Chapter 1: Baby steps: getting started.

When I applied for the position of Dean of the Honors College at my university in 1993, I noted with a tremor the expectations of fundraising (anathema!) spelled out in the job description. Perhaps I thought that if I performed all of the other duties well--including overseeing the university's general education program--no one would notice that I was postponing thinking about fundraising until the indefinite and preferably distant future. I was an experienced honors faculty member, knew the students and staff, and was assured by colleagues that I could handle, despite being untested at the time, the management tasks of an administrative post. Going out to raise money, however, was a totally alien concept. when I finally did begin to have modest success at raising money, it first came as an unintended consequence of other activities. Hence one of the first lessons of this book: Starting small is OKAY.

My discomfort with fundraising is echoed by the results of an informal survey I conducted in fall 2007 among honors administrators, using the NCHC listserve. (For the original questionnaire, see Appendix B.) Of the several hundred subscribers, 60 responded to the survey. A number of respondents were experienced and comfortable with fundraising, and perhaps they were the ones most likely to respond. Many, however, expressed little experience with fundraising and even less comfort at the thought. Of the respondents, 65% reported fundraising as 5% or less of their honors work, with 28% at zero. (Only 62% were full-time administrators.) At the same time, 40% said that fundraising was part of their job description, and 42% said that fundraising was increasingly an expectation from the upper administration. About 65% of the respondents reported some help in fundraising from the development office, but 17% reported no help of any kind.

Regarding comfort level, the majority of respondents reported feeling comfortable with sending thank-you letters for donations, "talking up" their programs, and working with their institution's central development office. when it came to holding fundraising receptions, meeting potential donors alone, and involving students in meeting donors or potential donors, the comfort level diminished. Respondents were least comfortable with telephoning potential donors, involving honors faculty in fundraising, soliciting donations from parents, and asking a potential donor for a gift of a specific amount.

In the spirit of camaraderie and support that characterizes the NCHC conferences and listserve, the survey respondents offered positive encouragement to the beginner: "Do it, regardless of how uncomfortable it makes you," 'Just get started," "At least bring it up ... give it a shot," "Patience," "Get help," "Keep plugging away." I sorely needed these assurances in 1993!

Barriers to Honors Fundraising Success

If those assurances sound facile, if stories of unexpected endowment gifts stretch credulity, if fear and distaste have become habitual and convenient, the time has come for honors directors to confront some of the other obstacles that may stand in the way before moving toward concrete methods of becoming engaged. If testing the fundraising waters remains daunting, there may be some good reasons, not just fear and inexperience. It is not entirely a matter of attitude.

When I asked survey respondents to state the greatest barrier to honors fundraising success, the conditions they cited ranged widely from the individuals themselves, or the nature of their position, to the institution. some respondents referred to qualities in themselves such as timidity, inexperience, or discomfort. others noted a failure to tailor their request to the interests of a potential donor, their own lack of initiative in establishing a relationship with the development office, or sheer unwillingness to deal with that aspect of university functioning when there are professionals with that responsibility. More respondents, however, referred to limitations inherent in their job duties: lack of time because of their ongoing projects, lack of staff to help organize the effort, or the absence or the low priority of fundraising in their job description. A few cited lack of sufficient alumni, predominance of young alumni without giving capacity, or alumni defined more by their college or department affiliation than by their membership in honors.

Most survey respondents, however, located the barriers to honors fundraising in their institutions. Almost a quarter of them said that their institution discouraged their involvement in fundraising for honors. several noted that their development office requires all funds raised to go into a general budget, selects only a few university-wide projects for fundraising, or makes everyone responsible for honors fundraising with the result that no one takes responsibility. A further problem is simply securing the attention of the administration and the development office, either of which may (a) dictate the direction of fundraising without consultation with honors; (b) show stubbornness in understanding how honors works, including the perception that higher-ability students do not need financial aid; or (c) assign constituent development officers to disciplinary colleges but let honors slip through the cracks. some respondents cited lack of fundraising coordination in general and excessive bureaucratization of fundraising. A number of respondents found that institutional structure itself was an obstacle: "All Honors College alums are also alums of some other unit in the University." Thus several mentioned that competition with other areas on campus and especially with college deans made fundraising for honors challenging.

This litany of the obstacles honors leaders face in raising money for their programs, along with their central and time-consuming concerns in directing effective academic programs, explains why they often accomplish little in the way of fundraising. Before shifting the mood in this handbook toward positive advice, we must pause for an oft-expressed caveat: The institutional issues just cited remind us that institutional context and culture, and honors programs themselves, are stunningly diverse.

Institutional Context

Honors programs and their institutions vary widely. Although honors programs share an educational mission dedicated to students of high ability and motivation, they range from 20 to over 5,000 students in population, from program to college in status, from 1 year to 80 years of existence. They serve a variety of student populations and have varying admission criteria. some survive on a shoestring budget and a volunteer faculty director, while others enjoy a multi-million-dollar endowment in a state-of-the-art facility under a full-time dean and its own faculty. some programs report to a dean and others to a provost or other administrator. Some have no courses of their own, others a highly structured curriculum and even degree-granting authority. some focus exclusively on honors students, while others administer university-wide programs such as fellowship or event coordination. such diversity has made many members of NCHC reluctant to mandate standards or benchmark characteristics.

Similarly, at the risk of stating the obvious, institutions housing honors programs range from two-year colleges to research universities. They may be public or private, secular or religious, small or huge. They may do little for fundraising or engage only the president in this activity, or they may have a large central or decentralized development office headed by a vice president. They may never have engaged in a capital campaign, or they may be on their sixth such campaign and have a well-researched database of donor prospects. They may or may not place heavy expectations on their academic leaders to raise money. Their structures and processes for fundraising vary widely and change over time. Relations between development and honors range from intimate to hostile, depending on the institution. Private institutions have generally practiced fundraising for a longer time, with more investment of resources and with more success; they depend on philanthropy for a significant percentage of their operating budgets. Many public institutions started serious development work only as state support dwindled.

Frequent turnover characterizes both development personnel and honors administrators, further challenging continuity and consistency in fundraising efforts. The perspectives of professional fundraisers and honors academics may be at odds, and their respective roles in fundraising not always clearly enunciated. Honors leaders themselves, as noted in my survey results, have widely varying experience in fundraising, including, for many, no experience whatsoever. For some the concept of donor support is either an alien idea or a seemingly unattainable dream. yet in some cases honors is allocated a dedicated development officer, secretarial support, and expense reimbursement, and the honors director or dean may be spending a third or more of her or his time seeking donor financial support alongside the development officer. such collaborations include strategic planning, writing case statements for support, calling and meeting with prospects, organizing events, keeping current donors happy and well-informed, and issuing publicity statements--all resulting in a steady stream of donations and some occasional endowment gifts.

Because of this teeming diversity of honors programs, their institutions, and their leaders' experience, a fundraising handbook must offer a variety of methods and examples. Although all of my own academic experience has occurred at public research universities, I hope that what I offer here will also resonate with honors leaders at two-year colleges and liberal arts colleges, with or without religious affiliations, and with both neophytes and veterans. Colleagues from a variety of institutions have generously shared their knowledge and examples of the fundraising adventure and misadventure. some methods may not work at all in some institutional contexts. on the other hand, some ideas or stories here may inspire readers to instigate change in their institution's standard practices. Regardless of each honors program's context, history, and size, raising donor support is not only desirable but possible.

Moreover, fundraising for honors and for higher education in general possesses a new urgency, and not just because of difficult economic times. For several decades the funding support for higher education, particularly for state institutions, has been eroding. state-supported institutions have become state-assisted institutions, and some barely that. How can an institution cope with a dramatic shrinkage of state support over 20 years, in one example, from 85% of the cost of education to 23%? students and their families compensate by paying ever higher tuition. Institutions pursue private dollars with increasing fervor. The result is that fundraising has become everyone's direct or indirect concern, and honors directors now share this pressure with other academic leaders. This increasingly shared responsibility unites all of us in higher education and in honors circles, despite the diversity of our programs and institutions. Honors leaders inexperienced at securing private donations need to begin thinking seriously about what fundraising specifically for honors could do for their programs and how they can go about it.

Filthy Lucre: How Can Honors Use It?

No, I am not joking. Amazingly enough, some honors programs are well funded by their institutions. Many small programs are poorly funded, but their often part-time directors have neither the responsibility nor the time for fundraising. In both cases, honors administrators may not be able to imagine how donor money could be spent. scholarships may be covered centrally. No staff members are available to initiate a special project to enhance student learning. salaries are already accounted for in the budget. students seem content with what they have and are not complaining.

Although directors may be so consumed with running the existing program that they have little time for imagining new projects, a good case for doing more can always be made, and someone out there may be interested in financing it. To quote Bob Spurrier, one of our wise national honors leaders, "Always have a wish list!" Does the honors program have an annual event honoring graduating seniors? What if it could be a more splendid ceremony if the expense were underwritten by a local business? Do only a limited number of students attend research conferences or honors conferences? what if an alum paid the registration or lodging costs for them so that more could attend? Do students have expenses associated with completing a thesis? what if a local civic organization reimbursed those costs in exchange for having the student present the research at a meeting? Are students rejecting study abroad because it means additional debt? what if an alum who participated in such a program offered enough scholarship support to get that student to Leipzig or Capetown or Tokyo?

Even such small gifts can change lives. But large donations can transform the landscape on a grand scale. Could honors have a scholarship program of its own, in addition to what students receive through university aid? An endowed fund would provide freshman renewable scholarships in perpetuity and could be named for the donor. An endowed artist-lecture series could enrich the intellectual experience of students and faculty. With an adequate gift, the honors program could offer incoming students a first-class orientation retreat as an introduction to the intellectual community. An endowed professorship could provide an additional stipend to a highly regarded but hard-to-obtain faculty member for a special-topics honors course. Facilities always seem inadequate. The right donor might offer funding to remodel or even to construct a new honors center, or at least to go halves with the institution for its funding.

