University Times

Albert J. Novak Jr., who had been interim vice chancellor for Institutional Advancement for the past year, received a permanent appointment to the job this month.

Novak, 43, came to Pitt in 1997 as associate vice chancellor for corporate and foundation giving. In naming him to succeed Carol Carter, who resigned as vice chancellor last October, Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg said: “This past year, under [Novak’s] leadership as interim vice chancellor, we had another record-breaking year, despite a very challenging economic environment. With this appointment, we are taking an important step to make certain that we can build on our existing momentum.”

Last year, after announcing that Pitt had reached its original $500 million capital campaign goal 13 months ahead of schedule, Pitt trustees and senior administrators increased the goal to raising $1 billion by 2007.

As of this week, Pitt has raised $620 million.

In a recent interview with the University Times’ Bruce Steele, Novak talked about the campaign and what it takes to get people to part with their money in behalf of Pitt.
UNIVERSITY TIMES: Since January 2001, the U.S. economy has tanked, America suffered the worst terrorist attacks in its history, we’ve fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Carol Carter left the University and so did the original director of Pitt’s campaign, Dee Jay Oshry. And yet, it seems that the campaign hasn’t missed a beat.

NOVAK: Well, the fundamentals were in place, and a lot of the credit for that has to go to Carol and Dee Jay, who came here during the 1990s, made a lot of improvements, and got us to think in terms of people giving this University gifts of $1 million. Pitt used to think of $10,000 as a major gift. And it is a big gift. But we didn’t realize that people would actually give us larger gifts.

Was that the result of thinking small?

I don’t know if it was a matter of thinking small. It just hadn’t happened. Maybe we were afraid to try.
I should point out that the seeds for some of the major gifts we’ve received during this current campaign were planted 10 or 15 or 20 years ago. For instance, the process that resulted in the George M. Bevier estate donating $10.5 million earlier this year to support our School of Engineering actually began back in the 1960s, when somebody from Pitt started building a relationship with Mr. Bevier and his family. The current dean of the engineering school, Gerry Holder, has spent a lot of time with that family. There’s still a daughter surviving [Pamela Bevier] and Gerry continues to stay in touch with her.
One of the keys to successful fund raising is to build and maintain strong relationships with successful alumni like Mr. Bevier who are interested in supporting the University.

The thing we need to do is to make the Bevier gift become ordinary here. I mean, we’re a great university. If we go out and crow about what we’re doing — the research, the teaching, the community service that goes on here — people who are philanthropists will respond positively.

Will Pitt be announcing any more big gifts in the near future?

At this time, we have a list of about 110 individuals, corporations and foundations that each has the means to give us $1 million or more. We’re talking to those individuals and organizations right now, but we’re not close to saying: It’s going to be next week or next month or even by the end of this fiscal year that we’ll be announcing any exceptionally generous gifts.

What is Pitt’s batting average in getting prospects to contribute $1 million or more?

In the first part of the campaign, we were closing on [gifts from] better than one-in-three potential donors above the $1 million threshold. By the end of the campaign, we will probably have closed on somewhere between one-in-three and one-in-four potential donors at the $1 million-or-more level. Typically around the country, the average is one-in-four.

Now, not everybody gives at the level you ask for. Some of these folks may say “no” to giving $1 million, but they may give $250,000, which is still a wonderful gift. At the end of the last fiscal year, we had 113 donors — individuals, foundations, corporations — who gave a total of $384 million to the campaign, with each of those donors giving more than $1 million.

How do you convince someone to give $1 million to Pitt?

With people who commit to major gifts, there’s an intellectual exercise that they go through. They believe in what the University is doing, or in what a particular professor is doing, or they want to help the University find a cure for cancer. But there’s also an emotional step that people go through. It’s pretty hard to convince somebody with a straight intellectual argument that they ought to part with $1 million!
Just because people have wealth doesn’t mean they want to give it away. That’s not saying they’re selfish. But you have to build a strong case, and there’s got to be both an intellectual piece and an emotional piece to it.

The same is true for getting most alumni to contribute, even at a relatively modest level of giving. There’s got to be some emotional tie there, some passion. Maybe they remember what it was like for them when they were freshmen, or they remember somebody who helped with an experiment in a lab one day. Or maybe they remember a faculty member who was especially tough on them, but in the end that experience served them well throughout their life.

If our alumni didn’t have good experiences in the classroom, in their dorm rooms, in their campus activities and so on, they wouldn’t give back to Pitt. You could have the best fund-raising person in every position within Institutional Advancement and it wouldn’t matter. Our surveys tell us that alumni donors believe they received a first-class education here, and they think we’re being well managed. That’s the other thing — if they don’t believe that the University has the right leadership, forget it. They will be very reluctant to give money.
Pitt still lags behind Penn State and other schools in alumni giving, but it is improving here, right?

