MIT Reports to the President 1998-99
Fiscal Year 1999 marked the second year of the silent phase of the capital campaign and the fourth consecutive year of record breaking private support to the Institute. Built on a tradition of partnership with all of MIT's donor constituencies, this past year continued to reflect the increasingly significant role gifts of alumni and friends play in the overall picture of private support to MIT, in addition to the continued support from corporations and foundations.
During the year, 8 people were promoted in Resource Development (4 men, including 1 Hispanic man, and 3 women) and 16 open staff positions were filled, of which 11 were women. Key appointments during the course of the year included Steve Dare to the position of Director of Resource Development, Karl Koster to the position of Director of Corporate Relations, and Athelia Tilson to the position of Director of Strategic Program Development. Elizabeth Harding, former Director of Communications and Donor Relations, retired from the Institute after 22 years of dedicated service. Resource Development continued its efforts to fill positions with qualified women and minority candidates by working closely with Personnel and others to identify new resources of applicants. A CASE (Council for the Advancement and Support of Education) intern, an African American woman, moved from Resource Development to the Alumni Association during the year.
Private support for Fiscal Year l999 totaled $209 million, an increase of 45 percent over the previous year. This included: $202.1 million in gifts, grants, and bequests, and $6.9 million in support through membership in the Industrial Liaison Program. The total compares with $143.9 million in 1998, $133.6 million in 1997, $130.9 million in 1996, and $108.9 million in 1995. Gifts-in-kind for the past year (principally gifts of equipment) were valued at $6.3 million.
Sources of gifts for Fiscal Year l999 were: $68.7 million from alumni, $38.3 million from non-alumni friends, $40.3 million from corporations, corporate foundations, and trade associations, $50.9 million from foundations and charitable trusts, and $3.9 million from other sources.
Donors designated expendable and endowed funds as follows: $21 million for unrestricted purposes, $76.9 million to departments, $29.4 million for faculty salaries, $11 million for graduate student aid; $23 million for undergraduate student aid; $28.2 million for building construction funds, and $12.6 million to miscellaneous other funds.
More information about giving opportunities at MIT can be found on the World Wide Web at http://web.mit.edu/giving/.
Barbara G. Stowe
YEAR TWO OF THE CAPITAL CAMPAIGN
In this second year of the silent phase of the capital campaign, the MIT Corporation approved a goal of raising $1.5 billion in private support over the course of seven years. During this time, MIT will work to raise $1 billion from individual donors, $240 million from corporations, $200—$240 million from foundations, and $60 million from other institutional donors.
During the quiet years of the campaign, the organizational and philanthropic foundation must be laid for the five-year public effort to follow. After a focus on academic priority setting, prospect and organizational assessment in year one, Resource Development and the Alumni/ae Association worked to involve MIT's most significant supporters and volunteers in building a nucleus fund equal to one-third of the campaign total or $500M in year two. Internal efforts focused on articulating the case, strengthening the prospect pool, building the volunteer structure, reevaluating gift levels for named giving opportunities, planning the November 1999 campaign kick-off and preparing the staff and the organization for the five year public phase.
At the conclusion of Fiscal Year 1999, the campaign nucleus fund stood at $549.3 million, well ahead of the goal of $500 million by November 1999. The nucleus fund includes all gifts, payments, pledges, and gifts of equipment received since July 1, 1997, as well as selected commitments made prior to this date.
Stephen A. Dare
The Office of Principal Gifts, led by Lucy Miller, is responsible for managing the earliest and largest solicitations to the nucleus fund. With the support of this office and in collaboration with the Office of Individual Giving, the President and the other senior officers closed 34 seven and eight-figure commitments from individuals or their foundations in this past year.
In addition, this office in collaboration with the Office of the Vice President, assumed responsibility for staffing the newly appointed Campaign Chairman, Raymond Stata, 57 EE; and managing the start-up and maintenance of the Campaign Steering Committee (CSC). Under the leadership of the Campaign Chairman, the CSC will provide high-level guidance on broad campaign strategy, and with the support of the Office of Individual Gifts, solicit mid to high level prospects.
