Ohio State’s bold fundraising goals have met an economy shrouded in uncertainty.

OSU officials plan to raise $300 million during fiscal year 2010 for its colleges, lower units and branch campuses. This goal includes money gathered from the two-and-a-half year, $100 million campaign to fund the Students First, Students Now program, and a $75 million campaign ending in 2013 to fund Project ONE, the $1 billion expansion of the OSU Medical Center.

But college fundraisers across the country are struggling in a shaky economy, and OSU’s are no exception. Peter Weiler, OSU’s senior vice president for University Development, reported on OSU’s fundraising challenges to the Board of Trustees’ Development and Investment Committee last Thursday.

The Students First, Students Now initiative, to which OSU President E. Gordon Gee donated his $20,053 raise in October, is ahead of schedule, having raised 46.5 percent of its $100 million goal through 40 percent of the fundraising period.

But fundraising on the $300 million goal, which Weiler described as “highly aggressive,” was behind through December.

OSU raised almost $133 million, or 44.3 percent of the goal, through Dec. 31, the halfway point of the fundraising period. Under better economic circumstances, OSU would have reached about 55 percent of that goal, Weiler said. Although the fundraising effort gained some ground in January, December is a crucial month for fundraising, which tends to decline gradually until June, he said.

Some of the 32 units that share the responsibility for the $300 million goal are faring better than others. The OSU Alumni Association, which received $1 million as part of a gift from anonymous donors to honor Archie Griffin, is already at almost 300 percent of its yearly goal of $414,000. OSU’s Newark campus, on the other hand, has tallied only 6 percent of its goal of nearly $1 million.

The College of Nursing has raised slightly less than 15 percent of its goal of nearly $2.3 million. The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity has raised only 12.2 percent of its $3 million target.

Perhaps the most surprising laggard is the Moritz College of Law, whose alumni enter a relatively lucrative profession. The college has raised only 10 percent of its roughly $8.7 million goal.

Weiler said he is not worried about units that are behind on their fundraising goals because the numbers are only a snapshot of a long process. A unit that is at 20 percent of its goal this year might be at 120 percent next year, he said.

Weiler also said he is confident in OSU’s ability to raise the $75 million needed to help finance Project ONE, which is also counting on hospital revenues and university bond issues in lieu of state money. The project has about $825 million worth of construction remaining, said Bill Shkurti, senior vice president for Business and Finance, in a report to the board Friday.

The $75 million goal represents the biggest fundraising initiative that OSU has undertaken for a capital project, Weiler said in an interview with The Lantern. In order to hit the $75 million mark, OSU needs a big gift, he said.

“We’re not going to get there without a 10, 20 million dollar-plus gift, and in this economy that’s hard to do,” he said.

Economic statistics from 2009 illustrate that difficulty. Private donations to U.S. colleges plunged in 2009, according to a survey cited in a Feb. 3 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Decreased alumni participation and smaller gift sizes added up to a $3.75 billion drop in donations to colleges, representing a fall of nearly 12 percent from 2008, the sharpest decline in the survey’s 50-year history, according to the article.

Despite the difficult financial environment, “the University has every expectation the fund raising goal will be met,” Shkurti said in an e-mail. “Everyone is working very hard to make sure that is the case. In the event it is not, the Medical Center will need to find the money elsewhere within its own budget or scale back the project proportionally.”

The Development and Investment Committee discussed OSU’s strategy for meeting the goal Thursday.

Trustee Doug Borror raised the possibility of soliciting corporate donations, not just donations from individuals.

Trustee W.G. “Jerry” Jurgensen, who is a director of Nationwide Children’s Hospital, also said that raising money for the Medical Center expansion can be an easier task than fundraising for other academic goals, because medicine’s benefits are easily demonstrated to donors.

“I don’t mean to sound crass, but saving lives sells,” he said.

With more than 464,000 living alumni, OSU has a large audience to which it can sell its fundraising goals. Their willingness to give will also depend on their expectations of OSU’s ability to manage money in a shaky economy.

As financial markets improve, donors are becoming less hesitant, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education article. A small minority of donors surveyed by OSU, however, was unhappy with the performance of OSU’s long-term investment pool, which includes the school’s endowment.

In October, OSU mailed a satisfaction survey to almost 3,000 donor households. Of the 129 who responded, 6 percent “expressed frustration with [the] economy and investment performance and said we need to tell the good with the bad,” according to the University
Development report delivered by Weiler to the board’s Development
and Investment Committee.

“I wasn’t satisfied with the returns last year either,” said Jonathan Hook, OSU’s chief investment officer, in an interview with The Lantern. Hook, who was hired shortly before the market crash of fall 2008, said there was little that his office could do initially because “the drop occurred as I was walking in the door … it felt like it was in free-fall for about 90 days.”

The long-term investment pool lost almost a quarter of its market value in fiscal year 2009, dropping to $1.66 billion. The fund has since climbed back to almost $1.9 billion.

“If I had been one of the donors at that point,” Hook said, “I might not have been happy either.”