Transcript Senate Meeting
September 17, 2013

Larry Crowley, chair: As you all collect your clickers and sign in a the back I want to go through some rules of the Senate. First I want to welcome you to the September meeting. I am Larry Crowley the chair of the Senate. A short review of the rules of the Senate. A senator and substitutes for Senators please sign the roll in the back and get a clicker so we can have a quorum call. We have a paper ballot that we will be passing out. We have 5 candidates for 4 slots, so we will be passing out the paper ballot when it comes time to vote. If you’d like to speak on an issue, go to the microphone, when recognized, state your name, indicate if you are a senator and state what unit you represent. The rules of the Senate require that senators or substitute senators be allowed to speak first, after all the comments by senators on an issue are made, guests are welcome to speak.

There are currently 88 members of the Senate, so a quorum requires 45 senators. If you will pick up a clicker, make sure it is on and register your presence by clicking A. Total 46, we have a quorum established.

The first item on the agenda is the approval of the minutes of the August meeting. Are there any corrections or additions to the minutes, they were posted online? If not then they will be declared approved and accepted.

The second item on the agenda is remarks from the president.

Dr. Gogue, president: Just a couple of items that I want to mention to you. We had our Board of Trustees meeting last week. There were 2 academic programs that were approved by the Board. Probably the largest item that occurred is that in June of each year the Board of Trustees approves what the call budget guidelines. Then during the summer the budget is actually put together and Dr. Large and a group of people came forward with that budget that will begin October 1 for the next fiscal year, and that was approved. No change in what was approved over what we had discussed at previous Senate meetings in terms of faculty raises. Permanent raises are at 2% as I recall, and also a 2% one-time type fund set up also, so about 4%.

The one item I mentioned last Board meeting that would be on the agenda was not on the agenda, that was the revisions to certain policies in the Handbook. The reason it was not on the agenda is that there is procedural guideline that the Board uses, it has to be discussed with the appropriate committee chair that was set up with the Provost and the Trustee was not able to make the meeting, so we pulled it off. It will go on the agenda in the November Board Meeting.

We dedicated two new buildings last week you may have seen write-ups about those. One was the Kinesiology Building and the other was a Research related building in the Research Park. Forgot the size of it but I know it’s Agriculture, COSAM, School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, and several different groups with multidisciplinary types of research.

The only other thing in terms of facilities, we were told last week that the osteopathic medicine group that will come (it is not an Auburn group as you know it’s a private group), they will actually break ground on that facility in late October.

The Faculty Awards Program is tonight and it is in the Arena. The Common Book Program will be in Foy on Thursday night.

And the only final thing I’d mention is a real vote of support to each of your colleges. We’ve been out over the last couple of weeks doing High School student recruitment. Atlanta, Mobile, Birmingham, Montgomery, Huntsville, a variety of different places, and they set up displays for each of the colleges and their representatives of the colleges were there to actually talk to the students in detail about the particular college and the program they may have interest in. [5:06] So we have had really good turn out for those events and pleased about the students that are considering Auburn.

I’d be happy to respond to questions. Thank you.

Larry Crowley, chair: Thank you, Dr. Gogue.

Now we will have some remarks from Dr. Tim Boosinger, the Provost.

Dr. Tim Boosinger, provost:  First I would like to thank all of you for your participation in the Strategic Planning process. I know I have talked to you about it multiple times since last fall. We started almost a year ago. Now we are moving into a very important phase and that’s the implementation phase. We have appointed a Strategic Planning Implementation Committee. We have already made some assignments of working groups that have started to work on some of the goals that are going to hang underneath our 5 Strategic Priorities, so I wanted to make you award of that. Those activities will be aligned with the appropriate committees at Auburn University, Senate and University Committees in order to make the implementation process also as inclusive as we possibly can.

