Department and college-level campaigns

A department wanting to raise ten thousand dollars for a teaching lab is doing something reasonable and something that touches four other people's remit. The campaign works when those four are asked first and stalls when they are asked afterwards.

The four conversations

• Advancement — approval, alumni access, gift acceptance, and whether anyone else is soliciting these people
• Your dean or chair — whether the unit may fundraise and who signs
• Finance or the business office — which account receives, whether it can be restricted to the purpose, and what happens to a surplus
• Licensing — if anything branded is being made

One meeting each, before the plan is fixed. All four are faster in September than in the week before a launch.

Do not compete with the annual fund

The annual fund's message is unrestricted support for the institution. A departmental auction asking the same alumni for restricted support in the same term is a message conflict, and advancement will treat it as one.

Two ways round it that usually work. Ask for a segment the annual fund is not actively working — recent graduates of your programme, or parents rather than alumni. Or time it to a moment the annual fund is not in market, which advancement can tell you in a sentence.

Restricted funds have rules

If you raise for a named purpose, the money is generally restricted to it. That is an advantage — donors like specificity — and it carries obligations: you have to spend it on the thing, you have to be able to show that you did, and a surplus cannot simply be moved to something else.

Decide the surplus question before the auction opens, agree it with the business office, and say it on the auction page. "Anything beyond the target goes to the department's student travel fund" is a sentence that takes thirty seconds to write and prevents a genuinely awkward reconciliation.

What departments raise for well

• One named scholarship or bursary, for one student, for one year
• Teaching equipment the capital budget will not reach
• Conference travel for graduate students
• A visiting speaker or artist in residence
• Accessibility improvements to a specific space
• Field trip or fieldwork costs for a cohort

All of these are small, specific, visible and outside the institution's core budget — which is exactly the profile an auction funds well and the annual fund does not target.

Report it up as well as out

Tell advancement what you raised, from whom in aggregate, and what it funded. It is courteous and it is also self-interested: a department that reports back is a department advancement will help next time, and the alumni who bid have now appeared in the institution's picture of who is engaged.

Setting the number: how much can a campus unit raise. Where items come from: getting items donated.