Effort weathers ups and downs with consistent progress

It began with a two-year "quiet phase" and Thursday it was still inconspicuous as the fifth story listed on the Duke News Service's website.

But since fundraising officials first planted the seeds of The Campaign for Duke seven years ago, the effort to raise $2 billion has become a top priority in every corner of the University and the fuel to the fire of Duke's most ambitious plans and initiatives.

Indeed, the journey from the early days in 1996 to Thursday's announcement that the campaign had reached its target has been a prominent, smooth and relatively swift one. Building a strong individual donor base with no single gift of more than $35 million and over 225,000 pledges in total, University officials have tapped donors' resources on a previously unfathomable scale.

The campaign started silently during the third year of President Nan Keohane's tenure, as development officials began asking Trustees and other top donors to help form the foundation of a prospective seven-year campaign as called for in the University's long-term plan.

By October 3, 1998, when the campaign finally went public with a gala event in Cameron Indoor Stadium, over $684 million had been raised.

"I think we all can have a great time celebrating Duke over the next five years of the campaign," Keohane wrote in a Chronicle column a few weeks later. "While we do that, we shouldn't focus just on the campaign, or the ambitious dollar goal; we should think about our purposes, stressing all that it will accomplish, so that we can do even better in teaching, in research and in service to society."

Reaching that ambitious dollar goal quickly became an issue not of if but when it would happen, and perhaps more important, whether the target was too low.

Buoyed by a humming economy riding the dot.com wave, the then-$1.5 billion campaign surpassed the $800 million mark by late February 1999 and helped pull in a record $330.9 million in donations over the 1999 fiscal year, a 30 percent increase over the previous record.

The University raised nearly $408 million during the 2000 fiscal year, catapulting it to just $200 million shy of the $1.5 billion goal.

In early December 2000, the Board of Trustees decided that what had long been seen as inevitable-a raising of the goal from $1.5 billion to $2 billion-was necessary if the University was to pay for the hundreds of proposed initiatives in its long-range strategic plan.

Several weeks later, the Pratt School of Engineering received a $25 million gift for photonics research from Duke alumni Michael and Patty Fitzpatrick, putting the school more than 250 percent past its original $50 million goal. The target was raised to $170 million, and two years later was one of two divisions to reach their ultimate goals almost 18 months before the final deadline.

But as the campaign's targets were raised, the economy went in the other direction. Duke's fundraising brought in only $294 million for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2001, and a recession and the Sept. 11 attacks further curtailed donations during the fall 2001 semester. In Dec. 2001 and early 2002, however, contributions steadily increased, putting the campaign back on track.

"The weight of growth of the campaign slowed a bit starting with calendar [year] '01-not much, but a little... and that was probably due to the economy," Peter Vaughn, director of communications and donor relations for the Office of University Development, said Thursday.

By July 2002, Pratt and the School of Law had reached their goals, and ever since, campaign officials have been trying to fill "buckets."

"It's clear in our mind that $2 billion was a target, and that nothing is going to stop at that point," Vaughn noted. "We all understand that it isn't over and we need to continue to raise funds for Duke in those areas that need them most."

Indeed, no major University-wide celebrations are planned until February 2004, when all the pledges have been tallied. After that, the University will continue to fundraise as per the nature of higher education, and could even initiate another campaign within five or six years, Vaughn said, although adding that there are no plans currently on the table.

If such a campaign becomes a reality-and with the strategic and master plans works-in-progress, the chances are likely-Vaughn said the University has learned an important lesson with the current campaign: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

"Duke has worked together very well in this campaign," he said. "We've shared information and prospects; we've communicated with donors jointly and I think we've found there was great strength in unity."