One thing I wanted to draw to your attention, to implement and also monitor our process we are going to use some tools, one I want to share with you which is on the near horizon, and that’s the coach survey. Depending on our approval that survey instrument will be available in October or you will get a note from Dr. Gogue encouraging you to participate. We ask that all faculty tenured and non-tenured track faculty participate in that process. That’s in support of strategic priority 2, which is faculty vitality. That will give us the information we need to continue to implement that phase of the process. A full committee will meet within the next week to start to hear from the working groups and start to keep us on track for our 5-year plan. We are trying to continue to move forward and have made a logical process to implement the plan.

I’d be glad to answer any questions or hear any comments. Thank you very much.


Larry Crowley, chair: Thank you Dr. Boosinger. I’d like to introduce the officers of the Senate as was customary by Bill Sauser. Bill Sauser is the immediate past chair, Patricia Duffy is the chair-elect, Judy Sheppard is the secretary, Gisela Buschle-Diller is the secretary-elect, and I am Larry Crowley, chair.
We have a new member of the administration, new member of the faculty here, Kevin Coonrod. As a result of a national search he is coming on board as the ombudsman, and I would like for him to introduce himself to the senate. [8:11]

Kevin Coonrod, ombudsperson: Good afternoon. I am a former mediator and an attorney from Seattle, Washington and I have come down here to help out, and I am looking forward to doing that. As ombudsperson I am here to help you. If you have something that is bothering you at this university, come and talk to me. I might be able to help you talk things through just on your own, help you see things from a different perspective, with your permission I may speak with the other person or persons who are involved in whatever it is that is bothering you. We might discuss policies and different ways in which the policies in place might be able to help your particular situation.

As a former mediator we may end up mediating some time. I can tell you sometimes people with deep-seated problems sit down by themselves and really deal with them, groundbreaking things can happen. So I am looking forward to doing that with you here on this campus. And I also will have my ears to the ground. I am listening to all of your concerns. What things are there that you think might be able to make this university a better place for you. I will take those things and in a manner in which I will respect your confidentiality, and relay those onto the administration. So that they can get unvarnished data from me, information without an agenda that may help them make some decisions as to the betterment of this university.

I am independent, I remain neutral at all times, I don’t advocate for any particular person or side and when you come to me I maintain confidentiality about those things that you tell me other than those things that may jeopardize or threaten a risk of serious or imminent harm. So, if you’ve got a problem come and talk to me. I have no authority to do anything about it, but I might be able to help you do something about it yourself. Thanks.

Larry Crowley, chair: Thank you Kevin.

To reiterate what Dr. Boosinger said, the survey is coming out in October, a huge response rate from the faculty will provide a good sense of where we are at and hopefully some insight into the direction ahead.

In the coming months the Senate officers are going to set up meetings with the Deans and they will invite their college senators and committee members to begin a dialogue. This is something that is done in several Colleges now. The College of Agriculture invites the Senate Chair every year, Bill had the opportunity to do that last year, I just did that here last week. It is a good exchange, raises the profile of the people that are volunteering for service to the Senate and for committees. It is a good time to share perspectives from all sides, the administration as well as the faculty, and the colleges. Our first meeting with the Dean and the college senators and reps will be October 17, with the Dean from the College of Business. The Engineering Dean has confirmed a date, the Education Dean is trying to work out a date so hopefully we will be able to go throughout the university and meet for individual colleges/schools.

We have one action item, Judy is going to present the vote for the nominees to the Rules Committee.

Judy Sheppard, Secretary: Hello, hope you have all had a chance to view the profiles that the 5 candidate for these 4 vacancies on the Rules Committee provided us. At this time, I and Giseala, the secretary-elect are going to hand out these ballots, please, senators only if you will raise your hand, we will pass you a ballot and during the rest of the meeting we will be counting the ballots and we will be announcing who the new members are. We’ll start now.

Larry Crowley, chair: If you will raise your hand if you are a senator and need a ballot. We are voting for 4, you don’t have to vote for all 4 but we have 4 positions to fill. [12:43] Proxies vote.

As you complete your ballots if you will pass them to the right hand side, to stage right, we’ll be by to pick them up. Bill Sauser and Patricia Duffy will count as we go through the information items.

