New Strategies for Educational Fund Raising (review)

Approximately once each decade a book is published that can best be thought of as a handbook of educational fund raising. New Strategies for Educational Fund Raising is a worthy successor to earlier volumes. The editor has worked hard to eliminate redundant material in its 31 chapters, which contain contributions from 38 academic presidents, vice presidents for finance, development and advancement, other development professionals, higher education consultants, lawyers, and professors. Some of the chapters are technical and deal with complex matters such as tax and estate law, while others are very basic. However, all can be profitable read by professionals in the development field and, more generally, by administrator and faculty seeking to get a better understanding of this area of ever increasing importance to academic institutions.

The chapters are grouped very naturally into ten parts. After three introductory chapters by the editor about the development function that define terms, discuss the elements of the development process and present a historical overview, a second section addresses the state of fund raising theory and research, the relationship of academic planning to advancement policies, and the key players in the advancement process. This is followed in turn by sections relating to fundraising from individuals, the nature of fund raising campaigns and corporate and foundation support. After a section with essays on the changing demographics of potential donors, with emphases on the changing gender, racial and ethnic distribution of college graduates and the internationalization of our society, the next section address fund raising in public higher education, private higher education, community colleges and professional schools within large universities. Concluding sections deal with managing and supporting development programs, the relationship of development to other administrative units in academia (public relations, alumni relations and the business office), and ethical and legal issues facing the development profession.

As a higher education researcher and a former Cornell Vice President, I found the discussions the authors present fascinating. Several messages from the volume came through clearly to me. Fund raising is both a science and an art. The scientific research base to support fund raising efforts is just beginning to emerge and much of what is the received knowledge is based upon anecdotal evidence. Successful fund raising programs are dependent upon building long-term relationships with constituents and should be built on academic priorities and institutional plans. Put another way, mission should drive the search for money, not vice versa.

While comprehensive in nature, any volume of this type will always have a number of omissions and the ones a reviewer mentions necessarily reflect his own interests and background. Unless I overlooked it, there is no discussion of the increasing difficulty of maintaining long-term relationships between institutions and their constituents in the world in which development officers are increasingly mobile and the profession has become very market driven. Similarly, there is no discussion of how the U.S. News & World Report annual ratings of academic institutions may distort the development function at academic institutions (Ehrenberg 2003).

While chapters are devoted to individual, foundation and corporate giving, little guidance is provided as to why the share of giving coming from various sources varies across institutions (Ehrenberg and Smith 2003) and how an institution might decide how to allocate its development resource across possible funding sources. So too is there little information about how an institution should decide what the optimal scale of its development operations should be. Moreover even if the marginal costs of increasing giving are low, how these costs are distributed across units in an institution and what the new funds will be used for matter because the "color of money" matters (Ehrenberg 2002, chapter 3).

As higher education institutions become increasingly dependent upon external giving for their well-being, ethical issues (discussed in the book) relating to the extent to which donors should determine institutional policy arise. As more and more institutions aggressively seek to raise...