NEW ZEALAND: University's $100m fundraising campaign

In a country where donations to universities are still a relatively new concept, an unprecedented $100 million (US$55 million) fundraising campaign is expected to reshape attitudes and help one institution compete on the world stage.

The University of Auckland, New Zealand's largest, launched the campaign with the announcement it had already raised $48 million from a range of significant donors. The money will be used primarily for fellowships, endowed chairs and funds aimed at attracting high-quality staff and students and "creating a university of genuinely world-class that will benefit New Zealanders and the international community".

Vice-chancellor Stuart McCutcheon said the campaign was important given that over the past 20 years, per-student government funding had fallen in real terms, making it difficult for the university to undertake important, strategic initiatives. McCutcheon said if used entirely as endowments, the money would earn the university about $5 million per year - a small amount for an institution with an annual turnover of about $800 million.

"But in the context of an organisation that makes a $25 million a year operational surplus, that's a big part of what we might think of as our flexible investment money," he said.

McCutcheon said that unlike the United States, New Zealand did not have a history of donations to universities. Though the campaign aimed to simply raise money, he said it was also intended to change how New Zealanders thought about philanthropy.

"It's about the money certainly but it is also about changing the way that people think about supporting the university... It brings a level of interest in the university that is important - people that make donations don't simply want to write a cheque and walk away. They want to have an interest in what the university is doing, they want to be involved with the university.

"Sometimes these are inter-generational gifts so we've got families who are giving to the university in the second and eventually the third generation and so on. So a lot of it is about changing the way people think about supporting the institutions as well as the direct effect of the money they give into the fund."

McCutcheon said the campaign had its origins in a fundraising drive for the university's business school. That was based on an unprecedented, and successful, pitch to the government to match donations dollar for dollar up to $25 million. In the end, Auckland raised more than $41 million in private donations, proving that significant fundraising was possible in New Zealand.

* John Gerritsen is editor of NZ Education Review.

John.Gerritsen@uw-news.com