The first information item on the agenda is the AU Research Week. Jennifer Kerpelman and Carl Pinkert will provide the presentation.

Carl Pinkert: I am going to introduce Jennifer Kerpelman, who is chair this year on the steering committee for Research Week 2014, she is taking on that responsibility from Paula Bobrowski, who was chair for the first two years. [15:46] I am excited for what she (Jennifer) has to outline today and where some of these things are moving forward. Jennifer.

Jennifer Kerpelman, chair of Research Week 2014 Steering Committee: I think the most important thing we need to know are the dates of Research Week because they are a little different this year. They will be April 14–17, so please make note of that. To remind you, the purpose of Research Week is to raise the visibility of research and creative scholarship, both internally on campus but also externally for the community, potential funders, sponsors, and other audiences.

So this is our call to you to encourage faculty to be engaged and also to engage their students. We are encouraging them to incorporate a Research Week 2014 into their syllabi, this year it may work best for it to be thought of as an extra credit opportunity because it is occurring the week before the end of classes, but I am thinking this is a really good extra credit opportunity and a lot of students will be clamoring to get that last chance to improve their grades. [17:06] This is something that we encourage. Benefits for faculty include increasing their awareness of the research that’s occurring across the campus. There are opportunities to identify potential collaborators and opportunities potentially, especially as we grow Research Week, for funders to see the work that faculty members are doing and recognize that work. For students there are a lot of benefits as well. Even if they don’t present, just going to Research Week is a good professional development opportunity. Also if they do present, this may be one of their first times presenting their research, so it gives them a chance to practice with what I think is a friendly audience. They also have a chance to be mentored to get feedback and importantly for students they get to compete for awards. So they get recognized for their accomplishments.

Now I will preview, a still work in progress, an agenda for Research Week 2014. Our kickoff event starts on Monday night and that’s at AUM and this is an evolving agenda and already the time has changed for the kickoff at AUM. We are coordinating with the Durr Lecture and that lecture will start at 6:00 p.m. So we will have an updated schedule that will come out once we have finalized everthing.

Then on Tuesday we will will have sponsor exhibits and banner displays throughout the day and we will start with a morning poster session. The we will have our kickoff here at Auburn University with opening commentary, then we will have an alumni speaker and another featured speaker. We are coordinating with Phi Kappa Phi, we hope, we are trying to work this out because this is their centennial. So they are having events throughout the year and may want to sponsor a speaker for Research Week.

Then we will also have paper sessions in the afternoon, other featured speakers and opportunities, and also creative scholarship. Last year creative scholarship made a small debut and we had an exhibition over in the Library in a very nice setting. This year we want to increase the traffic and the engagement, so we will be having the creative scholarship at the Hotel and Conference Center along with all the other activities. In the evening, like last year we will have a film screening, that will be at the Jules Collins Smith Museum. [19:49]

For Wednesday, that looks a lot like Tuesday in some respects but there are some important differences. Last year we had widely successful research opportunities for our undergraduate students. I was impressed at how many came, really interested in what was going on and what kinds of opportunities they could have. So we are going to have an encore of that this year.

We also will have the other very successful grantsmanship workshop that focused mainly on junior faculty for a day and a half starting on Wednesday afternoon and it is so successful that we are going to expand it and probably double the size. It may include graduate students as well. Then we will have our keynote address and reception that evening.

Finally, on Thursday, we’ll continue with the grantsmanship workshop as well as other special presentations and more creative scholarship and conclude with the Research Awards Gala.
So I would like to take a minute now to recognize the hard work that went into Research Week prior to this year. We are going into our third year coming up and it’s a partnership with Auburn University at Montgomery and other regional institutions, and bring faculty and students together to share in research and creative scholarship. I would like to acknowledge the very impressive work that Paula Bobrowski did, she is the one who started the first Research Week in 2012. That was a lot of work. Then 2013 a lot more people know about it, it was more well attended and now we are at 2014.