Those less experienced at fundraising do not have to think only in terms of major gifts. Certainly such gifts can make the biggest difference: development professionals realize that at least 90% of the funds donated come from 10% of the donors. Later in this handbook we can focus more on those large gifts, as well as engage the debate over how fundraising effort should best be spent, but for now we will concentrate on some small, easy, and even obvious ways to generate donor funds. Despite the power of major gifts, directors should never marginalize small donors. Small gifts can become larger gifts over time, and the honors program will benefit from the long-term relationship with a satisfied but initially small donor. Where is an obvious place to start small? Directors themselves should become donors to their programs. How can they ask others to give if they have not given? And how better for directors to feel the donor's point of view and motivation? But the next obvious place for directors to start is with their own students, of course, as alumni.

Building an Alumni Donor Base

Staying in touch with honors alumni keeps them engaged with the program and establishes an excellent base of potential donors who have benefited from being in honors and who may feel affection for and loyalty to the program. * This perception was one of the lessons of unintended consequences I learned early on as a dean. By reviving an alumni newsletter and establishing an alumni council, I soon discovered that the number of honors donors greatly increased. Their donations were usually small gifts of $25 or $50, but most donors repeated their gifts, and some later contributed much larger amounts. strong alumni relations are rewarding in themselves, and fundraising does not always have to be the ulterior motive in conducting them. But they will lead naturally to future financial support.

Having a well-established program with alumni now in mid or late career with prime capacity for giving is a stroke of luck. My own program began in 1933 and became a college in 1965, and I have had regular contact with our alumni, including some donors from the 1930s. Even if a program is too small or too recently established to have much of an alumni body, alumni of any age may have a stronger emotional connection to honors than in a large program because of the close sense of community they experienced. This connectedness is an advantage to exploit. If a program is only 10 years old, and many of its alumni are still in graduate school, are establishing families, or are paying off college loans, the strategy should be to keep them informed about the program, ask them for career updates, and even ask them for small donations to help the next generation of honors students and to begin a habit of philanthropy. If the honors program is housed in a two-year institution and the alumni are now working or have moved on to four-year institutions and graduated, they are still alumni. They may have spent well more than two years getting their associate's degree and feel more connected to the honors program that nurtured them in their formative college years than to the honors program from which they graduated with a bachelor's degree. Some of my honors students came from the two-year honors programs at our regional campuses, and I was well aware that many of them had formed lasting attachments there that we did not supersede. For fundraising purposes, the concept of alumni may include not just those who completed all honors requirements and graduated with an honors designation but also those who perhaps withdrew or transferred after three years in the program.

A good system of record-keeping is a necessity for efficient alumni relations and for fundraising among alumni. For example, programs that maintain an advising folder for each student should continue to maintain it after the student transfers or graduates. when I became dean, I found in a storeroom a box of such folders for each graduation year going back four decades. Because year of graduation was far less useful than name as a key for information retrieval, I organized in cheap used filing cabinets one alphabetical file of folders for all alumni. To each file we readily added any alumni updates and survey responses, news items, and continuing correspondence, including thank-yous for donations. These folders have become a treasure of information as my development officer and I have prepared to meet potential donors. Directors can store old files electronically by scanning new documents and adding them to the alumni e-folders. In any case, directors should abide by their institution's guidelines about secure storage of student information.

An early step in establishing organized alumni relations within honors is discovering who else is keeping track of honors alumni. How active and efficient is the institution's alumni office? Does it produce an alumni magazine and have a web presence? Does it sponsor programs that connect current students to alumni and bring alumni back to campus? Does it have a reliable database with up-to-date contact information? Are honors alums coded or marked as such in the database? whose responsibility is it to code them as honors graduates? How aware of honors is the alumni office? Have honors alums been members or chairs of the alumni association national board of directors, as ours have? Are other colleges or departments at the institution also tracking their alumni, some of whom would have participated in honors?

Ascertaining the answers to these questions will likely require initiative. Even if the registrar codes student records to show honors status, certification of honors completion by the honors program may be necessary. such coding must also distinguish honors graduates from those with Latin honors. Directors may have to argue that an honors alumni organization deserves support alongside the overlapping disciplinary alumni councils or regional alumni chapters. Directors may want to offer story ideas or specific alumni accomplishments for the alumni magazine to feature. Directors may find that they are catching up to other units on campus, but at least they will benefit from established procedures already in place. on the other hand, if not much is happening in alumni relations, honors directors can be leaders on this frontier, which is part of the role for honors at any institution. Directors might add to their budget wish list some funds to produce an annual newsletter. Asserting the identity of honors and of honors culture in our institutions, including in alumni relations, is critically important. Many honors alumni, after all, feel a stronger connection to their honors home than to their department or college home.

Although many academics think of alumni only as graduates, many institutions, especially the prestigious private universities and liberal arts colleges, start talking to their current students, and not just their graduating seniors, about their future role as alumni. Certainly many of us express at our ceremonies for seniors the hope that they will stay in touch and give back, but institutions with a strong sense of identity cultivate an alumni attitude in their incoming students. Letters of acceptance, orientation programs, and opening ceremonies provide occasions for encouraging new students to envision successful completion of their degree and a role of lifetime connection to the alma mater. So even at the beginning of thinking about alumni relations, the target audience should be broad.

The initial actions to develop alumni relations and the ensuing fundraising activity are fairly easy. Directors should communicate well with alumni, plan events that engage them, develop an organization at some point, and solicit their donations.

Communications

Once honors programs have established a mailing list for their alumni, they rely on a newsletter, typically an annual one, to stay in touch. This newsletter can be effective not only in touting the accomplishments of students and of the program itself, but also in securing updated contact information. My alumni responded warmly to our newsletter, especially after a newsletter hiatus of some years, because they felt that we cared about keeping in touch and learning about their career progress. As mentioned earlier, we immediately experienced a surge in the number of small donations even without having asked. The two most important ingredients in a newsletter are, of course, news about the program, but also a tear-off reply form that provides information about the alum.

An annual newsletter can

* review major events of the past year,

* give statistics, such as the size of the incoming class or the average grade point average of graduating seniors,

* offer a greeting or column from the director or dean,

* profile a new faculty or staff member,

* spotlight an interesting alum,

* and tell stories of special student achievements such as unusual leadership, conference presentations, service projects, prizes, or prestigious graduate fellowships such as the Truman or the Goldwater.

In this communication, as in all others that have an impact on fundraising, a shrewd strategy is to talk about the quality of the program rather than to dwell on its need for support. A general principle of educational fundraising that will recur throughout this handbook is that donors respond more readily to quality than to need, to positive accomplishment than to negative wishfulness. sometimes a special newsletter can focus on a new initiative, a new facility, or a special event such as a key anniversary.

Both special-purpose and general newsletters should always include the tear-off reply form. Every communication should provide an opportunity to update alumni records and find alumni who will take an interest in the current program. The form should include home and work addresses and telephone numbers (including cell), preferred email address, job title, additional education after leaving the honors program, and check-off boxes or blanks indicating potential interest in (a) returning to campus to talk to current honors students, whether about practical career advice or about specialized knowledge (e.g., a lecture on the bioethics of stem-cell research), (b) offering "shadowing" opportunities or internships, or (c) joining or working with the honors alumni organization. (see a sample form in Appendix C.) Enclosing the pre-paid addressed return envelope typical of most mail solicitations for donations is unnecessary because alumni will usually not mind putting the form in an envelope and paying for the postage. Honors alumni usually do well in life and are proud to share their career progress. when these forms arrive, directors should respond promptly to any show of interest, or the alumni will believe that the attempts to establish connections lack sincerity.

Aside from news, the newsletter should (a) remind alumni of how to contact the honors program and view its website, (b) emphasize the value of the reply form, and (c) briefly instruct alumni on how to make a donation to a general fund or scholarship fund--whatever unrestricted account is most useful on an ongoing basis. obviously the newsletter must be attractive, readable, impeccably proofread, and fun. A student or the institution's communications office should design an appropriate masthead. If affordable, photographs or student art will enhance the publication. Engaging students to write stories is good training for them and is welcomed by alumni, who probably valued the program in the first place partly for such opportunities to be involved. Depending on the complexity of the newsletter, the lead time must be ample. Directors should determine if a fall kick-off issue will work best, or whether an academic-year-end issue seems more suitable. The goal is to reach readers when they may have more leisure to read it and then to be consistent in mailing it at that same time each year.

Funding for such an annual newsletter need not be an insuperable obstacle, depending on the honors budget, current postage rates, the size of the audience, and the size and quality of the newsletter itself. The very least financial investment could allow for simply photocopying a black-and-white, two-sided sheet, either 8-/2 x 11 or 11 x 14, stuffing envelopes, and sending them bulk mail, which will require more lead time. Even if such a minimal effort could occur only once every two years, the point is to get started. A more substantial newsletter might involve a commercial printer, blue ink, and folding and addressing without need of an envelope. At the high end of the spectrum, some programs produce glossy 20-30-page newsmagazines in color with plentiful photographs of students, faculty, and alumni. Honors deans and directors often send these, as well as more modest versions, not only to alumni but also to donors and university or college administrators. Directors should know the cultural values of the program and the institution: Will a modest newsletter look frugal and sensible, or will it look cheap, as if the institution does not care about the program and the program does not care about its alumni? will a glitzy newsletter convey the program's quality and professionalism, or will it give the impression that the program either has too much money already or spends it on the wrong things?

An additional or alternative alumni communication medium is an electronic newsletter, or e-letter. The major advantage of e-letters is cost--they are free except for the time for composing. The major challenge of e-letters is maintaining a reliable and up-to-date list of e-mail addresses. Many alumni will also not want yet another e-mail message cluttering their mailboxes, especially if unsolicited. some may recycle a paper newsletter without looking at it, but many still like the convenience and care that comes with traditional mail. what will work best may come only after consulting others on campus or trying both. A related medium much discussed by audience members at a recent NCHC conference session is Facebook. Whether this tool can effectively reach all alumni, who have to become members, or whether it could serve as a supplementary means of communication, remains to be seen.

A second, increasingly popular way to communicate with alumni is through the program website. The first step is to ensure that the website has a separate alumni page and that "alumni" is a prominent tab or menu item among other constituent subjects such as "prospective students" or "faculty." As with all web pages, attractiveness of design and ease of navigability are critical. The alumni web page or pages can offer

* greetings from the director or dean;

* links to news stories about the program and its faculty and students;

* description of the alumni organization (if one exists) and a list of members and officers identified by year of graduation;

* calendar of events for the program (with an open invitation) and of events designed specifically for honors alumni;

* accounts of events, with photographs, such as a homecoming gathering or a recent appearance on campus by an alum;

* announcements of alumni award winners, with photos and profiles, and a nomination form;

* encouragements to become involved with the current program; and

* information about ongoing funds or special fundraising projects and how to make a donation, perhaps including a link to the institution's foundation or development site for on-line credit-card donations.

