“If they are planning on going into a campaign in the next year, the conditions couldn’t be better,” he says.
Andrew Tiedemann, a spokesperson for the University Development Office, points out that it has been 12 years since the last campaign started and thus since Harvard development officials last tried to solicit so-called “nucleus fund” donors.
“That’s a long time for an institution of this size,” he says. “This is the first major review of Harvard’s planning and mission in 12 years.”
Reardon says that while there is concern about donor fatigue, the University needs to continue raising money to support its ambitious goals.
“That’s always a question,” he says. “One of the problems is that there are a lot of things that you want to do—you have huge needs...so that’s kind of an ongoing situation: the place has a lot of money but it always needs a lot of money.”
Taylor says it’s not unusual today to leave little time between successive campaigns, noting that the most likely kind of burnout is if donors are no longer interested in the priorities emphasized in the last campaign, preferring instead to spend their money on new initiatives.
“Institutions are almost constantly in a campaign,” he says. “As soon as you finish one, you start to gear up for the next one.”
And Council for Advancement and Support of Education Director of Public Relations Joye Mercer Barksdale says the major donors are used to being solicited repeatedly.
“The very sophisticated donors that Harvard is dealing with—they know enough about the challenges higher education is dealing with to know that Harvard will need to come back to them over time,” she says. “So I don’t think it’s a one-shot deal.”
Taylor says that the outcome of the internal debate over the merits of a smaller, targeted campaign versus a broader cross-school campaign is unlikely to have major ramifications on its financial success.
“The only real difference between the two is that one counts everything including the kitchen sink and the other only counts gifts that are made towards those three or four featured priorities,” Taylor says. “There’s no real negative either way.”
“The only positive of going with the larger campaign is that you could announce a larger goal, because you are including everything,” he adds. “The positive of going with just the focused campaign is that you can market that much more aggressively.”
—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu.