WMU increases donors by 5 percent in the last year

By Josh Holderbaum
Western Herald

If winter is the season of giving, Western Michigan University has had an entire semester of giving.

The university has had about 5 percent more donors than last year, slowly working itself back up from the financial hit it took in the 2008-09 fiscal year.

“The last fiscal year was a rocky one for the whole world,” said Bud Bender, vice president for development and executive director of the WMU Foundation.

“There was nowhere to hide. All the fiscal investments were going down,” he said.

“The only way you were going to do okay was if you had a premonition about it and made the right decisions.”

The WMU Foundation is a private, not-for-profit organization that solicits and manages private gifts from the community, which public universities can’t normally do because of state regulations.

WMU’s loss that year wasn’t much different than many major universities.

“The Harvards, the Yales, the Michigans, everywhere that had endowments lost about a third of their value,” Bender said. “That’s about what WMU lost.”

The full amount the university takes in this year won’t be known until the fiscal year ends over the summer, but Bender said he would have a good idea of how the university is doing in March.

“The end of the year is a real ‘wait and see’ period,” Bender said.

“March gives us a better figure of how the year’s going. You don’t want to be nine months through and realize you’re doing bad because in April, June and July, it’s hot outside. People don’t really want to pick up the phone when you call about donating.”

The 5 percent increase in donors this year comes on top of a 2 percent increase at the end of last fiscal year, which ended in June 2009.

Last fiscal year also brought in around $38 million in total commitments from donors, up from about $30 million the year before, Bender said.

However, those donors are donating less money.

“If you walk into somebody’s house to talk about donating to the university and they have CNN on and they’re doing stories about the economy, you can’t ask them to donate because they’ll point to CNN and say, ‘didn’t you hear that? Are you crazy?’” Bender said.

“But endowments are coming back, portfolios are coming back. People are more willing to meet with us to talk about gifts.”

Donors who have made pledges, agreements to donate a set amount of money over a certain time period, have been keeping up on their payments and the number of differed commitments, ones the university receives only after the donor dies, have also increased, Bender said.

Other colleges seem to be doing about the same, but it’s much harder getting that sort of information out of them, Bender said.

“It’s a game of liars’ poker,” Bender said. “You play your cards pretty close to your chest. But what I’ve heard so far this year has not been inconsistent with what I heard last year. Everybody had a rough year last year. The ones who had a less rough year were just lucky or on top of their game.”

The smaller donations from an increased number of donors also shouldn’t be a problem due to the relationships the Foundation builds with donors, Bender said.

“I look at every dollar as an investment,” Bender said. “The people who are giving $25 million today probably gave $25 all along. It’s because of the relationship we form with our donors.”

Short URL: http://www.westernherald.com/?p=13156

Posted by HeraldAdmin on Dec 9 2009. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

Cody Kimball
Web Manager: I'm a Communication Student at WMU, a SCUBA Diver, Boater, Ordained Minister, Notary Public, Web Designer, Film Maker, DJ, and of course a Journalist. Born and raised in Port Huron, MI and a graduate of SC4. http://www.codykimball.com