Mile high expectations or just a fishing trip?
In late November of 2006, the University of Colorado announced a million gift from Denver philanthropist Phillip Anschutz. In appreciation of this donation, the Medical Campus in Aurora was re-named in Anschutz's honor.
The School of Medicine used the announcement to trumpet the call for a naming rights donor, asking price 0 million. Interesting tactic in the grand scheme of fundraising efforts.
An emerging trend in the non-profit sector is the super-charged escalation of ASK AMOUNTS for naming rights. This trend is directly linked to the surge in billion dollar fundraising campaigns currently underway at universities, colleges, environmental groups and others across the USA.
I wonder aloud sometimes and ask the wind, "Who checks the moral barometer of non-profit entities?"
Which organization is genuinely qualified to ask for a 0 million gift in return for the perpetual naming rights to an intangible like a school of medicine?
Is this about entitlement or need?
Benchmarking Named Gifts
to universities
Last August Stanford University received a 5 million gift from the founder of Knight Industries and in turn named the Knight Graduate School of Management. The dollar amount of 5 million by the way, made it the number one ranked named gift to a Business School, million more than the gift made to the University of Michigan in December of 2004.
Stanford is ranked # 7 Best National University - Doctoral level by the U.S. News and World Report. The six schools ahead of Stanford include Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Cal Tech, Duke and MIT.
Now add to that perspective, there are only two business schools that have received a nine figure gift. That's it. Of the 67 named Business Schools, #21 ranked Carnegie Mellon University, is next, having received a million gift in 2004.
For the record, there have been more naming gifts made to Business Schools than to Medicine, Law and Engineering combined. Capitalism helped to create wealth, some are giving back in a big way.
Naming rights for non-profit organizations take their benchmarks from these named Business Schools. Every now and then there is a gift outside the norm, made by someone who has financial capacity and a strong emotional attachment to the institution.
UCLA - David Geffen School of Medicine ( 2002 ) $ 200 million
University of Miami - Miller School of Medicine ( 2004 ) $ 100 million
Cornell University - Weill Medical College ( 1998 ) $ 100 million
Northwestern University - Feinburg School of Medicine ( 2002 ) $ 75 million
Stanford - Knight School of Management ( 2006 ) $ 105 million
University of Michigan - Ross School of Business ( 2004 ) $ 100 million
Carnegie Mellon University -Tepper School of Business ( 2004 ) $ 55 million
University of Texas, Austin - McCombs School of Business ( 2004 ) $ 50 million
I pose the question once again. Are the naming rights dollar figures about need or a sense of entitlement?
To the universities and colleges, receiving a large naming gift is like winning the lottery. Truth be known, it's better because unlike someone who claims a windfall from a random lottery ticket, there are no state or federal withholding taxes skimmed off the top. It's more like cashing in a tax-free prize from the Irish Sweepstakes.
For any university to be so bold as to peg their naming rights for a designated asset at 0 million appears to be one of self-serving entitlement. Public universities in particular. We do because we can.
Twenty years ago, philanthropy was all about contributing to a favorite charity because of the emotional ties that made us a part of the organization.
Contemporary fundraisers seem to be focused in on pushing for as much as you can every time they ask for a gift. Profiling of the would-be donors is skewed towards a what's-in-it-for-us background research according to wealth indicators. Many times the profiles are compiled without ever having a conversation with the individual, foundation, corporation or other possible benefactor.
Maybe it's the system that is bent. When senior fundraising staff look around and see the off the chart numbers being asked for naming rights at other schools they appear to be ready to announce in public, "me too."
Is that enough? Why don't we question them or ask them to validate their numbers?
Should they not have to back it up with some sort of track record of outstanding accomplishments such as a highly touted academic curriculum, multiple Nobel Prize winning faculty on staff or evidence of breakthrough research by accomplished professors? How did they come up with a 0 million price tag anyway?
Why are they not accountable to show deemed value in these naming rights? Should the donor community blindly accept any dollar amount that a university or college chooses to ask for its' naming rights?
And what kind of influence do these high minded tactics have on the rest of the non-profit organizations in that community? Not to mention the impact they have on donor's choices to distribute the same amount of money to a wider group of deserving organizations.
A month before I wrote this article there was an announcement from the corporate side of the fence. Citibank, the largest financial services company in the land and one of the largest in the world, announced two naming rights deals on successive days.
The first was a commercial sector naming rights agreement for million for the baseball stadium where the New York Mets play. The second was a $ 34 million dollar deal to name the Wang Center for Performing Arts in Boston. Isn't it interesting to see a bank pay almost double what it paid for naming rights in what most refer to as the media capital of the world?
Are universities that chose these fundraising strategies more about benevolence and working towards the greater good or merely acting out repressed ambitions to be the wealthiest kid on the block?