We have had between 1,000 and 2,000 participants each year. We have undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty efforts throughout, showcased, and with each year we have featured Auburn Speaks. Is everybody familiar with Auburn Speaks? So the first year was on the Gulf Oil Spill, last year was Water, this year the theme is going to be Food. And Pat Curtis is editing that edition of Auburn Speaks.  Also AUJUS, which is the undergraduate Research Journal that we have, will also be highlighted again at Research Week.

The galas have been well attended and we have had participation from our Research Advisory Board. Let me talk a little bit about how we are organizing the presentations. As I mentioned the theme this year is food, broadly defined, so that along with the five other areas that are in Auburn’s Strategic Plan will be primary organizing themes for the research. So we don’t want it where we have Engineering over here, Psychology over there, Nutrition over here…we want there to be multidisciplinary connections across these themes. There are some other themes included, those are in blue because although the areas in the Strategic Plan cover a lot there are some other areas that people are working in that we wanted to capture. We also are going to be integrating presentations by faculty and students so they are presenting together as opposed to in separate spaces.

A little bit more about what we are doing with Research Week 2014, I already mentioned the fist one we are trying to integrate a lot more students, faculty, bringing in creative scholarship more. We are also talking about ways to promote community engagement so we are trying to think of ways to invite different constituencies within the community to see what’s happening at Auburn. So those ideas are evolving as we meet regularly as a committee.

We are inviting Tuskegee, ASU, Morehouse, Spelman, and other universities to participate and we are continuing to work on new ways of communicating so that everybody knows what is going on and also we are getting the input that we need because each year Research Week should build on what we learned from the prior year and get better and better. We are seeing Research Week as a really good recruiting tool for undergraduate students, graduate students, and students from HCBUs. An example, we have the Bridge Program that Jerrod Russell leads. He focuses on students from underrepresented groups to our undergraduates that they are trying to recruit into the graduate Kinesiology program. So he brings them to participate in part of Research Week. So we are looking at ways to do that. Then we are also always looking to increase sponsorships because with sponsorships that helps with funding our activities and allows us to continue to sustain and grow Research Week. [24:53]

Here is just a summary of activities and features that will be highlighted at Research Week 2014. I will take a minute to see if you have questions or suggestions for us at this stage. Okay if you do have other questions or suggestions that you think of at some future point feel free to let me know because as I said, we are looking to gather input as we continue to work on developing Research Week 2014. Thank you.

Larry Crowley, chair: our next presenter will be Jane Parker briefing the Senate on the successful leadership start of the campaign.

Jane Parker, VP for Development: Thanks very much Larry. And thank you all for the opportunity to come talk with you about Auburn University’s comprehensive campaign and also to talk a little bit about the Auburn University Foundation. [26:15]

I think everyone here knows that the Foundation exists, it has become clear that not everyone really understands what the function of the Auburn University Foundation is. So I want to talk for just a moment about its structure, its role, what we are primarily responsible for. The Auburn University Foundation is a separate entity from the University. It’s a separate 501C3, which was created for  the purpose of helping to advance Auburn University’s mission. So the reality is without Auburn University the Foundation would not exist, there would not be any need for it. Essentially we exist to accept charitable contributions for the benefit of Auburn University. We keep those gifts separate from state funds as you all are aware by virtue of Auburn University status as a state institution there are understandable restrictions on how we can use state resources. So there are simply some things for which we cannot expend state funds.

As a non-state entity and as a separate 501C3 the Foundation has a little bit more flexibility. Not to circumvent laws or rules or anything of that nature, but there are transactions, there are expenditures that the Foundation can engage in that are perfectly appropriate in advancing the mission of the university. So the Foundation provides mechanism through which we can support the university in ways that it cannot support itself. We also have to make sure that gifts are used consistent with donor intent, that’s a critically important component of the role of the Auburn University Foundation. We also manage the universities, the Foundation, Tigers Unlimited, and the Alumni Association Boards and endowments. We have a very active and very expert investment committee of the Foundation Board. We have several committees on the Board, Administration, Finance Committee, Directorship Committee, the Audit Committee, and Investment; and the people who serve on the Investment Committee are people who have spent their careers in business, many of them in the investment management business.

