your law school. Delegate the parts of the fundraising job that you can (for example, scheduling calls, logistical arrangements, first drafts of letters, proposals, and agreements). But since the devil is in the details, be sure that you and your staff attend to the smaller as well as the bigger aspects of fundraising. If you are late for a fundraising appointment because you had bad directions to someone’s office or home, you may never get to make the presentation that can help transform your law school.

2. The dean must link fundraising with institutional planning and academic needs. All constituent groups should have an appropriate level of involvement in analyzing the institution’s present situation and dreaming about its future. Such planning may or may not be connected with the self-study process that the ABA requires every seven years as part of the site inspection and re-accreditation process. Planning may derive from formal, informal, and ad hoc discussions. Sometimes a campus may invite or require academic units to engage in certain planning processes.

Whatever type of academic planning has taken place, a school’s fundraising initiatives should be consistent with it and the conclusions it has reached. For example, if the faculty development committee convenes a faculty retreat with the goal of increasing scholarly productivity, the fundraising plan should help implement the objectives established at that retreat. The dean, in that case, might try to raise a capital gift to endow a chair to recruit a prolific publisher to the campus. The dean also might try to raise several smaller professorships that would recognize and support the most active internal faculty researchers and teachers. The dean might seek either an endowment or increased unrestricted-annual giving to provide summer research stipends for the faculty. Either endowed or annual giving also could target professional travel and support for student research assistants. Faculty research requires library resources. Consistent with the plan to support faculty publications, the dean can identify and cultivate donors who may have a special interest in making an endowed or annual gift for library support (whether a general acquisitions fund or one linked to the donor’s own legal specialty, with every book bought from that fund bearing an insignia of the donor’s support).

Hence, whatever are the academic goals, the dean creatively should try to find the fundraising dollars to help realize the goal. Indeed, the dean should enjoy the challenge of a new faculty proposal. Rather than deal with some of the more mundane day-to-day management duties, the dean can take special gratification in finding a way to help make the project happen, while giving the colleague and the donor full credit for the endeavor. For example, if a school has energized faculty in a specific area (disability law, for example), the dean can help facilitate a conference, visiting lectureships, or even a new journal in that area.

In another situation, the central university administration may initiate a capital campaign in which all units participate in a focused and substantial effort to raise funds over a limited number of years. Though initiated by the central administration, campaign preparation at each school on campus still requires internal communication and planning. The dean and advancement officer normally may initiate the process of prioritizing academic and building needs. Such consensus building must precede any study of fundraising feasibility - - which primarily gauges the level of giving likely to be attained and helps set the ultimate campaign goal. Planning for a bricks-and-mortar project or an entirely new building may require special and extensive communication processes. But since the construction is for an educational purpose, academic prioritizing certainly is relevant to building-project campaigns. Faculty, staff, students, and alumni leaders all must be part of the strategic-planning process. Harmony between unit and campus goals is important.

In short, a prioritization of educational aims must precede all kinds of fundraising initiatives. Strategic planning is essential to making a "case statement" for annual, endowment, and building campaigns. Academic planning and consensus building come first; a feasibility study, second; and the actual fundraising, third.

Some campuses may require the dean to raise funds before the central administration matches dollars for a given project. In such instances, the central and law school administrators partner in a specific plan or project; both make an investment in it; and fundraising offers one of several streams of the revenue required to implement the plan.

Planning is essential, but it must not impede flexibility. The lesson of planning is not to delay calls received from alumni who want to help the law school immediately. If a lawyer has just received a healthy fee, or has come into money personally or professionally, do not decline or defer the gift until your strategic and fundraising plans are in place. For example, if a donor wants to establish a student scholarship by the end of the tax year in December, accept the scholarship. What school doesn’t need a scholarship? Of course, if you already have a plan in place, which suggests the need for a certain kind of scholarship (e.g., economic-based), or which puts technology demands ahead of scholarships, you can share those priorities with your donor. But always be prepared to be responsive to donors by having an institutional wish list at hand. If a potentially large gift is in the offing, and there are complexities for which you are not prepared (maybe it involves a trust you have not seen before, or maybe the donor has numerous questions about endowment investment, expenditure, and stewardship), get prepared in a hurry. Do what any productive professional does in a peak period of importance: work as hard and resourcefully as you need to capture the gift. Your law school can put it to good use. However important planning is, it is time-consuming, and institutions must be sufficiently nimble to accept a bird in hand when offered.

3. Fundraising is part of overall institutional advancement. The term "advancement" refers to all aspects of an institution’s efforts to create a climate, context, and reputation conducive to generating additional resources for improvement. Fundraising is the part of advancement where you actually propose and secure a gift. But most significant gifts stem from a potential donor’s longer-standing relationships with the law school, originating from the donor’s days as a student. How we treat current students is relevant to their inclination to support their alma mater when they are positioned and asked to do so. (Development conversations in which the graduate tells the dean how indebted he or she is to the law school tend to go better than the ones where graduates recount their bad experiences at law school (particularly in instances when the graduate’s facts and complaints are accurate and well-founded)).

