Jerry Kutz writes about capital campaign (March 1, 2014)

Jerry Kutz writes about capital campaign

"The research done by consulting firms tells us that FSU is viewed favorably by former students. It receives better marks than peer institutions and is typified as a "caring institution". I haven't seen the data to see if that varies by decade or by school but overall the marks are high.

Its pretty obvious that the vast majority of our alumni are still super young. I remember a statistic during the Bowden era that said some 65 percent of our graduates attended school while he was head coach.

Even though we've been a co-ed school since 1947, our enrollment back then was very small and we were graduating very few people -- hundreds a year -- only about a third of which were males.

We probably had as many graduates the past two years as we did in all of the 40s and 50s combined and that's certainly true for male graduates, so I really don't think its about the quality of our students or the quality of our alumni. I think its simply a numbers game of graduates who are now old enough to make a big donation. As for endowments, we have a lot of people who have left endowment gifts to FSU in their will but fortunately (or unfortunately depending on your vantage point) are still breathing and buying season tickets.

When you look at Bobby Bowden today at 83, he's the picture of our oldest male graduate. Bobby was the starting quarterback for Howard College (now Samford) the night FSU dedicated the football stadium in 1950.

A freshman who came to FSU in 1947 at 17 years of age, is now Bobby's age. There were very few 17 year old freshmen back then as most of that first class were returning veterans.

We now have our first two Billionaires. One is in his mid 50s and the other is in her 30s. They are at that stage of life where they are still plowing money back into their businesses, reinvesting to grow market share. As with all other very successful people, there will come a time when that doesn't matter as much to them and they'll begin to refocus their interests elsewhere and FSU is doing what they can to stay involved with those alumni. I've had a relationship with one of them, who is a donor, and know his heart.

In my years at FSU (date back to 1972), I've noticed a huge growth in the FSU Foundation, the fundraising arm for academics. There was a time when FSU didn't have enough alumni to put much emphasis on fundraising for academic programs as the ROI was pretty low with such a young alumni base. But as we graduated more people, and our alumni aged, we reached critical mass.

The Foundation will announce a Capital Campaign of $1 billion this coming fall. We're about half way there already with pledges. The foundation has been gearing up for this campaign for a few years, hiring veteran fundraisers, developing a fundraising database, setting the stage to make the ask. Seminole Boosters will be asked to raise more than $300 million of that billion dollar campaign for athletics. That's a bunch, especially after three campaigns that netted more than $160 million the past 15 years but we'll get it done.

While we may not have a bunch of billionaires in our alumni base we have far more people now in income brackets and with high wealth scores than we had when the Boosters ran their first successful campaign in the early 1990s"