“You broaden your knowledge about the University and its needs, and there's a certain camaraderie that develops. Everybody has a similar mission,” says Kenneth Lipper, a graduate of the Law School and a member of COUR. “It gives you a chance to have a dialogue with the president and various officers of the University.”
According to Zofnass, the common ground established by COUR membership quickly forges relationships.
“If you go to one of these annual events, you meet somebody for the first time, and a year later, they’re like old friends even though you probably only knew them for 10 minutes,” he says.
Each COUR annual meeting comes with a guiding theme: in April 2013, the gathering focused on innovation and the sciences and ended with a tour of laboratory spaces that many COUR members had helped to fund. Despite the insistence that COUR membership does not represent a forward-looking quid-pro-quo, members say that this programming, coupled with the access to Harvard’s leadership that COUR provides, can lead to more giving.
Mitchell L. Dong ’75 says he discovered an interest in public health and environmental policy while he was a freshman at the College, but his decision to support the School of Public Health came after a presentation by the school’s then-dean, Harvey V. Fineberg ’69 at a COUR meeting.
“I got friendly with Harvey and he invited me to join the [School of Public Health] visiting committee,” Dong remembers. “I just kind of gradually got sucked in.”
When Dong’s 25th reunion came around, he and his wife, Robin, worked with Fineberg, then the provost, to make a major gift to the School of Public Health to endow a professorship.
THE BIG ASK
While donors say that committees are effective tools of engagement, they add that the Development Office often moves beyond the committee and brings in the closers—top University administrators—when it comes time to make a big pitch.
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Especially during a capital campaign, officials like Faust, Garber, and the deans and alumni campaign co-chairs of various schools play a crucial role in fundraising. When members of this group travel, the Development Office arranges meetings with potential supporters and ensures that days away from Cambridge are well spent.
“Development would like to fill every waking minute,” Faust says of her schedule when she travels for fundraising purposes. “And they... often succeed if I don’t say, ‘between 3:30-4:00 I’m going to take a nap or go for a walk or call in back to the office and find out what’s going on in Cambridge.’ I just have to say in advance, ‘don’t take that time,’ or they’ll take every minute of it. So they’re extremely effective in that way.”
When it comes time for leadership to sit down with a potential benefactor, the Development Office makes sure that the administrator—who might meet dozens of prospects during a day on the road—is prepared for the crucial one-on-one session. For meetings with new acquaintances, the administrator is usually provided with a concise, bulleted biography of the prospect.
“Ultimately, [the researchers] make sure that our leadership and volunteers have the best information in front of them when they sit down for a meeting,” says Alumni Affairs and Development spokesperson Patrick S. McKiernan.
The preparation is understandable; for many donors, these meetings are a crucial final step in the decision to make a large gift, coming after a long courting process by fundraising officers, group meetings with leaders, and committee work.