What is interesting in our structure is most Foundation Directors serve on two Foundation committees. Investment committee members serve only on one because their work is so intense and requires such a significant amount of time that it simply is not realistic for them to serve on more than one Foundation committee.[28:49] So they meet frequently, they work very closely with our investment consulting firm, Buchkholds, to ensure that the university’s various endowments are safeguarded and managed appropriately.

So as you can see the investment objective for the endowments is to ensure that we retain the purchasing power of the spending from the endowment, that we are growing it over time. The endowment lists in perpetuity, people often make their gifts to the institution with the idea that they will continue to support the activities that the donor is interested in well beyond their lifetime. So we have to make sure that we are protecting the endowment, that we are growing the endowment, that we are generating on an annual basis sufficient payout to support the activities that we want to support on behalf of the university and that we are able to continue to help ensure the fiscal health of the institution long beyond our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our donors.

We have 24 voting directors on the Foundation Board, all except one of whom are Auburn Alumni. These are people who are very much engaged with and committee to advancing the mission of Auburn University. Some of you have heard me say this more than once, but of all of the volunteer leadership boards I have worked with in 40 plus years of higher education, the Auburn University Foundation Board truly is the best I have worked with. These are people who are passionate about this institution who invest not only their time and their expertise, but their own personal resources in advancing the institution. They fully understand the rolls and responsibilities that they have and they take those very seriously. We also have 3 ex-officio non-voting members, the president of the university, the chancellor of AUM, and the president of the Auburn Alumni Association Board.

With respect to the endowment the market value as of last calendar year was a little over 488 million dollars and that resulted in a distribution of a little more than 17 million dollars to support the university’s various programs. [31:12] You can see the returns there and you also see that as of the end of July the combined market value of the endowment was almost 525 million dollars. That’s a good-sized endowment and that is really important to advancing Auburn. It is also helpful to keep in perspective, how we stack up against peer institutions. Our endowment is among the lowest in the SEC. So it’s just a reminder of how important it is to continue to grow the endowment in support of Auburn’s mission and activities. Not because we want to chase the rankings but because in order for us to sustain and in fact build on and grow the impact of this institution we need to build our endowment as well.

You can see how the endowment is distributed. Within the endowment roughly half are in funds for excellence. Those are funds that are created in order to provide the Deans and the Leadership of the university some flexibility in taking advantage of opportunities that come along. Initiatives that come along, provide some unrestricted support for the various activities and the units.

Then we have roughly 35 percent in scholarships and fellowships, direct support of students, and approximately 15 percent in chairs and professorships, direct support of faculty, which ultimately benefit our students.

The endowment is primarily in support of the academic side of the house. You can see that only 9.3 million dollars of the total endowment is for athletics, so a relatively small proportion of the endowment devoted to athletics. The reality is when people support athletics, they are supporting shorter term activities and are not building the endowment for athletics.

The spending formula from the endowment is revisited on an annual basis by the Investment Committee of the Foundation Board and ultimately approved by the entire Foundation Board. Again the spending formula is designed with an eye toward ensuring the long-term purchasing power of the endowment, growing the endowment, and ensuring that we have annual support that is available for the various programs at the university.

So you can see that there is a weighted calculation that has two components the first of which is 80 percent of the prior year payout amount, adjusted for inflation, and then 20 percent is based on the target rate, which right now is 4 percent applied to the 12 month average of the market value of the endowment.

