Big Brother Is Watching UVA Alumni

Robert Sweeney, vice president for development and public affairs at the University of Virginia, is on a mission to raise $3 billion for UVA between 2004 and 2011. That's a pretty penny. In fact, this was the largest fundraising drive ever launched by a public university.

I can certainly see the need for it. State support for UVA has dwindled to a pathetic 9% of the university's budget. At some point, you have to wonder what the difference is between a public school and a private one. Sweeney wants UVA to continue providing affordable education, yet also be able to raise the large sums of money that private schools can. That sounds quite noble, doesn't it?

However, let's look at the means used to reach these ends. The way they plan to raise $3 billion is not by getting relatively small amounts from many, many people. There just aren't enough alumni out there for that strategy to work. They want to target the people who are going to make the large gifts. Sweeney estimates that half of the $3 billion will come from only about 100 people, and earlier this year, the university received a single gift of $100 million. How do they zero in on the people who are willing and able to make such large donations?

Sweeney was kind enough to share some details about the process by which fundraisers comb alumni to find where the money is. While nothing described here is even remotely illegal, it should be alarming to anyone who values their privacy.

Starting with records of 180,000 alumni, they use demographic software to see who's living in neighborhoods with high incomes and flashy cars. They look up stock and real estate holdings to see who might be a good prospect for giving. Then a traveling development officer might ask for "road warrior sheets," which are intel reports on the top alumni targets in a city, and then ask the locals about them. This detective work is where it gets interesting. Let's hear about a typical gold digging scenario from Sweeney:

"He's an alum. Let's go back, look at his giving record. He's given $125 a year. Has not come back to reunions. He was a member of the university guides and lived on the Lawn. Wow! Then do demographic data—let's look at stock holdings. Does he show up in investment data? Then look up his company. He works for Blue Ridge Capital. Oh, my God! Blue Ridge Capital are venture capitalists. Then we'll go and Google Blue Ridge Capital. Lo and behold, they've been involved in X number of ventures, taken three of them public...now worth $850 million! Some of these are private. Can we figure out what so-and-so might have gotten out of that? We might talk to others in investment banking or hedge funds or venture capital, alums now involved with us. 'Do you know so-and-so?' Someone will say 'I'm betting they're worth $250 million.'"

Wow! Their efforts paid off! I'm glad to see they struck gold after going to all this trouble to track down someone who didn't step forward to make a large donation on their own. But now we have someone with $250 million who's giving $125 a year. Why the discrepancy? Sweeney says "either we've done a lousy job of communicating with them, or they're not interested." I'm sure it's the lousy communication job. The letters the fundraisers send out every year must not have made it clear that $125 is a very small percentage of $250 million, and they want more.

So when a situation like this presents itself, how do the fundraisers improve their communication to make it clear that they want the rich guy to give them more money? Get this—they don't ask for money at all. Is this reverse psychology? No, they do eventually ask for money. But first they ask how the alum feels about the university, and maybe invite them to a gathering in Martha's Vineyard to talk about UVA's future. Don't you think they see a sucker punch coming?

I'm all for UVA raising its $3 billion and remaining the Harvard of the South, but these tactics make telemarketers look like angels. And word has it that other public schools such as the University of Maryland are taking lessons from them. Mr. Sweeney, I implore you to take it down a notch. Call off your road warrior goons and trust the alumni to do what's right. Mr. Jefferson would have wanted it that way.