The Office of Principal Gifts continued its close collaboration with the Offices of Individual Giving and Foundation Relations to facilitate closure on multiple gifts below the million-dollar level and assume future stewardship for individual donors whose lifetime commitment reaches $1 million. Correspondingly, this pool of individual living donors with lifetime giving of $1 million or more rose from 111 to 139 prospects.
Lucy V. Miller
Directed by George Ramonat, the Office of Individual Giving carries the primary responsibility during the campaign for the cultivation, solicitation and stewardship of the alumni and friends capable of major gifts. As such, activities in the past year focused on nucleus fund solicitations, donor cultivation, volunteer preparation, and operational redesign.
In all regions, events were used to reach out to new constituencies. With the support of this office, President and Mrs. Vest attended 12 consultation dinners nationwide with 340 alumni and friends to discuss campaign themes and priorities and share perspectives about this capital effort. Young alumni and alumni entrepreneurs continued to be cultivated through venues such as the Tech Breakfast Program and 50K events.
The Corporation Development Committee (CDC) continued to assist the senior officers and the staffs of Resource Development and the Alumni/ae Association in clarifying campaign themes and strategy, as well as developing a strong volunteer structure. With their guidance, the Campaign Network was formed to extend for the duration of the campaign the regional efforts of the CDC and Alumni Fund with a small body of volunteers.
Finally, the prospect management system, both within the Office of Individual Giving and between Resource Development, the Alumni/ae Association and school development efforts, was redesigned to ensure available resources are used effectively to engage as many alumni as possible in this institutional capital effort.
H. E. Ramonat
Under the interim leadership of Richard Anthony, Acting Director of Communications, and Martha Ballard, Associate Director of Donor Relations and Events, this office, known as ComDor, supports the editorial and event needs of Resource Development, and coordinates stewardship for major donors during the campaign.
Development of the written campaign case, supporting materials for specific campaign priorities and an overall graphic identity were the top priorities this past year. In collaboration with the Publishing Services Bureau and the senior officers, faculty and staff from across the Institute, Cipriani Kramer Design developed the design system for the campaign and Martha Eddison wrote the case. This effort, in conjunction with other written materials and a web presence, will provide a unified rationale and image for the campaign.
As in previous years, Spectrum, a 16-page newsletter, was published three times and distributed to 30,000 MIT donors, faculty, and staff; full-page advertisements in Technology Review continued to profile donors of life-income funds. In addition to maintaining the "Giving to MIT" web site, a monthly e-mail newsletter for members of the Corporation Development Committee and other volunteers and staff was inaugurated.
Stewardship activities included continued engagement of scholarship donors, the introduction of a similar stewardship program for donors of professorships, coordination of over 1,000 letters of appreciation from the senior officers to major donors, and the oversight and production of recognition plaques for the Institute. After extensive consultation with the Corporation Development Committee and the senior officers, the formation of a new donor recognition society for those who make gifts of $100,000 or more to the campaign is well underway.
More than 30 events were organized by the Office of Events including numerous regional cultivation events and a spring Campus Visit for alumni.
Richard P. Anthony and Martha L. Ballard
Directed by Shelley Brown, the Office of Development Research and Systems (ODRS) provides research and information systems support to Resource Development.
In preparation for the public phase of the campaign, ODRS focused on expanding the pool of individual prospects capable of gifts of $100,000 or more. Fourteen thousand alumni donors were surveyed to assess philanthropic interests and gift capacity; and electronic research tools were employed to identify new potential donors. On the corporate front ODRS updated basic information on MIT-founded companies and renewed efforts to identify alumni-associated companies going public or about to be acquired. To support the increased pace of solicitation activity, 1,000 prospect research reports were prepared, including 280 reports in support of development efforts of the senior officers.