At the very least a copy of the mailed newsletter should appear on the website as well. A more sophisticated and interactive alumni site might offer a blog or a message board where alumni can post queries.

A periodic survey of alumni is yet another way to maintain contact, find out what alumni valued in their honors experience, and generate interest that could eventually motivate donations. The first alumni survey requires much thought, and perhaps advice from social science faculty as well, because being able to use the same survey again will enable longitudinal comparisons. The survey should elicit both quantifiable responses and open comments, as in teaching evaluations and other assessment instruments. Alumni will generally respond well without the need for anonymity. After the analysis and report of the results, each individual response can go to that alum's folder. Attitudes of alumni toward the program will provide clues about who might be likely prospects for fundraising.

Finally, one-on-one correspondence with alumni can cement relationships and abet fundraising efforts. Directors should show a personal interest in the success of alumni, all the more so if they had a personal relationship with the alumni when they were students, by congratulating them on their accomplishments with a short note or e-mail. My initial interest in several alumni has led to being placed on their e-mail message list; i now receive news of their latest performance, exhibit, degree, job opportunity, or international travel. i always respond personally to these announcements. Faculty, especially thesis advisors, can also help keep track of alumni and stay in contact with them personally.

Using these various forms of communication may very well place honors ahead of the disciplinary departments and colleges. The latter do not often have the time for the personal touch--typical of honors--that treats both current students and alumni as individuals. Thus one of the barriers to fundraising many honors deans and directors have cited-competition with other academic units for overlapping alumni as potential donors--may begin to fall. Now, or in fact simultaneously with communication efforts, the director can invite alumni to honors events and plan special occasions for them.

Events

What are some of the obvious choices for events that honors alumni, particularly those within reasonable driving distance, might be interested in attending? One such event is the major annual honors ceremony, usually held to recognize graduating seniors, to present awards, or to showcase thesis research. Freshman orientations or study abroad information meetings are other likely events. we recently added a music recital and an art show. The alumni newsletter and web page can notify alums of the year's calendar of events. If an alumni organization already exists, its members should take a special interest in attending honors events. seeing proud students and program quality in person cements alumni relations and inspires alumni toward greater involvement, through time or donations.

Mere attendance, however, is only a minimal goal. if the recognition ceremony includes a meal, directors should ask alumni and faculty as well to sponsor a student's meal. This small contribution can defray expenses, assuming that the honors budget would normally cover the honored student's meal, if not those of their guests. I have known alumni to sponsor up to three students in this way. The program of a major ceremony can include a segment for honoring one or more alumni with an award for their career achievement or for their service to the program. An alum could also be the keynote speaker for the occasion or say a few words at the very least, welcoming seniors to the ranks of proud graduates and encouraging them to stay in touch and give back to the program. For this latter role the president or chair of the honors alumni organization would be particularly appropriate.

Alumni can be engaged during other occasions as well. if honors requires a summer reading assignment for incoming students and breaks them into discussion groups at orientation, directors could invite an alum or two to participate as leaders or discussants, especially if their career expertise touches on the subject of the reading. A research forum will impress alumni with the quality of student work and will perhaps motivate them to become financial supporters of future student research, whether for scholarships, expenses incurred in the work (especially for the arts), or conference travel. A scholar-alum could also speak at a research day. one small honors program invites alumni to judge senior project presentations for prizes. we invited appropriate alumni to be judges in awarding prizes for our art show.

Student service activities such as Relay for Life, housing or ecosystem rehabilitation, or tutoring are other opportunities to engage alumni. Alumni could perform alongside students in a musical showcase or poetry reading, including a marathon recitation of, for example, Homer's Odyssey, as in some honors programs. Less ceremonial events to which alumni can make a strong contribution are meetings for majors or clusters of majors, such as English or other humanities majors ('What can you do with a liberal arts degree?"), pre-medicine majors, or professional majors such as journalism or business. students respond with considerable interest to an alum or a panel of alumni experienced in the field who can give them sound advice as they prepare to launch their careers. i have seen them flock around such guests at the conclusion of a presentation, bubbling with questions. such experiences are good for the students, of course, but they are also gratifying to the alumni and encourage continuing connectedness to the program. Any event at which alumni can talk with current students is desirable.

More focused efforts are special events planned primarily for alumni. in the beginning stages of alumni relations a common approach is to hold an event for honors alumni in conjunction with the institution's homecoming celebration. This could be a special booth in the alumni association's tent, a lunch between parade and football game, a tailgate party, or a reception at the honors facility before the game. our own alumni chapter took root at a homecoming ice cream social with students and at the next year's follow-up gathering in our center the morning of homecoming to see who would be interested in starting an organization. other on-campus alumni events could include a program anniversary celebration, an honors residence hall reunion, or a gathering for certain class years or clusters of years.

if the honors program is located in or near a major population center with a significant number of its alumni living nearby, an alumni "re-connect" reception in a convenient location might work. it could be held at happy hour during the work week or on a Saturday. Alumni usually prefer to devote weekends to family, even though at quitting time during the week they may also be reluctant to delay getting home to their families. Trial-and-error or consultation with the alumni relations office may help determine the best time and location. one promising strategy is to find an alum who is willing to host such a reception at his or her workplace or home; a few current students should be invited as well just to chat with individual alumni or to make a brief presentation. in some cases a presentation by the president or provost or by an interesting honors faculty member can serve as an attraction.

Such receptions can also be planned for other cities where alumni reside. One obvious choice is the annual NCHC conference; I have often invited alumni living in the conference city to an informal gathering at the hotel or a nearby bar. Planning such a reception requires at least two months' lead time. The alumni office or development office can provide names and contact information for honors alumni living in the conference city. The director can then call or write to them to invite them and to ascertain their interest. such gatherings, even dinner, need not be costly; alumni should pay their own way. if the institution has an organized alumni group in that city, it may help in planning and publicizing the gathering.

In all of these events, directors can choose whether or not to call attention to fundraising projects. At the least such occasions afford the opportunity to exchange news--to share good stories about the program and its students and to show interest in, and catch up with, alumni careers. Alumni also relish the opportunity to see their former honors professors, so faculty should be invited. Again, the stronger honors relations with alumni are, the more likely the alumni are to become donors. As alumni get to know each other through such events, they may also be more likely to join an alumni council.

Organization

At some point directors may feel ready to organize an alumni council. To be viable, such an organization needs a cadre of interested alumni within reasonable driving distance who would be willing to plan activities and meet at least two to four times a year. Before formally instituting such an organization, directors and honors staff members may have noted certain alumni who have attended various events and who have expressed interest in supporting the program or connecting with other alumni. Directors can begin with a small informal group and engage them in helping to plan some alumni events. such a group may even take the form of a think tank for directors to consult for advice about the program without being constituted as an advisory board. organizing alumni should occur organically. Formal organization will depend on a dedicated group of at least 8-10 volunteers and a larger pool of interested parties who might not become officers or attend meetings regularly but who still wish to participate.

The next question is whether the institution's alumni relations office has a framework and guidelines for the formation of such groups. For example, does the group need to have bylaws and a strategic plan? The group may be able to design its own organization independently--honors folks are always drawn to nonconformity--but it will need to ascertain the relative advantages of coming under a larger alumni umbrella. Will official recognition for the organization elicit any funding from the central office? will it gain by having a liaison from that office become a functioning member? will the alumni office offer helpful advice based on long experience? will honors gain easier access to alumni publications, listserves, and databases? Policies often change through the years. At one time our alumni office provided a liaison but no funding, then it funded our annual newsletter, then it stopped funding that and supported events only through advance loans. some alumni offices will not fund an event unless it is designed primarily for alumni, not for alumni and students.

In whatever form an honors alumni organization takes, it can generate useful initiatives. its members can organize alumni events, with the director's consultation. Their critiques can improve the alumni web pages. They can create alumni awards and select the recipients. They can initiate an honors scholarship for children or relatives of honors alumni and raise money for it. Dedicated leaders and officers are the key. Their energy often sustains the organization. After several years, the current and former officers provide a doubly strong core of committed members. A student liaison or two would also be useful. Attendance at meetings and activities may rise and fall, some members may drop out, and not every idea will work. Quarterly Saturday morning meetings, always with refreshments, worked well for us. Engaging alumni with current students on a service project was successful. of course, some initiatives faltered, or faltered even after being repeated successfully for several years. Directors must be active in identifying recent alumni in the area to recruit to the group and must attend all meetings to provide updates about the program.

Depending on the size of the program and time commitments of staff members, directors may assign coordination of alumni relations to a staff person. Directors burdened with curriculum and advising duties, teaching, correspondence, and even fundraising will need help. They may have to make the case to the administration that an additional staff position is needed to launch or expand alumni relations and, accordingly, fundraising efforts, in hopes of gaining significant improvements for the program. The administration may prefer that such activities be coordinated by the central alumni and development offices. if little has been done by these offices for honors in the past, directors can argue that they are better positioned to take on these initiatives within a partly decentralized model. Honors has a body of loyal alumni ripe for engaging as donors.

Solicitation 

At any point in the development of alumni relations, fundraising can rear its ugly head--er, i mean, arise as a natural opportunity for alumni to support the honors program. As mentioned earlier, various communications can tell alumni how to contribute. Directors can bless the alums' desire to establish an alumni scholarship and help them raise funds for it. if the institution has a tradition of class gifts, honors could start a parallel tradition, starting with new graduates. or, through personal invitations, several key alums, designated "class captains," might come forward to raise funds among their graduation cohort. Naturally, they should discuss with directors the sort of gift that would leave a legacy with the honors program and be recorded on a plaque displayed in the honors facility. Class reunions or five-year cluster reunions also offer opportunities for fundraising. if honors has a memorial scholarship for a deceased former student or faculty member, some alumni will doubtless have known the person; directors should inform them of the fund's existence and of the benefits it is providing for current and future students. if remodeling, expanding, or constructing anew the honors center is in the offing, directors should launch a significant campaign among alumni to help achieve the goal. Major construction costs, if not covered wholly by the institution, must doubtless come from a major donor or set of key donors with major gifts. Directors can, however, also give alumni, through smaller gifts, a chance to feel a part of the collective effort to bring such a project to fruition. whether it is purchasing a brick or other piece--whether a souvenir of the former space or a part of the new space--or simply having a name on a plaque, directors can acknowledge contributions at various levels. Later in this chapter I will describe a specific alumni project available to all honors programs: thesis sponsorships.

