Hat Passers

In Manhattan last week President Arlo Ayres Brown of small Drew University at Madison, N. J. (enrollment: 400), launched a campaign to raise $600,000 additional endowment during the next eight months.

In South Hadley, Mass., retiring President Mary Emma Woolley of Mount Holyoke broke ground for a new $250,000 chapel, reported encouraging progress in her current campaign for a $10,000,000 college fund. Same time, President Frederick P. Keppel of Carnegie Corporation observed in his annual report that the in come of private educational institutions had started on the upgrade from Depression.

Heartened by these signs of the times were the elusive members of the profession whose business is institutional money-raising. One of its deans, baldish, square-shouldered George Olver Tamblyn of the Manhattan firm of Tamblyn & Tamblyn, began to bombard the desks of U. S. school executives with a brochure called Now Is the Time. Thesis of Now Is the Time is that schools are not sharing sufficiently in the national recovery, that the time is ripe once more for Alma Mater to put out her hand.

Fund-Raiser Tamblyn points out that since 1932 the U. S. national income has gained 33.9%, while private educational income has dropped 28.5%. Since 1934, educational income has recovered just 1/2%. To articulate the extent to which Depression has damaged the nation's $3,000,000,000 private educational plant, Mr. Tamblyn quotes from a U. S. Office of Education survey of 588 private secondary schools and colleges. While average expenditures between 1929 and 1935 dropped from $417,983 to $346,572, average total income fell even further, from $476,200 to $297,603. The average U. S. private school and college, in other words, is losing money. That is because, unlike other businesses, private schools can rarely balance their budgets without outside help, and gifts to the average institution in the same period dipped from $156,992 to $29,945. First lesson Fund-Raiser Tamblyn hopes every school executive will derive from Now Is the Time is that if he wants his school to revive he had better start passing the hat. Second lesson is that he had better hire a professional to pass it.

Fund-raising as a business dates from the great money drives of War days. George Olver Tamblyn (Colgate 1903) was membership extension director of the Atlantic Division of the Red Cross when he met John Crosby Brown (Yale 1915), scion of the banking Brown brothers, son of Union Theological Seminary's onetime Professor William Adams Brown who married Anne Spencer Morrow to Charles Augustus Lindbergh. After conducting money drives for the Red Cross in 1920, they formed Tamblyn & Brown, a firm which prosperously endured until two years ago when the partners quarreled. Mr. Brown now runs Tamblyn & Brown and Mr. Tamblyn has launched Tamblyn & Tamblyn with his son, a recent Colgate graduate. The original firm of Tamblyn & Brown planned and executed the raising of $225,000,000 for private & public causes, made fund-raising history by collecting some $20,773,000 for Yale's Alumni Endowment Fund in 1927.

Neck & neck with Tamblyn & Brown and Tamblyn & Tamblyn in the educational field is Manhattan's John Price Jones, Inc., a much bigger fund-raising firm whose founder & president, John Price Jones, a dapper pince-nezzed Harvardman, stepped from a reporter's job on the New York Sun into the 1917 Liberty Loan drive. John Price Jones works for Harvard, Columbia, Chicago and on many a noneducational project like Community Chests, emergency relief funds.

Keynote of professional fund-raising is organization. Before accepting an account the fund-raiser makes a systematic study of the institution's assets and needs. A preliminary report such as Tamblyn & Brown drew up for Yale may run to 700 pages. When the amount to be raised is agreed upon, the fund-raiser sets a maximum expense budget, including his fee, running to 5% or 6% of the total. If the fund-raiser exceeds his budget he pays the excess from his own pocket. The professional trade group, the American Association of Fund-Raising Counsel, frowns on wildcat free-lance operators who drum up business on a contingent percentage fee or offer ironclad guarantees to raise specified sums. But fund-raisers usually get what they go out for. George Tamblyn figures that he has raised some 75% of the money he has promised.

Rule No. 1 in fund-raising is to set the goal exactly high enough. College presidents and trustees are apt to be unsanguine about the amount they can safely ask from their alumni. John Price Jones raised $13,931,780 for Harvard in 1920, a feat widely admired in the profession until Tamblyn & Brown promised and delivered Yale's record-breaking fund. In the opinion of fund-raisers, Harvard's Tercentenary ranks as a great lost opportunity. President James Bryant Conant, relying on a home-managed, low-pressure appeal, realized only $5,500,000 on that prime educational event.

Rule No. 2 is to draw up a sound prospect list. Alumni who have announced their intention to remember their schools in sizeable legacies are usually written off in advance. A fund-raiser like John Price Jones keeps some 50,000 names of super-givers always on tile, elaborately classified. When President-Emeritus Abbott Lawrence Lowell hired Mr.Tamblyn to raise $1,000,000 for Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, he specified that no appeal should be made to Harvard men as such. Equal to that emergency, Tamblyn raised most of the money by holding a banquet to which he invited 400 owners of large and well-gardened estates in Westchester and Long Island.

Once the campaign is under way the fund-raiser keeps discreetly in the background. Literature is mailed under the college letterhead from a separate office engaged for the campaign, so that many contributors never realize that an outsider is involved. A corps of personal interviewers is organized from among alumni and friends of the institution and armed by the fund-raiser with names and arguments. Colleges are not so shy as they used to be about hiring outside fund-raising help, but the prejudice against it persists. Princeton has engaged John Price Jones and Tamblyn & Brown to make preliminary studies, but has always managed its own actual campaigns. Mount Holyoke's Mary Emma Woolley, reluctant to deal with a professional fundraiser, collected some $100,000 in three abortive spurts before she finally engaged Tamblyn & Brown, who raised her $2,250,000.

Odd situations crop up in the fundraising business. Once Tamblyn & Brown were getting nowhere with a drive for Williams when they happened to print part of the college song. The Mountains, in a solicitation letter. That drew a nice flutter of checks. Horace Dutton Taft wanted to raise $2,000,000 for Taft School but it was pointed out to him that the school was his private property. Headmaster Taft generously deeded the school to his trustees and Tamblyn went ahead with the drive.

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