So you can see a calculation here on a $40,000 prior year payout, how it is adjusted or multiplied by CPI, 12 month average multiplied by the target rate results in the subsequent year’s payout. Now it is important to note that when additional gifts are made to an endowment, sometimes donors think, if I add 100 thousand dollars to my endowment and add another 100 thousand dollars it is immediately going to double the payout. That’s not the case, because the additional 100 thousand dollars has to be invested for a full year before it begins to payout. [34:44]

So when we are talking with probable donors about gifts to endowment and about gifts to grow their endowment, we also talk with them about bridge gifts, because based on the timing of the investment of a gift to endowment it may take more than a year for the endowment to begin to pay out. Most donors are interested in seeing a more immediate impact of their philanthropic investment at Auburn. So depending upon the payout period we might say, “in order for you to begin to have the kind of impact that you would like to have on an “X” College/School/Unit, whatever, would you consider in addition to your 100 thousand gift to the endowment a bridge gift that will enable the unit to begin funding the scholarship, the chair, the program, whatever it happens to be immediately while your endowment begins grow and is equipped to generate payout. So we are always trying to incorporate into the conversation a variety of options for donors so that they can have the immediate impact that most of them are interested in making, while at the same time, educating them about how the endowment process works and the importance of giving the endowment sometime to grow. [36:04]

You can see here how the endowment is invested. One of the things we sometimes hear from donors and a variety of people as well, “I could invest this myself and have a higher rate of return.” But they are not investing for forever, we are investing for forever; we are investing so the endowment will be there to support the institution well beyond our lifetime, sort of into infinity and beyond.  The Investment Committee is very strategic in the decisions that it makes, based on the advise and council of time Buckholds to ensure that they are growing the endowment, protecting the endowment, but also increasing the payout available to support Auburn University’s programs.

Getting specifically into the fundraising component of what we do, you can see how our annual gifts and commitments have grown from a little over 78 million dollars or almost 79 million dollars in 2009 to 110 million dollars in 2012. This was the second fundraising year ever in Auburn’s history. This year, 2013, our goal for new gifts and commitments is $122, 875,000. We are, right now, well as of the end of August about 80 percent of the way there. So it is my hope that we will actually exceed that annual goal for this year. I am hoping that we will blow past it but not too far so that we can push some of those gifts into 2014.
The reality is that in order for us to be successful in generating a billion dollars over the course of the comprehensive campaign we are going to have to raise about 120 million dollars a year in new gifts and commitments. We are working very hard to ensure that we are achieving that.

A little bit about the campaign time line, we finished the preparation phase of the campaign at the end of December 2012. And at the end of that preparation phase we had generated about 400 million dollars in new gifts and commitments. You can see that that was our goal at that point to have raised about 300 million dollars. Now when I talk about preparation for the campaign, there are a lot of things that lead up to launching these mega campaigns, but the reality is we are constantly preparing, constantly tweeking, we’re building the plane as we fly. So we are never at the point where we say okay, we’re ready to go, we’re constantly fixing things, making things better, improving our processes, systems, strategies, data, all of those things that will enable us to be successful.

Right now we are in what we call the Leadership/Gift Phase of the comprehensive campaign. In this phase, which will last for 24 to 30 months we are focusing on soliciting those people who are closest to the institution. Auburn Trustees, Foundation Directors, University Leadership, members of the Alumni Association Board because it is really important when we go live, when we go public in the campaign and we have the big public kickoff and we say that Auburn University is launching a Billion Dollars plus or minus Campaign and we already have raised “X” dollars, please come join us, we need to be able to say all of our volunteer leadership and those people who are closest to this institution have made their commitments. It’s hard to make the case for others to support the university if those of us who are closest are not supporting it or not invested in the campaign. So it is our hope that by the time we go public, which will likely be around mid-2015, we will have raised about two-thirds of the overall goal or 700 million dollars. [40:08]

Then we’ll launch the public phase. Before we do that however, we will pause to recalibrate our goals. We will look at each unit in the university that has a campaign goal, all of the colleges and schools, all the major units and programs, Library, Museum, ODMA, ACES, you name it, every unit that has a goal in the campaign to see how they are progressing toward their goal. And what we will find at that point is that some areas are rapidly approaching their goal, it’s clear that they have additional capacity, so we will probably raise some unit goals. There will be some areas we’ll see it’s just not going to happen, it was too ambitious, there is not the philanthropic support for this we’ll need to back off a little bit. That is always the way it is. Then we will roll up those recalibrated unit goals into the overall goal and that will be our final public goal for the campaign.