Two cautions are in order. First, before soliciting any alumni, directors must check with the development office to see if any of them are already being approached for major gifts to other programs. Honors should not interfere with that process with yet another request, or the prospects will think that the university is sending mixed signals or does not coordinate its fundraising internally. second, directors must use careful judgment in suggesting amounts to contribute or setting amount levels for various recognitions. Although honors students usually go on to successful careers, they do not always attain huge salaries even over time (after all, many of them become academics!). Of course, asking too little is unwise if more is possible. unless the plan is to segment the solicitation to donors of a certain age range with presumed giving power appropriate for their career point, the solicitation should suggest a range of giving or set a basic price, such as for a brick or a thesis sponsorship, low enough to accommodate those with little means. No one wants to insult alumni by requiring a minimum gift of too high an amount; that approach will encourage many of them to laugh cynically and jettison the solicitation in the circular file. in addition to suggesting various levels, perhaps with honorific titles, directors can set a base price and then list higher levels for optional additional gifts. (see the thesis sponsorship reply form in Appendix C.)

If the solicitation asks for a specific amount, it should not be undermined by a suggestion that gifts in any amount will be happily accepted. Such an explicit statement lets the donor off the hook. Of course, directors will happily accept a smaller donation; they should just not say so in advance! For all of these modest solicitations, they should remember that small donors may become big ones over time if directors treat them graciously.

In alumni solicitations as well as in all those discussed further in this handbook, the message should include a reference to possible matching donations from the donor's employer; many employers give a matching amount, and some give two or three times what the employee donated. in some cases the donor will send employer paperwork for the director to sign, attesting to the receipt of the gift, but often this form must be signed by a foundation official.

Reliance on alumni does not have to stop with personal donations. Many of them will have corporate employers who could become not just matching donors but interested supporters in their own right. The director should seek this additional help from alumni by providing them with materials about the program to share with their employers as they pursue corporate support on behalf of honors. Again, clearance from the development office is necessary. some young alumni may not be financially capable of a significant donation, but their recent memories of their honors experience and their energy and enthusiasm can be harnessed to persuade their company to take an interest in the program, or at least to move a step closer by agreeing to a meeting with the director and the alumni volunteer who broached the topic.

Concluding this section is a story from an honors director at a large public university about an alumni campaign to endow a scholarship:

   Several years ago I decided it was a good idea to establish an
   Honors Alumni Endowment. In 2003 the College hired a development
   officer and the Honors Program made use of her. I gave her names,
   email addresses, and phone numbers of alumni who had given gifts in
   the past. she went to work setting up breakfasts, lunches, etc. I
   went with her to meet with these alumni. we talked about their
   experiences in the Honors Program and the Development Office
   "closed the deal." We raised about $25,000 and established the
   endowment. unfortunately, the development officer left the
   university, so we were left without the help. I've gone about other
   ways to increase the funding for this account.

Not everyone is lucky enough to have such assistance from a development officer, but even in this case the notoriously high turnover of such staff people can be frustrating. This honors director is resourceful enough to pick up the slack and continue the effort to expand the endowment. Because development officers come and go, directors will benefit from having established their own close relationship with honors alumni.

By whatever means possible, establishing an alumni donor base is critical to successful fundraising overall. yes, some honors directors may have had the extraordinary good luck of having the president land a hefty donor endowment for the program. Assuming that the institution allows directors to engage in any sort of fundraising at all, however, they will also need to formulate a strategic development plan of their own rather than rely on occasional windfalls. As directors set out to do so, alumni can be their best friends.

Stewardship 101: Effective Written Communications

Now the donations are coming in. or perhaps directors inherited some donors from their predecessors. Naturally they are grateful for this generous support. Now they must show appreciation by writing prompt thank-you letters and tending to ongoing donor relations. Donors' philanthropic motives are enhanced when directors express gratitude and keep the donors informed about the purposes served by their gifts. Good stewardship means, above all, using donors' gifts in the way they were intended, taking good care of these precious donations, and having integrity in fundraising. it means adhering to donors' desires for confidentiality and even anonymity, if that is their choice.

Good stewardship also means showing appreciation to donors on an ongoing basis. Most donors are modest, but some desire, expect, or even demand recognition. How to recognize donors at various levels of giving often depends on institutional policy, so the director must consult the development office for guidelines and advice. Major gifts may come with naming opportunities, which can be complicated and which may shift over time; they require cooperation with the development staff or upper administration. This first chapter, however, focuses on stewardship fundamentals that apply to all levels of giving. Good stewardship is usually expressed through effective communications, through formal and informal events, and through donor recognition. The latter two will be covered in "Stewardship 301" in the next chapter. Here the focus will be on communications, especially correspondence, both process and content.

Procedures

surely all of our mothers taught us that whenever someone gives us something we should say "thank you." when i became honors dean, i made it a rule to write a thank-you letter for every gift, whether a check for $5.00 or a $10,000 pledge over five years, whether a faculty member's donation of books to the honors library or a local bank's underwriting of the honorarium for a guest speaker. The institution's foundation will also doubtless send a "form" thank-you, but the director's letter will carry more weight because it comes directly from the program the donor chose to support. It can also be more personal. Some deans of academic colleges make a practice of sending a thank-you only to donors of at least $500 or $1,000. Writing thank-yous for every gift adds labor, but not every letter has to be unique. The director can compose a standard letter for gifts for a certain purpose up to, say, $500, and use it for six months or a year before revising and updating it. Upon receipt of a gift notice, a secretary can print this letter out routinely with a personalized inside address and salutation ready for the director's signature.

Directors should never send an impersonal, unsigned thank-you letter, especially not a printed form. They should never use e-mail in place of a letterhead message that bears an actual signature in blue ink. Larger gifts will demand a fresh letter each time. using a mixture of approaches, directors can still acknowledge every gift without consuming an excessive amount of time. No matter how minor the gift appears in the overall honors operation, expressing gratitude directly and personally will mean more to the donor and encourage repeated and increased giving in the future.

Here is a case in point: One of my alums found my thesis sponsorship project attractive one year and adopted a thesis student. she received prompt thank-yous from me and the student and, at the end of the school year, a copy of our thesis profile booklet, which included a reference to her gift. The next year she adopted three students. For the two years following, she sent checks for $1,000 aside from the adoption program. within another year, she and her husband had dedicated a $100,000 endowment to an honors scholarship! This case was unusual but at the very least small donors will often renew their gift year after year.

A similar success story about the value of good stewardship comes from another honors dean, this time involving students much more heavily in the stewardship:

   We have a very good relationship with a couple who prefer to fund,
   in their words, "quirky" things. Indeed, they fund the travel and
   expenses of the students we bring to the NCHC conference. During a
   pre-conference meeting before we took the very first group of
   funded students to the conference, I suggested that we (all) should
   find a way to thank our benefactors. One of my students recalled
   that in high school, they had sent postcards to folks who had
   helped his class go on a trip. "Postcards from Honors" was thus
   conceived. Every year, each student is required to send a postcard
   to our good friends who sponsor the trip--they buy and write the
   postcards, we supply the address and stamps. The first year the
   postcards (20 or so that year I believe) arrived at the donors'
   house over the few days immediately after a significant
   (six-figure) proposal from the Honors College arrived there.
   Needless to say, the proposal was fully funded and now, six or so
   years later, their house is full of postcards. our President held a
   reception at their house last spring--every surface of their living
   room and dining room was covered with postcards from Honors. Their
   giving to the university (almost all through Honors) recently went
   over the $1,000,000 mark. (In a subsequent communication this dean
   noted that this couple's annual support will be funded in
   perpetuity through a $1.2+ million bequest.)

Directors must not hesitate to ask students to write thank-you messages. Their voices will probably mean more than those of administrators. Many institutions and some honors directors now require students to write a thank-you note if their scholarship comes from a private donor; the financial aid office often withholds the scholarship money until the student completes the task.

Above all, directors must express gratitude promptly. If the donation comes directly to the honors office, the thank-you should go out within the week--in fact, as soon as possible. If notice of the gift comes from the foundation office, typically in monthly or weekly (or ideally daily) reports, directors should respond especially quickly because more time has elapsed since the donor's original mailing. Prompt replies show attentiveness, and paying attention is typical of honors folks: paying close attention to students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends is one of the things we do best.

Content

What goes into a good thank-you letter? Sincerity of tone and freshness of language. speaking from the heart. No bureaucratic or business jargon. until directors master the skill, they should test their drafts with honors staff and with development office staff. They should consider the advice of these colleagues but remember that they are expressing their own personality and their honors culture, which is likely to be a bit different from institutional or professional development staff culture. The content of the letter consists of at least three parts. It begins with a direct expression of gratitude for the gift, explicitly acknowledging its amount and purpose. Restating these facts reassures donors that the gift has been accurately recorded and that directors understand the purpose for which the gift is to be used. If this is a repeat gift, the letter should acknowledge that loyalty and commitment. If the gift represents a significant increase, directors may want to acknowledge that, too, with special pleasure.

The main body of the letter should describe the impact of the gift or the specific benefits the gift provides for the program and hence its students. The letter should help donors visualize the actual outcome of their philanthropic impulse--how the money is being put to work for the good of the cause. If, for example, the contribution goes to an unrestricted foundation account, often called a discretionary fund, directors should cite several examples of how they used this fund to support projects otherwise difficult or impossible to accomplish. They might have used such a fund to pay for several students to present at research conferences in the past year. Perhaps they chartered a bus for a class field trip or for a student group's service project an hour's drive from campus. If the contribution enhances the general scholarship fund, the letter can refer to the benefits of having renewable scholarships when recruiting new students, or to the gratification of awarding a special scholarship to an international student to prevent the student's having to drop out and return home.

