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SHARED LEADERSHIP

A VISI NARY

APPROACH TO FUNDRAISING

Pommashea Noel-Bentley, MBA and Scott Blythe

In today’s complex post-secondary landscape, it is crucial to empower and actively engage the
campus community in fundraising goals. However, for most universities and colleges, articulating
what this means, developing a strategy, and addressing this goal have proven somewhat elusive and
abstract. There are many factors, histories, and perspectives at work within a campus community
that continually shape how well the campus engages in advancement-related activities such as alumni
and government relations, fundraising, marketing, and communications. Each campus has a unique
organizational context that either supports or limits the institution’s fundraising potential. Therefore,
it is important to articulate the value of establishing a shared leadership model of relationship-based
fundraising across a campus community. This allows the institution to utilize a better framework and
provide appropriate tools to build and evolve accountable and transparent fund-development processes
that will beneft the entire institution and, most importantly, support the institution’s benefciaries.

Background, Scope, and Key Premises an advancement model that combines alumni and fund-
development teams to form an integrated unit as the majority
For donors, efective and efcient fundraising is not about of donations to post-secondary education are from alumni.
institutions, it is about the cause (Sherrington, 2014). In Consider an institution’s fundraising eforts in relation to the
education, that cause is centered on a specifc group of following questions:
benefciaries: the students. In all the complexities of delivering
education and serving students, the bottom line is student 1. Does the campus community view fundraising
success. In support of this bottom line, sophisticated systems as an essential function?
have been developed to measure achievement of student success. 2. Is it important for the advancement team to
While these systems allow institutions to deliver value, they
must also be designed to capture external interests, thereby maximize funds for the immediate term?
facilitating an understanding of how post-secondary donors 3. Is it critical for the advancement team to
connect to benefciaries and what those donors are willing more broadly focus on the value a donation
to fund. Institutions need to understand and know their can provide for benefciaries to maximize
prospective and current donors. Tis relationship-based model funds over the long-term?
is called donor-centric fundraising (Burk, 2003). Te answers to these questions are shaped by the present
Fundraising is an important facet of building the institution’s fundraising culture or lack thereof. Te culture has a profound
capacity to deliver the best education possible. No matter what impact, not only on how an institution engages in fundraising
method of fundraising a specifc institution employs, campus activities, but also on how an institution funds, structures,
employees must demonstrate that funds are invested prudently discusses, and holds to account its advancement team. Most
and with purposeful integrity to build donor trust and loyalty. institutional executives and boards have a range of answers for
Many institutions view alumni relations departments and the frst question and almost without exception answer “yes” to
staf as friend-raising; separate and distinct from fundraising question two and sometimes “yes” to question three. Of course,
activities. Te most efective fundraising is typically within with any investment there is an expectation of immediate

LEADERSHIP Vol. 23.1 Spring/Summer 2017 31

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