A Fund-Raiser That Hasn’t : Cal State Fullerton: After two years, an effort that sought to raise $6.3 million has proven a dismal failure.
It’s the Heaven’s Gate of fund-raising campaigns, an effort that began with grandiose visions, but to this point has fallen well short of expectations.
Two years ago, Cal State Fullerton and the Robert B. Sharp Co. launched a campaign to raise $6.3 million to benefit the new Titan Sports Complex and the Fullerton athletic department.
It was a move that inspired the dreamers and shakers around campus--namely, Titan athletic administrators and boosters--to astronomic levels of optimism and came on the heels of President Milton A. Gordon’s emotionally charged decision to retain the school’s football program.
But when their contract expired last week, Sharp employees packed their belongings, vacated their trailer next to Titan Gym and quietly slipped off campus, leaving behind a campaign that has netted only $1.36 million in pledges.
And in Sharp’s wake is a trail of irate faculty members, perplexed coaches, concerned city officials and what has to be one mortified university president, who made the decision to go forward with the campaign, ignoring skeptics who doubted $6.3 million could be raised.
“I feel bad that this didn’t come through for (Gordon), because he really stuck his neck out for athletics,” one university employee said. “I think he’s been embarrassed and doesn’t want to be further embarrassed.”
The city of Fullerton, which invested $10.2 million in the sports complex project, lent the university $540,000 to pay up front for Sharp’s services.
And what does the city and school have to show for it? No lead gift--a donor of at least $500,000 for whom the complex or part of the complex could be named--and about $1.36 million in pledges from only 69 donors in two years. That computes to 2.8 donors per month at a cost of $7,826 per pledge.
“That’s totally inexcusable,” said Bill Puzo, a Fullerton geography professor and athletic booster. “As a faculty member, it’s really a matter of considerable concern. What does it say for our future here if these are the people we’re hiring to do that kind of a job?”
Sharp is gone, but the campaign, with a scaled-back goal of $4 million, will continue under the direction of Harry Gianneschi, Fullerton’s vice president for university advancement.
Gianneschi and campaign cabinet members remain confident that large gifts can be secured for the major uncompleted components of the project--a press box/pavilion for the baseball stadium ($875,000) and furnishings for the locker room in the soccer/football stadium ($600,000).
“It’s premature to say the campaign is a failure,” Gianneschi said. “It’s not where it should be, but we think it will end on a fairly successful level.”
Proponents of the campaign like to accentuate the positives--that no other Fullerton athletic fund-raiser has generated this much money, that the drive surpassed $1 million despite the severe recession, and that it elevated community awareness of the school and sports complex.
But before releasing those balloons and passing out party favors, consider that:
$1.36 million pledged is not $1.36 million collected. At least one major donor, former Titan and current New York Giants cornerback Mark Collins, said he’s “not giving one dime” of his $100,000 pledge until the school reinstates football, suspended last December.
“And I haven’t signed anything,” Collins said.
Puzo, who helped organize a group of 15 boosters known as the Uptown Titan Club, which made a cumulative pledge of $45,000, said several group members might not fulfill their commitments because they’re not satisfied with recent athletic department decisions regarding football and gender equity.
The school will have to spend $200,000-$500,000 for sports complex repairs. The 400-meter track is actually about eight feet too long and unfit for competitive meets. Several concession stands in the soccer/football facility are not built to code and cannot be used until corrections are made.
Jay Bond, Fullerton’s vice president for facility planning and construction, said legal action against those responsible is possible. But Fullerton will have to fund the repairs for the time being.
The school will also need to add costly drainage systems to the baseball and softball fields.
There is $300,000 cash in campaign coffers (most pledges were payable over five years), but the first $800,000 received will go toward reimbursing the university’s general fund, which bailed the athletic department out of an $800,000 deficit in 1991-92.
That $1.36 million isn’t going very far.
The Santa Ana-based Robert B. Sharp Co., which has been involved in many prominent Orange County campaigns--some successful (O.C. Performing Arts Center, Irvine Barclay Theater), some not (Huntington Beach Pier)--isn’t responsible for most of the problems facing Cal State Fullerton and its athletic department. But several people had a problem with the process by which Sharp was hired to run the campaign.
The city paid Sharp $22,000 to conduct a feasibility study, and through interviews with 24 people, Sharp was convinced there was sufficient interest in, and support for, the Titan Sports Complex to warrant proceeding with a campaign to raise $4 million.
“If we didn’t think the potential was there, we wouldn’t put our necks on the line,” Robert Sharp, company president, said then.
The 10-member Sports Complex Fund-Raising Study Committee, which consisted of Fullerton faculty members and administrators, reviewed the feasibility study and recommended to Gordon that he move forward with the campaign.
The university, without going through a competitive bid process, then awarded Sharp the contract, and school and city officials who were deeply involved in the project convinced the city to advance the university $540,000 to pay for the campaign.
And nowhere in the contract were there any performance requirements.
“If I had to do it over again, I would say no,” said Fullerton Mayor Molly McClanahan, a city council member in 1991. “When you have a second party spending our taxpayers’ money with a third party, the accountability isn’t tight. I can show you notes all over my feasibility study--I was the only council member who raised hard issues.”
The fund-raising study committee’s recommendation to Gordon wasn’t unanimous, either.
“I had major difficulties with Sharp doing the feasibility study because he was going to get the contract,” said Barbara Stone, a political science professor and former Athletics Council chairperson who was on the committee. “And when you got through their list of names, I’m sorry, the money was never out there.
“What they were talking about, everyone with a brain in their heads knew what the economic situation was. Some of us on the committee said the money wasn’t there. Sharp said it was. Milton Gordon believed Sharp.