The heart of the letter should not convey simply a boilerplate news update on the program. The content should relate specifically to the purpose of the gift. If directors wish to communicate to the donor some exciting news, because it will affirm the overall program quality as an incentive to keep investing in it, they should place it separately in a third paragraph. The language in this second paragraph should also connect the purposes for which the gift was used to the strategic priorities of the program. Directors need to show why it is important to honors education to be able to send a biology student to a conference to present his or her thesis research, or to take an honors art history class to a museum, or to ensure that a Ukrainian business major remains part of the program.

The brief closing paragraph repeats the thank-you in different phrasing and affirms the importance of donors such as the reader to the health of the program and to the success of its students. If directors have established an ongoing, more personal relationship with the donor, they may wish to offer seasonal wishes (e.g., for an interesting new year) or regards to the spouse, or they might refer to an upcoming event at which they expect to see the donor in person. They may wish to refer to an enclosure that they think will be of interest, such as a student's conference report, a story in the campus newspaper, or an honors giveaway such as a bookmark or brochure, especially if the item is related to the purpose of the gift. One caveat: Because the letter will document a tax deduction for the donor, the amount of the gift listed should not include any quid pro quo benefits. For example, if the donor paid $150 for a scholarship dinner that cost $25 for food, the actual gift is just $125. Or the letter can acknowledge the total amount but indicate clearly what part is a tax-deductible contribution.

Here are two sample thank-you letters, one for a general fund and another for a special-purpose fund.

April 27, 200-

Mr. Brian Brain

Address

City, State, Zip

Dear Brian,

Thank you so much for your generous donation of $-- to the Honors College Dean's Discretionary Fund! Your support of the Discretionary Fund allows me to address the greatest needs of the College and fund projects beyond our normal budget capacity.

Thanks to this fund, I was able to support several students to attend conferences and field experiences this year. several accompanied us to the national and regional honors conferences, and one thesis student was able to present his research at an international biology conference. Three musical theatre majors participated in very successful New York spring showcase auditions, and another theatre student participated in the national Black Theatre Association fringe festival. A thesis student in early childhood education is also receiving support for an intersession research trip to Italy in May. The fund also helps cover transportation costs for our spring break restoration project at a Hurricane Katrina site in Mississippi.

One of the most interesting uses of the fund has been to purchase art work from graduating art majors to display in the Honors Center. In fact, we are commissioning a piece for our reception area wall this spring.

Again, we are grateful for your thoughtful contribution to the ambitious work being done by our students. It has enriched our program.

Sincerely,

Sam

Samuel Smarts, Dean

Note that the opening line calls the donation "generous" no matter how small the gift. Any giving is generous, so even if directors think that a supposedly affluent donor should make more than a token contribution, they must be gracious; they do not know what other competition exists for that person's resources. That opening line also needs to convey some sincere emotion. The plentiful concrete examples of the gift's use, although still without individual students' names, provide reassuring evidence. In this example, directors might choose to omit the mention of the office art if they suspect that that is a less than universally acceptable use of this fund, or they could explain further how it celebrates student work and offers compensation for students whose field is poorly rewarded financially.

April 27, 200-

Ms. Clara Clever

Address

City, State, Zip

Dear Clara,

Thank you so much for your contribution of $-- to our University Honors Program Scholarship Fund! Your generosity is helping to provide renewable scholarships to our incoming students, thus enhancing our ability to recruit outstanding young scholars to Honors. Given budget constraints and the increasing financial burden of a college education, your gift will make a real difference for our students.

Here are some of the new students who are benefiting from our freshman scholarships:

* A journalism major who in his first year has already become a designer for the campus newspaper;

* A young woman from Bosnia and another from Ukraine;

* A young bassoonist who began his XXU career while still a high school student and who is taking a 22-credit-hour load and performing in four ensembles;

* A young woman with a boundless intellectual curiosity whose interests range from education and science to conservation, Swahili, and African dance;

* A young woman in biology/pre-med already active in Habitat for Humanity, the International Film Society, and the Medical students Association, who has just spent four months teaching basic computer skills to residents in a retirement home, and whose twin brother is an Honors meteorology major.

The scholarship fund also provides support for participation in life-changing off-campus programs such as the Washington Internship Program and study abroad programs that help make our students citizens of the world (check out some of their reactions on our website: http://www.xx.edu/honors/studyabroad). we are proud of the ambitious students who undertake these special learning experiences and wish to do our best to support them in their quest.

Again, we are deeply grateful to you for contributing to our educational mission with your gift.

Sincerely,

Wanda

Wanda Wise, Director

Here, the strategic goal of recruiting top students signals the importance of the gift. The bullet list offers an alternative for listing examples that may be easier to digest than the solid prose paragraph in the first letter. The reference to the website functions not only to provide more examples of the benefits of scholarship support but may lure the donor into browsing other pages of the website. An alternative would have been to enclose a single sheet of student testimonials with the thank-you letter. Both letters use first names in the salutation and signature lines. This choice is partly a matter of individual judgment, but I would recommend this friendly approach even for donors the director does not know personally. Both letters doubtless contain ideas or word choices that would not suit some directors. Each director must find his or her own voice and engage readers in a direct, dignified, down-to-earth, and human way.

Other important stewardship communications are publications, newsletters, DVDs, brochures, and invitations. Why are these important for stewardship? Most of these items will reaffirm the value of honors as a cause worth supporting. They put a specific face on the program, especially when they tell individual stories and display photographs of students and faculty in action. In this way effective public relations tools support fundraising. As alumni become donors, for example, the alumni newsletter serves the double function of keeping them informed about the good things happening in honors and inspiring them to continue to support the program financially. Directors should regularly send a major production, such as a creative writing magazine or a thesis profile book, to major (primarily endowment) donors as a courtesy, with a cover letter sharing their pride in their students and expressing gratitude again for the donor's support. Some programs design a special newsletter or brochure just for donors as a sign of special attention. In one case I sent a documentary video made by a class to a few donors who I knew would be interested not only in the subject but also in the independent and creative spirit of the students. If the program has a new recruiting brochure or DVD, that can provide yet another opportunity to maintain contact with a major donor; a short cover letter should accompany its mailing.

Active and ongoing contact with major donors is a basic principle of Stewardship 101. This was another lesson of unintended consequences that I learned as a novice dean. when I took office, I found out that our college had received several memorial scholarship endowments some years earlier. Contact with the donors had been intermittent. I wrote to the donors to introduce myself and to express gratitude for their gifts. I also mentioned points of pride about their scholarship recipients. At the time, my purpose was common courtesy; I was not thinking that additional donations might be forthcoming. In one case we were soon able to have lunch with one donor, her sibling contributors, and the student recipient. This donor thereafter made the first of her annual additional gifts to the endowment, and I wrote a warm thank-you letter. The next year this donor told me how pleased she was with how we used the endowment and how we kept in touch with her--that in fact we were much better stewards than another institution that had also benefited from her philanthropy. As our encouraging attentiveness--personalized thank-you letters, publications, holiday cards, occasional coffee or lunch--continued over the years, her annual gifts expanded the endowment principal so that the scholarship she had designated also grew in size for the recipients.

Here is a final stewardship story from a director of a small honors program:

   Our development office offered to assign a small endowment to the
   program, assuming I'd be willing to meet with the benefactor. I
   have met with him several times and will speak with him on the
   phone several times a year. I also make sure that he is informed
   about our activities and how we use the proceeds from his
   endowment--for example, we used some money from the proceeds of the
   endowment to purchase books for our book club. The students who
   received the books sat in my office and wrote thank-yous. He then
   sent me a check to replace the cost of the books. I never "asked"
   for money, but the communication with him provided him with the
   motivation and the opportunity to offer it. He said something to me
   once that I think is very important: "I just want someone to pay a
   little attention." The mistake we sometimes make is forgetting that
   there is someone behind each donation.

Here the students' participation in stewardship warmed the heart of the donor to the point of replacing the endowment funds used for the book purchase, in effect making an additional donation.

Good stewardship is common courtesy, but it also pays off in the long run in directors' increased comfort level with fundraising and in donor confidence expressed through additional contributions.

Securing the Support of Top Administrators

Honors plays a valuable role in the institution and furnishes student "points of pride" for presidents and provosts to highlight in speeches about academic excellence. Of course, this role is seldom recognized or valued as much as directors could wish. Honors deans and directors come and go, but sometimes presidents and provosts come and go even more frequently. Their familiarity with the honors program's tradition of excellence and their budgetary support can be fragile. The degree to which top administrators think of honors when they engage in fundraising varies considerably. They may also establish or follow policies about who is allowed to do fundraising, policies that may exclude honors leaders and that may need to be addressed. Personal, historical, or political tensions may also exist between honors and the central administration. NCHC lore is rife with stories of the fickleness of administrative support and encouragement, stories even of administrators who wish to eliminate honors entirely.

If the current relations between the honors program and top administrators are uncomfortable or administrators' view of honors is unknown, directors should approach better-positioned colleagues for information and advice. whether directors have inherited tensions or discovered them, they need to address them. They should find out what they can do to resolve such tensions or whether they will have to live with them. A dean or another middle administrator may be a useful ally. One honors program was saved by an arts and sciences dean who defended the program to a new president, who was contemplating eliminating it. But that is an extreme case. More likely is the problem of indifference or ignorance, especially if directors do not report directly to the provost's or academic vice president's office.

The person to whom directors do report directly needs to be their ally and advocate, not just their boss and judge. If it is a dean, directors need to ensure that they have that person's support and understanding, through periodic face-to-face meetings, written updates, annual reports, and a stream of good news. with that dean's knowledge and blessing, they should meet with the provost and president personally from time to time to keep honors on their radar screens. If directors report to the provost or associate provost, they will supply the same reporting and public relations documents and also meet personally on a periodic basis. In such a case they may have easier access to the president as well. If they are deans, they will probably be better known and more visible to the upper administration, including all vice presidents.