In partnership with the Offices of Alumni Information Services and the Recording Secretary, the staff of ODRS implemented the conversion to a new alumni/donor database at the start of the fiscal year, the culmination of a multi-year, Institute-wide effort. Over 200 users throughout Resource Development, the Alumni/ae Association, and in the schools access the database, called ADONIS, with additional users granted access on a regular, as-needed basis. Additional efforts to prepare for the campaign included an upgrade of all desktop configurations in Resource Development and the development of a portfolio of campaign giving and fundraising reports.
Shelley S. Brown
Under the direction of John S. Wilson, gifts from private foundations for this fiscal year totaled more than $52 million, up 52 percent from FY98, and continued to provide significant support for MIT's educational and research programs. Major grants or pledges include support for a new bioengineering Ph.D. program; the Ray and Maria Stata Center for Computer, Information, and Intelligence Sciences; the Department of Mathematics; the Museum Art Loan Project; the W.M. Keck Foundation Neural Prosthesis Research Center; the Starr Asian Internship Program; and MISTI China.
The Office of School Development Services (OSDS) provided research support and project management for the fundraising efforts of the five schools and the Office of Academic Development. OSDS also continued to maintain and update the full series of academic profiles for each school and host an FYI series on school based programmatic initiatives for Resource Development. Special projects managed by OSDS included: planning and coordinating a cultivation event for over two hundred graduate alumni of Chemistry; coordinating and staffing the Political Science Department's second annual Washington DC Internship Reception; project management the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; providing research and other support for the development activities of the Sloan School of Management; producing over 100 research reports, including research for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland; and managing a campus visit for potential corporate sponsors for the School of Architecture and Urban Planning's House_n (House of the Future) consortium.
John S. Wilson, Jr.
Under the direction of Karl F. Koster, cash gifts from corporations to the Institute reached $40.3 million, up 33 percent from the previous year; ILP revenues were $6.9 million, up from the previous year for the first time in the last five years. The Office of Corporate Relations (OCR) supported the efforts of the faculty and senior administration in establishing two multi-million dollar corporate partnerships and one major international partnership; staffed and obtained funding for Institute and international initiatives; and identified corporate support for discrete MIT research and educational programs.
OCR continued to place strong emphasis on the development of strategic partnerships with key corporations and international institutions by supporting senior faculty and administration leaders. In FY 99 these efforts resulted in the signing of a multi-year, multi-million dollar research agreement with NTT, a multi-year, multi-million dollar research and educational partnership with Merrill Lynch, a major NASA contract involving Lockheed Martin, and the signing and implementation of the Singapore MIT Alliance agreement for $100 million.
OCR also continued to assist individual faculty and departments interested in securing more modest corporate support (in the $1 to $5 million range) for their programs. Commitments included General Motors $1.5 million relationship building grant, ABB's $1.5 million research support, support for the Ray and Maria Stata Center from Lockheed Martin, and the 3M Chair in Environmental Economics.
The development of opportunities to establish collaborative relationships between corporations and MIT consortia and faculty represented another set of accomplishments for OCR during FY 99. Over 40 percent of ILP members currently support other activities at MIT, primarily research support.
Given the importance of maintaining a broad base of corporate contacts for MIT, the ILP focused its efforts on increasing ILP membership and fee income while continuing to actively identify and facilitate member company investments at the Institute. As a result, the ILP saw 22 new companies join the membership rosters, as well as 11 other companies engage in revenue-producing activities such as multi-day on-campus visits and seminars.
OCR provided research and staff support to the President and other senior officers in the development of corporate prospects. The OCR Faculty Advisory Committee met with regularity and approved the OCR Faculty Liaison Plan.
More information about the Office of Corporate Relations/ILP can be found on the World Wide Web at http://ilp.mit.edu/.
Karl F. Koster
MIT Reports to the President 1998-99