Chicago Tribune [online], May 31, 2007, Thursday

Chicago Tribune

U. of I. chases funding goal of $2 billion
Goal among largest U.S. fundraisers
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-070531illinois-funds,1,3789790.story

By Jodi S. Cohen
Tribune higher education reporter
Published May 31, 2007, 10:12 PM CDT

The University of Illinois on Friday will kick off a $2.25 billion fundraising campaign, among the largest goals ever for a public university, on a scale typically reserved for the nation's wealthiest private institutions.

The "Brilliant Futures" campaign, expected to continue through 2011, will focus on raising money to boost student scholarships and faculty salaries, a change from fundraising efforts that historically focused more on new buildings.

To pull it off, many university employees will now focus on fundraising.

About 200 staff members will work on the campaign. Another 750 people will volunteer. Deans and chancellors will be involved more than ever, soliciting gifts from alumni as far away as India and China.

With the notion that it takes money to get money, the budget to run the campaign will be about $18 million a year, a 20 percent increase over what is typically spent by the University of Illinois Foundation, the university's private fundraising arm.

About $350,000 in private funds will be spent on a semiformal gala Friday night for nearly 1,200 people on Navy Pier, the formal kickoff of the campaign.

"We are off and running [Friday] night," said U. of I. President B. Joseph White, who was hired in part because of his past fundraising success. Referring to an announcement this week of a $100 million anonymous donation to the University of Chicago, White said: "The University of Illinois is going to take a back seat to no one when it comes to fundraising."

While the size of the campaign is staggering—only 10 ongoing or completed university campaigns are larger—the goal is lower than it might have been. During the last year officials had discussed setting a target as high as $3 billion.

"This goal is a more fact-based goal, rather than an extremely rough estimate," White said. "We have done a lot of work to home in on what will be [a] stretch, but [an] achievable goal for our campaign, and this is the result."

The campaign so far has brought in more than $990 million in donations or pledges during the "quiet phase" that began in 2003. That means that over the next 41/2 years, the university will have to raise on average more than $750,000 each day to reach the target.

More than ever, reaching that goal will rely on courting donors who can give millions. While the fundraising adage used to be that 80 percent of the money came from 20 percent of the donors, the figure now is closer to 90 percent or 95 percent of the money coming from 5 percent or 10 percent of donors, experts said.

U. of I. officials estimate they will need to persuade 295 donors to give $1 million or more. So far, they have received 173 gifts or pledges of at least $1 million.

"As the numbers get bigger, the campaigns become more and more reliant on major donors," said John Lippincott, president of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. "To achieve billion-dollar goals, you are going to have to identify some very major donors. Quite frankly, you are not going to get there with your $25 phone-a-thon gift. That would be a heck of a lot of phone calls."

There are currently more than two dozen universities in the midst of campaigns of at least $1 billion, including the University of Chicago, which expects to conclude its $2 billion campaign by June 2008, a year later than originally anticipated. The University of Notre Dame recently announced a $1.5 billion effort.

Only four other public universities—Michigan, UCLA, Virginia and Washington—have completed or are in the middle of campaigns of more than $2 billion.

Of U. of. I's multibillion-dollar goal, about $1.5 billion is targeted for the Urbana-Champaign campus, $650 million for the Chicago campus and $28 million for the Springfield campus. The goal for the university and University of Illinois Foundation is $72 million.

Among the largest gifts counted toward the U. of I. campaign so far:

•$11.5 million from Doris Kelley and Jay Christopher for the Family Resiliency Program and Christopher Hall in Urbana

•$7.5 million from investor Michael Tokarz for the College of Business in Urbana

•$4 million from an anonymous donor to the Springfield campus

•$1.5 million from UIC alumnus Rick Hill to fund three endowed engineering professorships in Chicago.

As late as Thursday, university officials were working to finalize three major gifts before Friday's launch. Two donations would be at least $10 million, and a $3 million to $5 million gift would fund the first endowed dean's position, said Sidney Micek, president of the University of Illinois Foundation.

Doris Christopher, founder of the Pampered Chef, a direct-sales kitchen-tools company, and one of the university's major donors, said she's excited to see what changes U. of I. can make after receiving billions of dollars through the campaign.

"It is huge and very lofty, but society in general will be better because of what they are going to do with this," said Christopher, a graduate from the university 40 years ago. "My kind of dream for this . . . is to think about what they can do if they are equipped with the resources."

U. of I., with 70,000 students on three campuses, increasingly relies on private money, as state funding makes up a smaller portion of the operating budget. About 21 percent of the university's $3.3 billion annual operating budget comes from the state. Twenty years ago, that portion was 41.5 percent.

"The great public universities have to behave like great private universities" in their fundraising efforts, said Ronald Ehrenberg, director of the Higher Education Research Institute at Cornell University. "The states have barely been able to increase state appropriations over long periods of time."

jscohen@tribune.com