No matter what the reporting line is, directors should keep the president and provost well informed about what honors is doing, especially through publications and through periodic points of pride as they occur. These top officers should be on regular honors mailing lists for newsletters and show-and-tell student products. Directors should ascertain whether they are receptive to email or always need paper communications. I was pleasantly surprised when, at an out-of-state institutional recruiting reception, our new president departed from script and read aloud a thesis abstract from our thesis profile booklet, saying, "This is what you can do if you come to Kent State." I had just sent it to him a week earlier. Directors should also invite these chief administrators to major honors events, such as annual graduation or awards ceremonies or a research forum, where they can speak or present faculty or student awards. Directors should treat them as special guests by means of a cordial invitation, personal greeting, shepherding to reserved seating when they arrive at the event, and public acknowledgment from the dais of their support of honors.

Most relevant to fundraising is to keep honors at the forefront of administrators' awareness as one of the institution's best embodiments of academic excellence. Directors can furnish them with statistics and with vivid, individual anecdotes of student achievement that they can tout not only in recruiting speeches but also in fundraising conversations with major donor prospects. Administrators are aware that academic excellence is the heart of the institution's mission. Athletics or campus buildings may be important to some donors and may be fundraising priorities, but administrators must always be armed with impressive information about the learning experiences of students. whether the president does most or all of a small college's fundraising or plays a significant role in a large university's pursuit of donors at the million-dollar level, he or she will want any good stories honors directors can provide. The president and provost also need to be armed with justifications for the existence of honors--on their own or reminded by directors--in case they encounter donor prospects who are skeptical and see honors as elitist. Even if the institution places major responsibility for fundraising on the directors' shoulders, directors should also find fundraising allies in the president and provost, who have significant fundraising responsibility for the institution as a whole or particularly for academic affairs. Directors must be aware of any policies or procedures for shared responsibility for fundraising and make sure that they have the blessing of top administrators for their own fundraising plans and priorities.

Getting to Know the Development Office

when an institution has a development office and fundraising is not simply a function of the president's office, development operations are usually headed by a high-level administrator, a director or a vice president of institutional advancement or of university relations and development, which may or may not also include communications and marketing. A highly centralized fundraising model locates all development activity and coordination in this institutional development office. A highly decentralized model locates the largest responsibility in individual academic or athletic units, which have their own support staff working under academic leaders such as deans and school directors. A third model divides the labor between a central office and individual units with constituent development officers; in this mixed model the central office can coordinate institution-wide fundraising projects, capital campaigns, prospect research, and the annual fund. The central office may also partially fund and share supervision of the constituent development officers.

If directors are new to honors or are just turning their attention to fundraising, they will need to ascertain the development model currently in operation at the institution. How does honors fit into the scheme? Are development staff members aware of honors? Has honors been listed as a destination for donations in the annual campaign, in capital campaigns, in faculty/staff campaigns, in planned giving? If not, why not? Who decides on institutional fundraising priorities? Are there resources, such as a library, to guide someone new to fundraising? Do the academic degree-granting colleges have development officers? These are some of the questions directors should ask key people in the development structure. They should start by making sure that the vice president or director in charge knows who they are and why the honors program is worth fundraising effort. Depending on the size of the development staff, they may be meeting with coordinators of such areas as major gifts, the annual fund, planned giving, corporate and foundation giving, capital campaign, constituent development officers, research, and donor relations. Directors should also find out who the constituent development officers are and probe what it would take to get their attention through shared interests.

From the development vice president, directors can gain a sense of the big picture--the structural model used, the availability of budget to support fundraising activities, the status of any capital campaign planned or in progress, the role of top administrators in fundraising, and the general giving capacity of the institution's alumni, business community, and region. In turn directors can convey the value and importance of honors and keep this vice president well informed of honors achievements on an ongoing basis. From each of the other staff members, directors can learn valuable information and advice and in turn make that person much more aware of honors. In terms of the annual fund, they can determine whether telephone or direct mail works better. If there is a phone center, they can learn how it can or does target honors alumni specifically. They can ask to come to the phone center in person to give a pep talk to the student callers and highlight fundraising priorities. They can learn from a major gifts officer what goes into an endowment agreement, and they can obtain a template to examine. Similarly, they can learn much about policies and procedures for planned giving, corporate and foundation solicitation, and prospect research.

In talking to constituent development officers, directors should acknowledge that honors has alumni in common, but they should encourage collaboration as opposed to competition in seeking what the donor is most interested in supporting. They should point out that fundraising for scholarship support offers an especially fruitful opportunity for cooperation. They may find a donor interested in supporting a student in biology with a scholarship; they would disburse the scholarship fund, but they would probably have to engage the biology department in the selection process and that department's student would benefit. Conversely, the constituent development officer in, say, education, now knowledgeable about honors, might secure a scholarship endowment for an honors education major because honors membership assures the donor that a top student would be selected as the recipient. Education would control the fund, but the honors director would be involved in the selection process and an honors student would benefit.

In an unusual case of paying attention to the development office, one university honors director had discovered from reading foundation reports that a number of institution-wide, endowed scholarships were not being awarded because the small development staff did not have the time to find students who matched the donors' wishes. A good entrepreneur, she volunteered to manage about ten of them, amounting to $20,000 annually. She awarded them to honors students in their ninth semester, thus relieving the development office of embarrassment, pleasing the donors, and serving her own students who had exhausted all other scholarship support.

The goal in these efforts is to learn as much as possible from development staff, to teach them as much as possible about honors, and to address gaps in institutional fundraising that have negatively affected honors. Directors may wish to ask that honors be added to a list of campus-wide programs (e.g., library, graduate program, and athletics) for annual-campaign solicitation. Honors may have been invisible to the staff in planned giving, but directors can make them aware of older honors alumni as well as the attractiveness of honors to prospects who do not know about it but who might enjoy being associated with its quality. one Midwestern honors director made a point of inviting a key person in the central development office to co-present a session at NCHC. The person was suitably impressed by the conference, by honors education, and by the university's own honors students and became an advocate. A similar partisanship can arise from inviting a development staff person to honors events at which students shine. In the case of the decentralized and mixed models of development structure, depending on the size of the honors program and of the development budget, honors directors should feel entitled to representation by a constituent development officer, even if shared with another unit. (Arguing for a development officer will be taken up in Chapter 2.)

Here is a happy story from an honors director at a two-year institution, illustrating how making the central development office aware of honors' needs can have successful results:

   I went to the director of development last fall, told my story, and
   asked for help--could we try for a donor or a grant to support
   enrichment activities--fees, tickets, even just hire a van to go to
   a place. To my surprise I got a call a month later and was told we
   were given $2500 by an anonymous donor. Wow! It is great!! Caution.
   It was apparently a one-time gift and so far no more action has
   occurred. I guess that honors fundraising was on a checklist and it
   got its check.

The writer's "caution" deserves to be expanded. The last two sentences indicate that this honors director remains in the dark about the operations of the development office and assumes that honors was simply given "a turn." This director probably does not have the time, or does not feel empowered, to push the process further and follow up on the possibility of continuing cultivation of this or other donors. The director's caveat dampens the elation over the gift. In a subsequent communication this director reports writing a thank-you letter to "an unknown group," accounting for the expenditures, and later discovering the donor's identity by accident. The director continues: "the foundation office continued to be secretive about its methods and priorities. I still don't know why the donor donated at that particular time to our program. we now have a new president who has put a higher value on honors, so I hope the foundation gets the message." My suggestion is not only to seek more information about fundraising processes but also to offer assistance in fundraising for honors.

As a partner to the development office, the institution's foundation is also critical to honors directors. The foundation holds, invests, and disburses donations. It can set up and maintain accounts for honors. Directors should get to know the foundation director and record-keepers and obtain answers to the following questions: what is the spendable endowment interest payout currently and how and when are account statements issued? How much service or maintenance fee is charged on accounts? To support development activities, does the foundation deduct from honors accounts a percentage of each gift honors receives, or only of each gift that the central development office raises for honors through its own efforts? or does it take deductions only from non-scholarship donations? How much time must pass before usable interest has been generated from a new endowment gift? How much delay is there between a scholarship award through the financial aid and bursar's offices and its actual transfer as an expenditure from the foundation account? who is the best contact person for information about accounts, and what is the best method, email or a phone call? If account statements are shared only with the director's superior, how can the director also receive them? How can the director transfer funds from one account to another, assuming no restrictions on their use? what is the difference between the book value and the market value of endowments? Directors should not be in the dark about honors foundation accounts or about how the whole fundraising process currently works at the institution.

Developing Modest Projects

Some small fundraising projects were mentioned in the earlier section on filthy lucre and will be expanded here. For what purposes does honors need money? what will private donations enable honors to do for its students beyond its current budget? what are the still unfulfilled priorities in the honors strategic plan? Ideas for fundraising often come from that wish list that directors should always have on hand. This wish list should always represent consultation with staff and advisory committees, it may involve some background work such as student opinion surveys or research on costs, and it should be aligned with overall strategic priorities.

This chapter explores the relatively low-cost items on the wish list, not the multi-million-dollar endowed scholarship program that will be discussed in Chapter 3. The list may contain wishes that cannot come true given the current budget--several new computers, a laser printer, a display case, travel expenses for students presenting at conferences, gift cards for faculty awards, prizes for a thesis competition, a recruiting scholarship for an international student, reimbursement to students for thesis expenses, a joint camping excursion with another honors program nearby, small grants for study abroad. where can directors find money to enrich the program in these ways?

Directors might occasionally find a donor, especially an alum, who will buy a refrigerator for the kitchen, fund a computer upgrade, or pay for a display case and its installation. Donors will more likely respond to a call for student aid such as prize recognition, research support, and travel support. A local travel agency might put up $300 or $500 to help a student undertake study abroad. A faculty member might pay for a subscription to The New York Times for the lounge or library or for a first-year colloquium.

Perhaps the wish list includes care packages for students during finals week, and parents could provide the cost for them. Members of the honors student committee or organization might help make such an appeal, from their own student point of view. Parents might take an interest in other projects that directly affect their children, such as a fund for internship support, study abroad, or renovation of a student lounge. A good habit is writing a welcome letter to parents of incoming students. I also wrote to parents following their child's graduation, congratulating them and soliciting their donations; this effort had limited success, but in other honors programs or institutional cultures it might work. The liberal arts college one of our daughters attended has dunned us annually ever since she graduated 20 years ago. one honors director holds a summer luncheon for parents of incoming students to establish relationships and to plant the seed of philanthropy. Another director hosts a parents' picnic and follows it in two weeks with a solicitation letter.

