Council awards IU excellence in fundraising honor

The Council for the Advancement and Support of Education has selected IU as one of the 2005 recipients for excellence in fundraising for the third time in the past seven years. \nThe award program, which looks at educational institutes nation-wide, uses voluntary data collected by the Council for Aid to Education for a minimum of three years. IU is one of only six in the category of Public Research/Doctorial Institutions to win the CASE-Wealth ID Award for Overall Fund-raising performance. IU also received the award in 1999 and again in 2000. \n"If you get the award once in a decade, it's a fantastic thing," said Curt Simic, president of the IU Foundation. "When you get it three times in seven years, it's phenomenal." \nAccording to CASE's Web site, www.case.org, winners are chosen by a panel of volunteer judges who look at a variety of factors, including the patterns of growth in overall support as well as among alumni donors, breadth in program areas, type of institution and factors contributing to the total amount of support. \nSimic said because CASE analyzes growth in private support over time, IU must continuously outdo itself in order to be considered for the award. \n"They measure you against yourself in terms of sustained performance, not just in dollars, but in number of donors, diversity of donors and comprehensiveness of the program," he said. "So what it does is confirm the fact that we at IU really have a fine development program, and have had over time." \nIn 1994 IU raised $43.9 million in gifts. With the addition of non-governmental research grants awarded to faculty members, the total was $106 million. The numbers that were looked at for this year's award, from 2004, saw fundraising totals grow to $106 million in gifts and $248 million including faculty grants. \nBecause the data evaluated includes only private donations and gifts, Simic said the work that goes into fundraising is a shared effort among faculty, chancellors, deans and development officers. \nAlthough Simic credits the sustained efforts of the program over many years as the reason for the award, he notes that several events in 2004 may have contributed to the win. \n"I think there are two things that have gone into this latest recognition," he said. "One is the enormous success of the IUPUI campaign, in which we raised ($1.39 billion), and the second is that we're in the early stages of an endowment campaign for the Bloomington campus... Those numbers are starting to add up and our expectation is that it'll be over a billion"