So right now our working goal in the campaign is 1.09 Billion dollars, but that will likely adjust somewhat before we go public. [41:21]  There also will be a post-campaign assessment, that’s a really important part of any campaign. At that point we will say, “Where were we successful, what did we do really well, how successful were we at engaging a broader range of people in the life of Auburn University and how much did we increase our donor base in terms of number of donors how much did we increase our alumni participation rate; all of those things will go into the post-campaign assessment because the reality is we will at some point go into the next campaign and we need to know how we need to make adjustments for that.

The financial objectives in the campaign are that we generate something in the neighborhood of a billion dollars in new gifts and commitments both outright, more immediately spendable as well as endowment gifts for student support, faculty support, programs, and facilities. In a big campaign typically if you raise about 30–35 percent in new endowment gifts, you will have done very well. We’d like to generate more than that. As I mentioned earlier we really need to focus on increasing our endowment. Right now we are at about 33 percent of the overall gifts and commitments toward the endowment, which is quite good, so I am pleased with that and will continue to focus on that.

Also in a campaign you are looking at differed gifts. Those are gifts that will come to Auburn at some point in the future based on a planned gift of some sort. Typically in a campaign like this you will have roughly 25 percent of your gifts to come in, in the form of deferred gifts or planned gifts. Right now, I think we are at 24 percent deferred gifts.

Other objectives in the campaign; I mention in the post campaign assessment we are going to look at engagement. We want to expand the number of people who are authentically engaged with Auburn University. We want to build a more strategic and more comprehensive and also more personalized donor relations and stewardship programs. Stewardship is so, so important in the context of fundraising. Fundraising is not a transactional business if you do it right. It is a relational business. You identify people who might have some connection to Auburn, you identify ways in which to connect them more closely to the university, you educate them about what the philanthropic opportunities are and how they can satisfy their philanthropic passion through investing in Auburn University. And then you make really sure that you are appropriately thanking them, acknowledging them, keeping them apprised of the impact that their philanthropic support is continuing to have, has had, or is continuing to have on the university. And if you do that well, they will continue to give. Most people will not have given just one gift, they will continue to be interested in other ways. They can enhance the impact they are already having or they can have an impact on another area. It’s a cycle of giving.
Stewardship is just the right thing to do. We have a responsibility to appropriately thank our donors, steward them, steward the resources they have invested in us, but it also is a smart thing to do because it keeps people engaged in the cycle of giving.

Annual giving is a really important part of the campaign. When we talk about annual giving we’re largely talking about unrestricted annual support that comes into the institution, that is available to the Deans, to the Directors, to take advantage of opportunities, initiatives, that perhaps they don’t have other funding sources for. So by the end of the campaign, and this is really ambitious, so by the end of the campaign we would like to have increased our roughly 1.75–2 million dollars a year in unrestricted annual support to 5 million dollars a year in unrestricted annual support. So that is fairly ambitious over this time period but we’re hopeful that we can do it. [45:45]

We also want to by the end of the campaign have achieved an ongoing run rate, if you will, annual support of the institution in the form of new gifts and commitments to about 100 million dollars a year. We are doing well on that right now, we’re achieving that, we’re exceeding that, but we’re in the midst of a campaign. When we get to the end of the campaign we want to stay at about 100 million dollars a year and that will be another mark of how successful we have been in the campaign.

Another area, not in the slides, that is a non-financial goal but is really important is our alumni participation rate. I mentioned that a few moments ago in connection with the post campaign assessment. We have a wonderfully passionate alumni base. People who graduated from Auburn University by and large have a deep and abiding love for this institution. They are passionate about Auburn, but only 12 percent of them support the institution philanthropically on an annual basis. So there is a big disconnect there. Now that is not unusual in public institutions. In fact in the last few years, largely because of the recession, participation rates in Higher Education have actually been declining a little bit. Never the less, not many institutions have this level of passion, this deep and abiding love among its alumni that we have here at Auburn University. So we need to find a way to translate that passionate loyalty for Auburn into philanthropic support. We are working hard at strategies around that. We are collaborating with the Office of Alumni Affairs on how we can leverage their activities to help us increase our alumni participation rate. We definitely would like to increase that 12 percent annual participation rate to maybe something like 17 percent participation rate. That doesn’t sound like a lot but when you think about the numbers that will have to go into that over the course of the next 4 years that’s a pretty ambitious goal as well.