Speaking of parents as potential donors, a scholarship fund may have special appeal to parents whose children have benefited from an honors scholarship that has relieved both parents and children of some of the cost burden of their education. one honors dean and his development officer send a postcard to all parents, soliciting annual fund support; they follow up with calls from honors students. They also make a more personal appeal to the 10 or 20 parents with the greatest capacity. A number of parents have made four-year pledges equal to the amount of their children's first-year $3500 scholarship. Another dean with only young alumni decided to start fundraising with parents by organizing a parent society, with an attendant website, that looks promising. (See Appendix C for the sign-up form.) Success in fundraising with parents, no matter what the project, depends on their capacity, their perspective on what their child's education is costing them, the institution's tradition of inviting their financial support, the timing of the solicitation, and the degree to which honors directors have persuaded them of the program's quality.

Unless a lead has emerged for one of the modest projects mentioned so far, however, directors should prefer to rely on building an unrestricted or discretionary fund, which they can use to support many small projects. They may think that donors will not give money without a specific purpose earmarked for it in advance. Certainly the national trend has been away from unrestricted giving in favor of an interest in specific projects; however, many sensible donors apprehend that honors needs vary and that directors must have some freedom to judge when and where to spend unrestricted monies. They will trust honors leaders to make responsible choices.

Directors should not think of such a fund as a blank check or slush fund, which connotes untrustworthiness or potential abuse. They should speak of it as a fund that allows them to meet the greatest needs of the program at any given moment. Such needs may include additional filing cabinets, copier repair, emergency student aid, copies of books for required reading for incoming students, or an unexpected increase in postage or supplies--in fact, anything that will aid the program's success. Some honors programs, such as the honors colleges at the University of South Carolina and the University of Central Arkansas, feed such a general fund through a student matriculation fee, and they accomplish much with it. In such cases directors should feel an obligation to use the fund as directly as possible for students, rather than, say, for equipment that the institution should fund, and to show the students explicitly how it is being used. one dean has the students make up a wish list for how the money should be spent. In several NCHC listserve discussions, however, the majority of respondents have argued that a matriculation fee is for various reasons a bad idea.

Aside from projects from the wish list of small additional items that the budget cannot accommodate, directors can also seek underwriting or sponsorship of costs that normally do come out of the budget, thus freeing the particular budget line for other purposes. If a major recognition event includes a meal, directors can ask faculty and alumni to sponsor a student by covering the cost of the student's meal. For an annual reception for honors faculty, they can seek a local business to underwrite the cost of the food or of the bar. If selling an honors T-shirt makes only a little money over cost, they can seek a donor to cover the cost so that they can pocket all the sales income. Selling honors paraphernalia is generally not much of a moneymaker for either the discretionary fund or the student organization. On the other hand, if the members of the student organization wish to raise funds for the program and not just for their own activities or charitable causes, their creativity and energy may produce some money that can make a difference, especially if honors operates on a small or tight budget.

Here is an obvious small project any honors program can undertake. I have found that one of the easiest and most rewarding ways of securing alumni donors is to ask them to sponsor or adopt a thesis student. In an NCHC listserve survey a few years ago, 70% of respondents reported that the senior thesis was required for graduation with honors. For most deans and directors, this means that all of the honors alumni will be aware of the labor and rewards of completing a thesis and will probably feel a sympathetic connection to current students undertaking the same ambitious work. Although the thesis is optional in my own honors college, we have over a thousand alumni who have completed one. I reported on our "adopt-a-thesis-student" project at NCHC conferences and in the National Honors Report in 2001 ("Honors Fundraising: A Story of Adoption," NHR 22.2 [Summer 2001]: 7-9). After building the program for a few years, we reached a point at which every one of the annual 50-60 thesis students was sponsored by an alum or donor friend. In our case we had been offering each thesis student a partial reimbursement for thesis expenses up to $75. (Many students submitted receipts for less, some for more, so sometimes we were able to cover more if the expenses were extraordinary.) The adoption fee initially covered this reimbursement. After a generous alum pledged an endowment for thesis fellowships, we raised the reimbursement to $100 and added to the fee a $50 contribution to this fund to expand it. Now the total fee has been raised again to $200. This may seem a small-scale fundraising operation, and the correspondence requires a bit of time, but the reimbursement money generated saved our budget over $5,000 annually, and the extra donations to the fellowship endowment doubled the fund so that it could generate two $1,000 thesis fellowships annually. Most of the sponsors look forward to choosing a new student every year.

What accounts for the success of such a project? Donors of small sums as well as large relish the connection with individual students and a visible result of their contributions. Previous sponsors receive their annual solicitation letter in November with a list of current thesis students, including their majors, advisors, and titles. (See a sample copy, with return form, in Appendix C.) They choose whom they wish to sponsor; sometimes they select as many as three to five, but most usually support one. I write each donor a thank-you letter with FERPA-appropriate information about the student. I write a notice of the sponsorship to the student, including information about the alum's honors thesis, career, and address, along with a request that the student write a thank-you note to the donor. A copy of this letter goes to the student's thesis advisor and department chair. Copies of both letters go into the student's folder and the alum's folder. At the end of the year, a thesis profile booklet acknowledges the sponsors at the front and on each student's page, and the donors receive copies. In February, assuming that some students remain to be adopted, I send the same solicitation to the thesis alumni who have never sponsored a student before, to complete the project. The ability to choose a specific student whose project interests the donor, or who was mentored by the same advisor as the donor was, seems critical. Beyond the thank-you letter, some students send the donor an abstract or even a copy of their completed thesis. Alumni donors respond warmly to this personal connection.

One heartwarming example comes to mind. A young alum, then a Ph.D. student elsewhere, responded to my annual solicitation with regret, saying that although his honors thesis had been critical to his admission to the best doctoral program in the country in his field, he was financially strapped. A month later he wrote back unexpectedly to report that he had just received a small cash prize for outstanding doctoral research. He decided to use it to sponsor a current thesis student after all. And the connection did not end there: after receiving his Ph.D. he returned to our university as a new faculty member and eventually taught an honors course for us.

Some non-alumni friends, including the provost, have also become regular sponsors. one year we succeeded in persuading a local environmental organization to sponsor three biology students doing ecological research. The students presented their results at the group's meeting to the accompaniment of many lively audience questions and comments.

Directors do not have to follow this model exactly when conducting a thesis sponsorship program. If no reimbursement policy is in place, this project can initiate it, perhaps funding it completely through donors. The adoption fee can also be used for other purposes such as conference travel, a thesis forum or exhibition, or a research grant fund. we began to offer the additional option of a straight $500 thesis scholarship, and several alumni responded. Even a small fee could be awarded directly to the student as scholarship aid or as a book award through the campus bookstore. The adoption fee can vary depending on the estimate of what alumni are willing to give, but beginning modestly is probably wise.

Other small projects, such as senior class gifts or support for class field trips, have been mentioned in passing. No matter what projects directors devise in consultation with staff, advisory committee, and perhaps the development office, they should remember again that starting small is OKAY. Developing modest projects along with efforts to attract major donors is perfectly acceptable and common. Directors can use all the help they can get.

Exploring Grant Funding

As directors formulate their fundraising strategy, they should investigate corporations and foundations that offer grant support to worthy educational causes. They should consider not only writing their own grant proposals but also collaborating with other units on campus and finding ways to take advantage of others' grants. At the outset they need to be prepared with several attitudes. They need to be realistic in their expectations. They need to be precise in matching their project to the grant-funder's interests. They need to treat the grant-funder with the same respect and candor as they would an individual donor. Finally, they must be willing to devote considerable time to entering into a personal relationship with the grant-funder and to preparing a proposal.

Corporations and foundations have generally not been cash cows for honors programs, and government grants are highly competitive. Directors can start their exploration by consulting the central development office staff about local, regional, and national foundations-whether family, corporate, or community--particularly if a staff member can focus on these prospects. Chances are that the institution is far ahead of honors directors in pursuing and achieving such support--especially from local foundations--and that directors will need to have a detailed conversation to ascertain whether these prospects might be interested in funding honors and whether, and to which ones, they would be allowed to appeal for support. For large grants only the upper administration and deans of disciplinary units may be allowed to approach such funding sources, and only in carefully orchestrated ways.

Directors should also learn about major government grants, such as those under the U.S. Department of Education under FIPSE (Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education) or those awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), even though the proposal process for these is extremely time consuming and requires collaboration with the campus's external funding office. State humanities and arts councils, as organs of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) or National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), may be more accessible, although their grants are smaller. Some funding sources have a competition with a fixed deadline. others are open to ongoing discussion and to the development, in guided stages, of a convincing case for support. Many require a financial commitment from the institution or other co-funders. Some simply offer a mission statement and wait for proposals, while others issue requests for proposals (RFPs) that seek solutions to specific problems. More rarely, some foundations accept proposals only by invitation.

As directors become more ambitious, they should consult the most comprehensive resource on grants, the Foundation Directory online, which is part of the Foundation Center's website at http://foundationcenter.org. The problem is that this continuously updated and comprehensive source is accessible only by subscription, at various levels, by month or by year. The low monthly charge will be worth paying if directors can accomplish their search in that time period. If the institution subscribes, they may gain access that way. Otherwise, they may wish to consult the Center's regional or local reference collections, usually located in public libraries. Librarians there can be helpful in finding the right keywords to use for the Center's CD catalogs so as to narrow the search more quickly. The institutional library might also house the Center's older selective print catalogs, e.g., Grants for Higher Education 2003-2004, which covers most of the 1,000 largest foundations by state. Descriptions of the foundations include purpose, eligibility, and examples of recent grants. once directors locate a granting source that seems favorable for their purposes, they can search for its website, which will offer additional and more up-to-date details, including instructions for the proposal process. A critical part of the research will be reading about other recent grants by the funder, contacting the recipients personally to ask about their funded projects, and sounding out an appropriate staff member at the granting entity about the appropriateness of the project in mind.