Seven years ago, we had an 11 percent participation rate among our undergraduate alumni in terms of contributing to the University. We’re up to 17 percent today. That is a very significant improvement. When you think about having 200,000 living alumni, it’s a significant move when you add a percentage point.

Every year, we add a new class of students and another class graduates. It’s hard to even track all of those people down. They’re going off to graduate school, they’re looking for employment, they’re spreading across the country. It often takes a couple of years just to track them all down. The good news is that we pretty much know that, every year, we are going to uncover new alumni who are very successful and have the means to commit to major gifts.
Have any of the divisive issues on campus in recent years — double-digit pay raises for senior administrators, not extending health benefits to employees’ same-sex partners — affected the capital campaign?

I’m sure that on a case-by-case basis those kinds of things have affected some people and influenced some not to give us money. Our TeleFund callers, the folks who make hundreds of thousands of phone calls each year to potential givers, I would think that they hear about those issues. In fact, I know they do. But we haven’t heard about those issues from donors at the major gift level.
Is there still an untapped reservoir of donors who would give to Pitt but haven’t been approached yet?

Oh, yes. Especially individuals. Our campaigns in the past have been pretty much local. Maybe we’d make fund-raising trips to Philadelphia, and maybe New York. But during the current campaign, the chancellor has been very serious about these “University on the Road” programs. This past year, we went to Philadelphia, New York and Washington, D.C., and in the past the chancellor has gone to San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco. We’re committed to getting out to other cities around the country to spread the Pitt message.
Last week, Pitt and UPMC announced the creation of a foundation that will raise philanthropic funds for Pitt’s six Health Sciences schools as well as the medical center. Isn’t that encroaching on Institutional Advancement, by removing the Health Sciences from your domain? Might it even conflict with Pitt’s capital campaign?

Actually, I think the creation of that organization will serve both the University and the hospital community very well. Institutional Advancement will continue to provide support to the Health Sciences’ fund-raising program, as we always have.

Clyde Jones [the new foundation’s leader] brings first-class experience here from Cornell and its Weill Medical College. I had the opportunity to meet Clyde during the interviewing process, and I think he’s super. I feel fortunate that he’s here. We need that kind of attention paid to fund raising on the Health Sciences’ and hospitals’ side. Previously, there was a lot of confusion among donors. When they would be asked to give money to support medical research, they often wouldn’t be sure whether it was UPMC or Pitt’s medical school or maybe the surgery department that was asking them to contribute. Now, all of that will be clear.

There was talk this year of a Pitt fund-raising drive to pay for scrubbing the outside of the Cathedral of Learning. What’s the status of that?

Facilities Management is still looking at ways to clean the Cathedral’s exterior. We have not heard yet if a way has been found, although I’ve been told that Facilities Management thinks they may have a way. We also have not been told how much a project like that would cost. We would certainly be interested if it makes sense for the University to pursue such a project. We would want to do a campaign that harkened back to the buy-a-brick-for-a-dime campaign [of the 1930s, which raised funds for the Cathedral’s construction and generated massive publicity and a sense of ownership of the Cathedral among many Pittsburghers]. People in Pittsburgh still talk about that campaign.

I should point out that a number of projects have been going on inside the Cathedral. Various rooms have been refurbished — Nationality Rooms, the [College of General Studies’] McCarl Center, the Honors College’s space. Something we would have to determine would be, do we want to raise money for a comprehensive Cathedral of Learning restoration project? Or would this strictly be a cleaning of the Cathedral’s exterior? I can tell you that a number of alumni are very interested in the latter. They want that building to be cleaned.

Will Pitt meet its $1 billion campaign goal? If so, when?

Oh, I’m very confident that we will meet it. When we will meet it depends on what happens with the economy. If the economy bounces back to where it was when we started this campaign, probably we’ll reach the goal earlier than 2007. If not, we’ll get there in 2007 or 2008. But we will get there.
Fund raisers say that the last millions are the hardest to get in any big campaign. We have a long way to go in this campaign, and I think the further we go, the more difficult it’s going to be. I am concerned about foundation fund raising right now, and that’s no reflection on our staff or on the kinds of projects and programs that we bring before the foundation community. It’s just that foundations have suffered from the same poor economy and poor investment returns that we have.

Foundations generally set their payout rates the same way that we do, using a three-year rolling average and so forth. Well, we just had the third of three pretty bad years. So, I am worried about the foundation numbers for this year. But, longer term, we’re starting to see individual stock portfolios bounce back. We’ve had a number of people say, “We’re interested in giving. We like what you had to say. But come back to us when the economy recovers a little bit more.”