While a dean cannot change the experience a student had in law school (and while schools must adhere to academic policies with current students), the dean can try to help a graduate remember the "good old days" through a well-honed reunion program. And the dean can publicize the school’s current success with an annual alumni-event speech, a well-crafted brochure, an effective email broadcast, and periodic regional gatherings of graduates. Invite alumni to lectures and other campus events. Neither reunions nor speeches target specific large donors. But they help the school to network with its donors; to build a case for a future gift; and to help transform lesser levels of support into larger future gifts. Institutional advancement efforts foster networking, establish relationships, and are springboards for annual and capital gifts.

If overall advancement efforts help to convince a donor that the school is stable and prospering, it is much more likely that the actual fundraising call will go well. While donors want to give to a "needy cause," they usually do not want to contribute to a ship sinking or dead in the water. Though the dean must explain the significance of the gift and even the urgency of it, it is common sense that donors want to contribute to winning causes. Advancement initiatives can help communicate how the school’s progress and prosperity enhance the value of the graduates’ degree. Even if a specific fundraising proposal does not succeed immediately, the school may gain other benefits from institutional advancement, outreach, and a positive image. Institutional advancement can help recent graduates with career placement. It may call attention to the law school when other groups in the legal profession or academy seek partnerships for new projects. It will lend the school credibility when and if it faces challenging issues externally. It gives the institution the presumption of being sound and capable even when fundraising is not on the table. A good law school image will benefit an entire campus. In summary, major-gift fundraising is a part of advancement - - often the culmination of other efforts - - but it is not the only component of institutional advancement.

4. Build an advancement team. Deans inherit a staff with the. Within the extant staff, the dean must find ways to optimize productivity and to establish a positive professional relationship. Deans should draw upon the experiences and strengths of that staff. When a staff vacancy occurs, the dean naturally must hire professionals who will help the law school to improve. Such basic ideals pertain as much to building an advancement staff as they do to building infrastructure in any area. An engaged fundraising dean will spend a significant portion of his or her time on advancement matters. Deans need a good team - - a combination of professionals with institutional memory and experience but with a receptivity to initiatives and creativity.

If all advancement matters are counted, deans normally should devote approximately at least a quarter to a fifth of their time to the "external" side of their duties.² Of course, that time commitment depends upon the internal issues with which the dean is dealing in a particular academic year; it depends somewhat upon whether the school is involved in a major capital campaign. If advancement is worthy of the equivalent of at least a day of the dean’s week, the advancement staff must be sufficient in quantity and quality to handle matters the other four days. They must know what issues to bring to the dean’s attention; how to frame those issues; and how to help the dean respond to those issues.

Though the dean must meet advancement staff at least halfway in responding to their individual strengths and approaches, the dean also must be able to count on the staff’s commitment to his or her leadership. A certain level of compatibility is necessary. There is a cliché´ that a dean should select an advancement officer with whom he or she would not mind spending the (not untypical) three hours driving in a rental car to see a donor in the pouring rain after arrival upon a delayed flight. Compatibility, however, does not mean that the dean should seek a clone to help him or her raise money. Advancement officers who can complement the dean’s strengths and offset his or her weaknesses are a plus. For those many conversations over meals with donors, an advancement officer who can add variety to the discussion also can be a plus. An advancement officer holding your law school’s degree can be an asset to fundraising; he or she can speak from personal experience about the school. But a non-lawyer with ample fundraising experience also can be effective. (In that situation, however, staff at either the law school or in the central administration will have to provide the legal skills needed for accepting and using certain gifts.) The advancement officer must possess a combination of organizational and business skills, but be personable. The dean and advancement officer must remain appropriately persistent and upbeat even when a donor declines a gift proposal.

A traditional way to organize an advancement staff is to divide the functions into at least six tasks: major fundraising, annual fundraising, special events, communications; research, and clerical. Schools may determine that the advancement staff is a good investment and that the school raises money only by spending money to hire and pay the staff. Most law schools, however, cannot afford one staff person in charge of each of those six areas. The average-sized law school typically will have about two or three professional positions plus secretarial and student support.

Fairly typically, an assistant dean (or director) for advancement reports directly to the dean, oversees major giving, and supervises the directors of other areas. Appointing a second staff person to increase annual unrestricted giving also is important. An annual-program fundraiser can be especially effective if he or she helps set definite yearly goals to increase both the level of participation and the level of each gift. If the revenue from a month or two of increased annual giving pays the annual compensation of the director of that area, then the proceeds from the ten or eleven remaining months all can go to supporting the academic priorities. Unrestricted annual gifts are an important complement to major gifts (which use only investment income and only for restricted purposes).

