When Harvard graduates pick up the phone, open their mail, or answer the door, they may very well find a anxious plea from their alma mater.

All this is in the effort to tap Harvard's 234, 136 alumni, including 81,000 graduates of the College, for donations. "We hope every alum will give as much as they can every year and periodically more than that," says Thomas M. Reardon, director of the University development office. With a $650 million annual budget, "Harvard is a large business," says Reardon. "If you look at what Harvard tries to do, we need all the support we can get and we need to get over the stereotype that we're rich. It's costly and time-consuming."

"I'm not one of those people who thinks raising money is tacky," says Fred L. Glimp '50, vice president for alumni affairs. "Alumni feel better about it once they do it, and it's something an institution has to do."

The fundraising game now has higher stakes than ever before, and Harvard won't be left behind in the nationwide race for donations. Forty universities across the country are pushing to raise more than $1 million each, amounting to a combined goal of nearly $7 billion. Stanford University will soon launch the biggest drive ever--to raise $1 billion. In December 1984, Harvard wrapped up its largest campaign by raising $360 million for the College and public policy programs alone. The country's richest school also raked in more contribution dollars--$145 million from individual donors and corporations--than any other university in the nation, according to the latest tally by the Council for Financial Aid to Education.

"Giving used to be a once in a lifetime thing; cycles are going to be shorter," says Reardon. Harvard's last major campaign before the recent five-year drive was in 1956; Reardon predicts that "it is not seriously out of proportion" to assume that the next fundraiser will come in 10 years.

Although the almost $4 billion endowment is soaring at an unprecedented pace--about $100 million a month--fundraising and tuition have had to bear a higher burden in bankrolling the University's costs. While the endowment funded 22 percent of the budget 10 years ago, its share slid to a low of 18 percent last year. At the same time, fundraising has had to cover 3 percent more than its 15 percent share a decade ago, and tuition's share has jumped 6 percent to a 33 percent rate last year.

"The endowment was never intended to provide a majority of funding for the institution," says Reardon. "If the purpose of the endowment is to provide a stable base for the University to grow on for the future, then we cannot raise the endowment's [share of the budget] to meet growing operating costs."

"For the College to grow in a certain area, we have to be able to raise more money. It can not come through the endowment."

The development office, Harvard's central fundraising office, spearheads the money-soliciting effort for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences with a 140-member operation in Holyoke Center. However, the money-raising push extends far beyond the banks of the Charles.

With a nationwide network of 4000 volunteers, the development office has kept in contact with 90 percent of the best Campaign solicitors, says Reardon. Their ranks were augmented by "new, strong people uncovered by the Campaign who emerged through exercise," he adds.

The number of alumni donors, which had been "disappointing in the past," found a "broader basis for support" as it hopped from a 35 percent participation rate to a 60 percent high during the Campaign, says Reardon.

To keep track of these efforts Harvard spent $1.5 million this year on the College Fund. Although "major gifts," which amount to more than two-thirds of total donations, are cheap to get since they usually involve one donor's decision to give, the thousands of smaller alumni gifts in the annual drives cost the development office much more for solicitation efforts, says Reardon. And the cost of raising money is up.

Before the Campaign, when the Fund cost only $900,000 to run, it only raised $7 million. Now the Fund has set "a realistic and ambitious goal" of $17.3 million in the first major drive after the five-year Campaign, says Henry G. Van der Eb '42, Fund chairman. The Fund has so far raked in $16.5 million toward its goal.

But when the Fund structure revved up after its five-year hiatus, administrative problems led it into a boggling cross-over with other branches of the development office. The same alumni would be asked to cough up money for fair old Harvard by many different callers for many different reasons--for their membership in a class, their hometown, their area of interest, and their children now attending Harvard. "If the annual and major gift [fundraisers] take separate tracks, they arrive on the same doorstep simultaneously," says Reardon.

Then came more confusion. William R. Fitzsimmons '67, director of the College Fund, decided to leave the millions behind and become dean of admissions this spring.