While directors are learning about major national or regional grant funding, they should not neglect sources close to home. At the very least they should be aware of the twice-yearly NCHC Portz Fund grant program. The NCHC website offers information about how to apply and what projects are fundable. Like many such documents, the Portz proposal form asks what funds the institution will be committing to the total budget for the project. These grants are modest (small ones up to $500, large up to $1,000), but they can make a difference to an honors program. Here are some examples of projects funded by the Portz Fund grant program in recent years:

* an oral history project ($500 for equipment and transportation)

* a student-led workshop on resilience for high school students ($479 for books and an online training program)

* a reading program with the author as guest speaker ($400 for the honorarium)

* a student-driven seminar series ($495)

* a service-learning course ($500)

* a faculty retreat ($600 for the speaker honorarium)

* faculty honoraria ($600 matching grant)

* an inaugural campus recycling program ($895)

* equipment for a smart classroom when the institution would not provide it ($1,000 for teaching technology)

* a research assistantship when the institution would not provide any research support ($1,000 as a prompt to the institution)

* two art shows ($500 and $1,000).

These and other grants have been awarded to a wide range of programs at community colleges, church-affiliated colleges, private universities, and large state universities.

Whether directors apply for a Portz grant, corporate funding, a FIPSE or an NSF program award, or a Bill and Melinda Gates grant, they must follow the principles of effective grantsmanship. They may have solid faculty experience in communicating with granting agencies and writing grant proposals for research funding, especially if they are in the sciences, social sciences, engineering, education, or nursing. A disproportionately large number of honors deans and directors, however, come from the humanities. They may be excellent writers, but they probably have far less experience in writing grant proposals because far less government and foundation funding is available to them, and grantsmanship is not a major expectation of them as faculty members as it is for scientists. They probably also shrink from the idea of cultivating personal relationships with staff in the granting agency.

Because most honors directors are fairly new to grant writing as part of fundraising for the honors program, what follows are some basic guidelines to help them feel less daunted by the process. First, as they look at various granting agencies and types of grants, they must study carefully descriptions of the sorts of projects the agencies support and the eligibility guidelines. They will want to make sure that these are a match for the honors program and the projects they hope to fund. Any discrepancy is cause for quick elimination from the competition. If they are unsure about their project's suitability, they should not hesitate to call the agency for clarification. In fact, even if they are confident about the match, they will benefit from making themselves and their intentions known to the granting officer, on the telephone or even better in a face-to-face meeting. They should ask this person for advice about the project concept, take notes on any reactions and suggestions, and use them as they formulate the proposal. Any early investment in the project by this staff person can make directors more successful in securing the grant. Susan Golden, in Secrets of Successful Grantsmanship: A Guerilla Guide to Raising Money (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997) makes a convincing case for the importance of establishing such personal relations before submitting a proposal, except where such contact is explicitly forbidden. She also provides detailed advice about every step in the process of seeking grant support.

As directors look for a likely grant opportunity, they will have in hand a short list of projects drawn from their wish list for which they could use external funding. As one example of a granting agency, the Ohio Humanities Council has a highly informative and useful website (http://www.ohiohumanities.org) that lists, under the tab for "Grant Guidelines," contact information and sections on the following subjects:

Definition of "humanities"

Description of Council

Eligible applicants

Eligible projects

Grant categories

Proposal review process

Reasons for not funding

Application process

Instructions for submitting proposals

Grantee responsibilities

Compliance requirements 

Glossary of terms used

Application checklist

Deadlines for drafts & final proposals

Special notes for electronic media proposals

Boxes and sidebars offer highlights, special notes, and examples of funded projects. I quickly learned that (a) mini-grants are available for proposal preparation, say, for the cost of a consultant; (b) honors would need to provide at least matching funds; (c) the project narrative, with its specified seven parts, must not exceed six pages; and (d) I should freely consult with a named staff person at the Council. other state humanities and arts councils offer similarly useful websites. Many websites and newsletters advertise grants for science and math projects in higher education, often in concert with local schools.

Sometimes reading grant descriptions will give directors an idea for a project that had not occurred to them before. If so, they should be careful not to be too hasty to switch focus. Their wish list should have been carefully thought out, backed by some preparatory work, and supported by strategic priorities. A new project arising simply from the availability of grant support needs to be vetted in a similar way if they wish to push it forward and apply for the grant. Their purpose should drive the grant process, not the other way around. opportunism may lead them astray from their priorities and even their mission.

After directors have determined that their program and project fit a funding agency's priorities, they must decide whether they or a staff member can take the time and effort to do justice to developing a relationship and writing a proposal. If so, they must plot a realistic timetable that will allow them to meet any deadlines at least two or three weeks early. when they are ready to prepare the written proposal, they should follow the instructions exactly for its structure and content. They should answer directly any questions posed and structure the proposal in exactly the format requested, with transparent headings matching the information desired. Instead of crafting the sections in order, they may wish to start with the implementation and budget sections, which will force them to think through the project in depth before writing the basic description of it. They should cite persuasive facts about the importance and value of the project, the realistic basis for estimating cost and time involved, and the successful track record of the honors program. They need to address such questions as these: How will they measure the effectiveness of their project once it is implemented? What is compelling about their project in terms of the grant-funder's mission? How can it reach readers whose purpose is to try to support such projects? Directors should supply enough concrete detail so that readers can vividly imagine the consequences and significance of the project. A concise, clean style is critical. Directors should note and follow any maximum given for word or page count, as well as requirements for font style and size and any preference for anonymity on the proposal pages themselves. They should be careful not to over-write the information they supply; they should be straightforward and (did I say it before?) concise.

Directors should readily seek the help of the institution's grants office and its experts on proposal writing. They should ask others in their office and among their grant-getting faculty to read and critique their drafts. They must proofread extremely carefully, using others' eyes as well as their own. For further reference, they may wish to use the proposal-writing tutorial on the Foundation Center's website or consult practical books such as Golden's, which was cited earlier. Another useful source is The Grant Institute (http://www.thegrantinstitute.com), which offers workshops around the country, as does the Foundation Center, and online resources, for a fee.

When directors happily receive their grant, they should immediately write a thank-you letter. They will want to maintain a long-term relationship with the funder for possible future grants. They will publicize the grant in communications and let their top administrators know about it. They must be good grant administrators, using all of the money to fulfill the purpose for which it was awarded. They must do all that they can to make the project succeed, perhaps by drumming up student attendance at an event or making sure a designated staff member is monitoring the project closely. They must follow any reporting stipulations. Most grantors require a final report, but even if it is not strictly required, a closing document reporting the results of the funded project will be appreciated by the grantor and be useful for honors records and annual reports. If the project extends significantly over time, an interim progress report is in order. Directors must comply with any reporting deadlines.

Aside from direct grants from external agencies, directors can learn to take advantage of any grants received by others at their institution. An obvious choice is faculty or department research grants that include funding for undergraduate students. Many NSF grants now have this enrichment of undergraduate learning as a stipulation. Some of these may be multidisciplinary as well, with opportunities for a variety of majors to become involved in a high-level project. Directors should become aware of such opportunities and advertise them forcefully to their students, even if the students have already heard about them in their departments. This is an opportunity to secure research funding for honors students, especially as they plan and undertake their senior thesis. If the honors program resides in a research university, directors can also make a case for using some grant overhead or cost-recovery monies to support undergraduate research by their thesis students through an annual allocation. I persuaded the vice president of research to provide two $1,000 thesis fellowships, which, over a few years, we doubled to four, then eight. These were followed by two memorial thesis fellowships from the university library, perhaps because one of our Portz Scholar theses so impressed its dean.

Directors should consider other kinds of in-house collaborations. Our honors college was written into the first Ronald E. McNair Scholars program proposal as a host for its summer research program, part of the university's contribution to the program's support. Trio grants such as these rarely include an honors collaboration, but we have found it fruitful; it became part of our diversity mission, and we recruited McNair Scholars into honors and encouraged them to turn their McNair research projects into senior theses. No money came to us, but we benefited in other ways. Some major corporations endow or underwrite an institution's major undergraduate research program, as is the case, for example, of the university of Maryland's Gemstone project, which features interdisciplinary teams doing problem-based research over their four years. Directors may be able to make their honors program the centerpiece or at least an active participant in such a program.

Sometimes directors can leverage support for a project from multiple sources, internally and externally. Our inaugural art show was made possible by support from various funding sources: a Portz grant enabled us to purchase the permanent equipment (hanging system, pedestals, vitrines) that would allow us to mount the show each year, the dean of arts funded the catalog, the art school allowed us to share the spotlight with the annual BFA show, alumni volunteers (professional museum curators) served as judges, and a local art-supply business funded prizes. Directors must think creatively about putting together various pieces of funding to make a project happen.

Applying for grants can seem daunting, and directors should not waste time and energy on a long shot. If directors choose carefully and put in the necessary work, however, grant support from corporations, foundations, and government agencies is possible. I have placed it last in this first chapter because the other sections are more important and may be more immediately fruitful. Nevertheless, a baby step in the direction of grant-writing is a must as directors consider all the possible sources of additional funding for their program. If they feel hindered by inexperience, lack of time, and lack of help, they can pursue lessons on grant-writing through workshops, printed books and articles, and online resources. They can get advice from faculty and from the appropriate staff people in their development office and research grants office. The important step is to start.

This first chapter has been the longest because it covers so much basic material. Readers should now be convinced that they can do fundraising. Perhaps they have already taken some of the first steps toward securing new resources to enrich their students' learning experience and thus enhance their program's stability, attractiveness, and success. The next chapters will progress to new levels of ambition and sophistication in the areas already covered here.

* Although in my own program I prefer to use all four forms of this word--for number and gender ("alumnus," "alumna," "alumni," "alumnae"), and although female students are usually the majority, I will bow to popular usage and use the less cumbersome "alumni" for both genders and singular and plural, sometimes skirting the problem by using "alums."

Larry R. Andrews is Dean Emeritus of the Honors College and Professor Emeritus of English at Kent State University. He has served on the National Collegiate Honors Council Board of Directors, has been a member of NCHC's Publications Board since 2001, and is a past president of the Mid-East Honors Association. At the NCHC national conferences, he has led several sessions on fundraising and other sessions on a variety of topics. He serves on the editorial board for Honors in Practice (HIP) and has written for the National Honors Report (NHR), the Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council (JNCHC), and the monograph The Honors College Phenomenon. He has also served as a consultant and program evaluator.