The dean should get as involved in the management of the advancement staff as the situation requires. Optimally there should be close and frequent communication with the top advancement officer, with less frequent (though regular) contact with the other officers. For example, a set weekly appointment between the top advancement officer and dean is valuable. That meeting should focus on major prospects and significant projects, with lesser items often handled by email. Biweekly meetings between the dean and entire advancement staff are appropriate. The meetings will be more productive if the staff prepares a written outline of discussion items beforehand.

The division of advancement responsibilities on a campus between the central administration and the component academic units necessarily will affect staffing and reporting protocols. There are any number of centralized, decentralized, and hybrid approaches. Whatever the arrangement, good and trusted communication is needed between the campus and the academic units. The dean and campus officials should share a common understanding of fundraising priorities and processes. The advancement officer normally should have some direct reporting line to the dean.

5. Fundraising isn’t physics. This final lesson could have gone first. It has been expressed by others as: "it’s not rocket science;" and "keep it simple, stupid" (the "kiss principle"). Deans should try to simplify and streamline most of the jobs they do. Deans do not achieve success by complicating matters and telling everyone how hard their job is. Instead, they do well by keeping the simple simple, and by simplifying the purportedly complex. The key to resolving most institutional matters is carefully to divine the specific issue or issues needing resolution. This approach applies well to the law dean as fundraiser. Lawyers are trained to focus and streamline matters; such analytical abilities are helpful to administrators who should strive to keep advancement and other matters simple.³

It is not really intellectually hard to try to raise money. It may involve a fair amount of time, but it is not intellectually challenging. You must have a good grasp of information about your school, the donor, and the project at hand. But that simply involves preparation, a good memory, and a capacity to keep proposals to various donors juggled in the air at the same time. (At least you need some reliable crutches to help you with such functions; for example, to offset middle-age memory loss, keep a note card with you of key information you don’t want to forget during fundraising appointments. Make yourself lists and establish a good calendar system, so there is less for you to forget to remember.)

There have been extensive discussions about whether the dean or the advancement director should make the actual request for a gift. But there is no catch-all answer to the question of "who" makes the ask or "how" it is made. Professionals will get used to working together on fundraising calls. It is not hard to ask for money if you believe in your "product." Most people with resources give money to something; so your only job is to convince a donor that your law school and its specific needs represent a worthy recipient of a gift. One of you just asks for the gift, while the other person follows up with the rationale. Marriage proposals offer a useful analogy. Marriage may be proposed in various ways, but it is rare that one person gets on his knee and simply pops the question. Making an important decision about such an important personal relationship usually involves an extended dialog. The same is true in a discussion over time about a significant gift. That communication must be kept clear and simple, but deans need not fret about the perfect way to pose the question. There is no universally perfect way. Occasionally, it is neither the dean nor advancement officer who initiates the proposal to a donor, but the president or chancellor or a volunteer fundraiser (such as the potential donor’s best friend in law school⁴).

The jargon of fundraising initially may sound off-putting and hard. "Capital" versus "annual" gifts. "Endowment" and "corpus" funds versus "interest" funds. Annuity trusts ("CRATs"), unitary trusts ("CRUTs"), and so on and so forth. But deans are smart, and these concepts are not really complex. They are not unfathomable concepts to lawyers. To be sure, an administrator who previously has dealt with campus financing and fundraising has an advantage over the novice, but it should not take a new dean long to learn the basics of fundraising. Admittedly, it may take longer to get to know the alumni and all the connected campus players. It may take even longer to appreciate a campus’ overall financial landscape. But after the school identifies its academic priorities, and you and your staff work to identify capable donors with a probable inclination to support the given project, go ask for the gift. It will be gratifying and beneficial when the gift comes in.

* * *

A dean’s leadership role today includes fundraising and other advancement efforts. Fundraising is good, professionally satisfying, and important work. Economic realities at both public and private schools demand that the law dean supplement the budget with philanthropic dollars. Academic strategic planning creates the blueprint for a school’s progress, but new resources are needed to fuel such initiatives. The fundraising dean can facilitate his or her colleagues’ academic proposals. Fundraising is part of the dean’s overall external role; it is a key part of the institution’s advancement operation. Fundraising responsibilities may be new to new deans or to schools without a history of development work. But fundraising is not really complex. The basic principles and values that make leaders successful in the other parts of their position usually will guarantee success in their fundraising duties. It is exciting to receive a gift that will improve a school’s academic program.

To recap the principles this essay articulates:

    1. Stick to the fundamental values of integrity, decanal modesty, gratitude, and good organization.

    2. Link fundraising to institutional needs.

    3. Remember that fundraising is part of a plan of overall institutional advancement and external relations.

    4. Build and nurture an effective advancement team.

    5. Keep things simple and well organized.