Learning from Howard Dean: Dean may be out of the running, but that doesn't mean college fundraisers can't learn from him

University Business, April, 2004 by Bennett Voyles

Dear Howard,

I don't know if you widened your job search since that thing in Washington didn't work out, but I've been Looking into Internet fundraising at universities, and it turns out there's a lot of opportunity there for someone with your skills.

OK--the perks aren't as good as the DC job. You won't get a plane, that's for sure, and if you get a house, it won't be as big. But if you do as well raising money online for a college as you've done for yourself, I'LL bet you could get that institution's president to play "Hail to the Chief" (or any other tune you like) whenever you walk into a room on campus. I mean, you're really good at this, Howard: By Q3 you had raised $7.4 million online, and in the 24 hours after you Lost the New Hampshire primary, you and your campaign team raised $192,111 from 3,000 people.

Listen, Howard, I've spoken with people who know something about Internet fundraising for colleges and some of them have been following your campaign fairly closely. I don't know what their politics are, but they'd definitely nominate you for best fundraiser of the year. I talked to one guy, Vinay Bhagat, who is the chief strategist for Convio (www.convio.com), a company that builds fundraising software. Even though Convio is based in Bush territory (Austin, TX), Bhagat has plenty of good things to say about the way your team has handled your Internet strategy.

"Everyone--from the top person on the campaign, to Joe Trippi, the campaign manager--" he points out, "has a very acute focus on how the Web can be used effectively." What's more, he says, colleges are still in the very early days of using the Internet as a fundraising tool. In fact, "Most schools have taken a passive approach to online fundraising versus the active approach used by political campaigns or even some nonprofit organizations," adds Bhagat. That means that higher ed is wide open for your kind of expertise, Howard. Wide open.

But I also spoke with Kristina Carlson, "President/Superchick" (no kidding) of Fundraisinginfo.com, an Atlanta-based fundraising information service. Carlson also thinks that college fundraisers could Learn a Lot from you guys.

"The thing that the Dean campaign really took advantage of (and it's an old fundraising principle)," says Carlson, "is that people give to people. One of the things that the Internet creates for us," she continues, "is this amazing ability to send out 20 messages to 20 people and say, 'This is what we're doing. If you're excited about it, could you forward this to your friends?' Then those 20 people forward the message with the click of a mouse to 20 of their friends," she says. And the circle widens logarithmically at Lightning speed.

The brilliance of your campaign fundraising strategy, says Carlson, is that the people you had asking for donations were friends, not strangers. The e-mails they sent out were from somebody the prospects trusted and so they paid more attention to those solicitations than if the requests had come directly from the Dean campaign. "That's the real power of the Internet," says Carlson.

Yet, the Internet fundraising experts I spoke with say that most schools still aren't very far from the stage where they simply place a "Donate Now" button on their Web sites and expect it to do all the work. Some of these pundits even Laugh when they talk about that "Donate Now" button; to them, it's just about as bad as a "Kick Me" sign. (Although, come to think of it, you'd probably get a higher response rate with "Kick Me.") Of course, not all campus administrators are clueless about the Web's true potential for their school. Craven Williams, the president of Greensboro College (NC), says that the Internet has turned out to be a terrific way to bring alumni closer to each other and closer to his institution. The Internet is also a particularly effective tool for keeping recent graduates of a school plugged in. Unfortunately, some schools are missing out on this opportunity, too.

"It's a strange phenomenon today," says Charlie Cumbaa, executive vice president of Blackbaud (www.blackbaud.com), a software company that works with 1,400 advancement offices to help them more effectively raise funds for their schools. "Today, college students in most universities are accustomed to dealing with their institution through the Internet, whether it's to schedule classes, contact professors, get assignments, or pay tuition," he explains. But get this, Howard: Cumbaa says, "There are a Lot of colleges and universities that struggle with the transition of their students becoming alumni, simply because they don't have the same infrastructure to support that kind of alumni interaction on the Web."

So, basically, after the college has spent four long years training its students to communicate with the institution in a cheap and efficient way, it then spends the next four years retraining the recent grads to use modes of communication that are more expensive for the institution to support. (I wonder: Is there some kind of government price-support program in play here that I don't know about?)