So here is our progress to date, you see 1.09 billion working goal. As of the end of August we were at almost 500 million in fact a week ago last Friday we surpassed 500 million. So it just feels good to have 5 and all those zeros behind it.

You can see here by the various categories of support, student support, faculty support, programmatic support, and facilities support, how we are doing in those areas, what we have raised in terms of outright gifts and pledges. And outright gifts and pledges comprised funds that are spendable, available in the near term. They might be in the form of a 5-year pledge, but they are going to be available for expenditure by the university in the relative short term.

Then you see these differed gifts that I talked about a moment ago. There are two categories of differed gifts. Differed irrevocable gifts, those are planned gifts that the donor cannot change his or her mind about. For example, they might have set up a gift annuity or a trust of some sort that perhaps provides annual income to them over the course of their lifetime, but at the end of their lives the residual comes to the institution. And that would be an irrevocable gift, they cannot change their mind about that. Those are differed irrevocable gifts.

Differed revocable gifts might something like putting the university in someone’s will, which people do all the time. When people put an institution in their will or a program or something, they are saying, you’re family. We care enough about you that we want to leave a legacy beyond our lifetime, for you, for your programs. The fact is that with differed revocable gifts, gifts about which the donor can change his or her mind, if you do a good job of stewarding those donors, that les than 2 percent will change their minds. In the last campaign we had about 2 percent of donors who did not fulfill their revocable differed gifts. So Auburn does really well in that regard and we want to continue to focus on that.

You see that about 381 million is in the form of out right gifts and pledges and you see 28.9 differed irrevocable, and 89.6 differed revocable gifts for a total of 499, that was at the end of August, we are now a little over 500 million. And you also see here that we are roughly at 33 percent endowed gifts and the combined total of the differed gifts is about 24 percent of the overall amount raised thus far.

Here you see the campaign progress to date for all of the colleges and schools in the university. You see some are progressing particularly well, others are coming along a little be more slowly, but in part the work, the timing of gifts depends upon the donors, it is about the donors, it is not about us. We work with them to help them identify how they might like to have an impact on Auburn University, ultimately when and whether they make that philanthropic investment is up to them.

Then you see here the other campus wide units, the Extension Service, Alumni Affairs has a goal in this campaign, Athletics, AUM, so forth and so on. You see on here a couple of major facilities goals as well, those are not units, but those are significant components of the campaign goal, so we include that here. I suspect you all are familiar with the conversations about the need for new classroom space. We are talking about those opportunities with many of our constituents. We also are talking about the Performing Arts Center and the positive impact it will have on the cultural life and the educational life of the institution as well as the surrounding community.

Now having said that for the Performing Arts Center it’s going to be really important that we identify a couple, maybe three big donors who will make big commitments to that project and then we can go out and say to other people, come join us in this effort and we can raise a number of smaller gifts. What we cannot do is generate a lot of smaller, and I use that term in perspective when you are talking about a 45–50–60 million dollar project, a 100 thousand dollar gift is not going to enable us to break ground. So we wouldn’t start soliciting those level of gifts unless or until we get to the point in which we have some huge gifts to get this project off the dime, so to speak.

So that’s a pretty quick overview of what is going on in the Office of Development and the Auburn University Foundation will be glad to address any questions you might have.

I’ve either done a really good job of an overview or I have bored you to death. Thank you.

Larry Crowley, chair: Judy would you come provide the election results.

Judy Sheppard: secretary: The good news is, everybody likes everybody, so the votes were really close. Are new Rules Committee members are: Vicky van Santen, Mark Taylor, David King, and Lisa Kensler.

Larry Crowley, chair: Any other new business? Any unfinished business? Be adjourned. [54:30]