Major Gifts

On the day the Circle Ten Council of the Boy Scouts grew $25 million richer, Trevor Rees-Jones and Rex Tillerson were riding around in a golf cart at the national Jamboree, witnessing firsthand the power of Scouting.

That was two months ago when Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, asked fellow Dallas oilman Rees-Jones to make a $25 million donation to the local chapter. It was a lofty sum, more than anybody has given a regional Scouting chapter.

The ACLU's Leading Freedom Forward campaign transformed the organization's mind-set and major- and planned-giving strategies.

A billionaire philanthropist is backing Europe's first major school of government, which opens at Oxford University later today. Len Blavatnik, a Russian-American industrialist, has ploughed £75m into the venture so far and says he is prepared to offer more. The school, which will be launched with a message of support from the former US president Bill Clinton, aims to train outstanding graduates from around the world in the skills and responsibilities of government.

Penn State President Graham Spanier announced to the Board of Trustees (Sept. 17) the largest private gift in the University's history -- $88 million from Terrence M. and Kim Pegula to fund a state-of-the-art, multi-purpose arena and help to establish an NCAA Division I men's hockey program.

The gift paves the way for the creation of a Division I women's ice hockey program and enhanced figure skating opportunities.

The $100 million gift to Human Rights Watch from billionaire George Soros announced last week will extend the overseas presence of the influential American rights champion and ensure its financial health for years to come. But the goal of the gift is more ambitious still: to alter the way human rights are promoted in the 21st century, making rights advocacy less of an exclusively American and European cause.

Bruce Makous and Michael Rosen provided five steps to turn your direct-marketing program into a major- and planned-gift program.

C-level executives Angel Aloma, Danny McGregor and Atul Tandon, along with moderator Tom Harrison, discussed the biggest issues concerning fundraisers at the DMA Nonprofit Federation New York Nonprofit Conference.

Major donors are invaluable for any fundraiser, and retaining them during these tough economic times is more critical than ever. At the 2010 Bridge Conference held in National Harbor, Md., July 26-28, Martha Schumacher, president of Hazen Inc., and Katie Jett Walls, manager of individual giving at Capital City Public Charter School, provided 10 stewardship tips to live by in their presentation, "How to Keep Your Major Donors Happy."

The traditional (and frankly easy) way to evaluate a direct-mail fundraising program is to determine net revenue and the number of donors you keep, gain and lose. A mature and well-managed program invests in acquisition, ends the year with more donors and, if really good, achieves an overall higher average gift to boot.

But major college fundraisers know there have been fewer alumni willing to whip out their checkbooks these days. So they've been focusing almost exclusively on major donors for large gifts -- a strategy that paid off this week with news of some record-breaking increases in private contributions. "The number of million-dollar gifts are up dramatically," said Gene Tempel, president of the IU Foundation, "and we've been emphasizing those major gifts." The Bloomington-based foundation helped Indiana University raise $342.8 million in fiscal year 2010, a 38 percent increase from 2009 and the second-highest amount ever. Purdue and Notre Dame reported