“Sharp said we were thinking too little, and our attitude was too negative. But he saw enough where he backpedaled (the campaign goal) from $6.3 million to $4 million. You knew it was going to be a disaster. I’d love to blame it all on Sharp, but it was in the advising stage where it all went wrong.”
Julian Foster, a political science professor in his 30th year at the university, said Sharp’s hiring also raised eyebrows in the Academic Senate.
“In the beginning, it was like, here’s this magician who’s going to raise $5 million,” Foster said. “Milton Gordon was initially impressed by this thing, but when push came to shove, they couldn’t raise beans. And it was a real blunder drawing a contract without any performance clauses (paying a percentage).”
Sharp, however, said it is standard for capital campaign contracts to be drawn this way. To be paid on a percentage basis would give the impression the fund-raising company was out to make money for itself, not the client.
“Anyone who would propose that is unfamiliar with the rules and regulations of how capital campaigns are funded,” Sharp said. “The National Society of Fund-Raising is on record specifically recommending caution against that practice. It simply isn’t done for very good reasons.”
Sharp also took exception to criticism that his feasibility study was too optimistic, that this job was much too ambitious for an athletic department with a long history of minimal financial and fan support.
“I wouldn’t presume to tell someone how to teach a course in political science or how to write a newspaper article, just as I wouldn’t expect the uninitiated person who knows nothing about capital campaigns to make credible judgments about how things are done,” Sharp said. “But certainly, everyone is entitled to an opinion.”
Gordon’s opinions on the subject won’t be known--he deferred comment on the campaign to Sal Rinella, the university’s vice president for administrative affairs.
“My view on it is I’m just not prepared to make an assessment of the campaign until it’s over,” Rinella said. “We’re going into overtime--we have to play the game all the way through to the end.”
So what happened in regulation? Why did the campaign fall so short of its goal in the two years Sharp ran it?
Certainly, the school’s decision to drop football last December and a 1992 gender-equity lawsuit that caused much negative publicity for the university didn’t help.
But the biggest culprit, according to Sharp and campaign leaders, has been the recession.
“It was deeper and more severe than the best experts could predict,” Sharp said. “Many campaigns are in virtual paralysis throughout Southern California. I think the Fullerton campaign is consistent with fund-raising across Orange County.”
Indeed, charitable donations in Orange County made a sharp drop in 1992. According to UC Irvine social ecology professor Mark Baldassare, the median annual donation reported in 1992 was $145--down $83 (35%) from the $229 reported in 1991.
“I think Sharp did a wonderful job,” said Buck Johns, one of three campaign chairmen. “These are difficult times, but he worked hard and got as much out of it as anyone could have.”
As one athletic department employee said: “Maybe the Pope couldn’t have got it done.”
Bob Ling, the Titan Athletic Foundation president who runs a Los Angeles marketing company, made a $25,000 pledge to the campaign but found it difficult securing other donors.
“I really thought we could raise that kind of money because there was excitement with the school, and the complex was very exciting,” Ling said. “But things change. I had three possible founders ($25,000 donors) who had problems with their businesses. That makes it tough.”
But Orange County and the U.S. were gripped by a recession in the winter of 1991, which again raises the question: Should the university--and city--have spent this much money launching a campaign of such magnitude during such troubled times?
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” said Dick Ackerman, a campaign chairman, former Fullerton city councilman and the driving force behind the sports complex project. “You’ve got to take some risks. A lot of things that were outside of our control had a negative impact on the campaign, but I still think it’s a salable product.”
Some thought the campaign was hurt by a high turnover of salespeople. Steve Christensen began as campaign director with Rick Poe and Alan Freeman serving as assistants. But by last summer, all three had left Sharp for various reasons, leaving Katherine Spear to close out the drive.
The Titan athletic administration also underwent a complete transformation beginning in the summer of 1991, with a new athletic director (Bill Shumard), associate athletic director (Maryalyce Jeremiah) and TAF director (Larry Zucker).
“They (Sharp) tried hard, but they went through some turmoil in their company,” Ling said. “I think it made it tough when people moved on. Maybe the school should have been more involved with the Sharp Co.”
Said Sharp: “I don’t think that had any effect whatsoever.”
The campaign’s initial goal was $4 million for sports complex improvements. It was amended to $6.3 million to include an additional $1.3 million to cover projected athletic department deficits and $1 million in supplemental TAF drives.
When asked in 1991 if the sports complex and athletic department efforts would be competing for the same donors, Sharp said: “It’s important to coordinate the TAF drive with the complex drive so we don’t have two trains bumping down the same track.”
Some cars never made it out of the roundhouse, though.
The $1-million supplemental TAF drive was never launched and was cut from the campaign, and the $1.3-million drive to benefit the athletic department was rolled into the overall effort last year.
The first phase of the campaign, scheduled to run about 12 months, was to target gifts of $25,000 or more, and that was supposed to be followed by the second phase, which would target thousands of Fullerton alumni for lower-level gifts.
But the estimated 65,000 Titan alums in Southern California were never canvassed, despite a March, 1992, school release in which Gordon, after announcing the campaign goal had been pared back, stated: “On April 3, we will launch the phase of the campaign that will focus on the thousands of alumni . . . “
According to Sharp’s “sequential solicitation order,” campaigns go after the large gifts first, then move to the middle and lower ends. But because a lead donor hasn’t been secured, the low-end phase hasn’t been launched. That helps to explain why there have been only 69 donors.
“The (low-end) phase is the typical closeout of a campaign,” Sharp said. “But with the timeline for the campaign extended, the prospects of doing that are good.”
And about that lead gift? This has been the campaign’s primary focus, but only eight donors have pledged $50,000 or more, and the largest pledge has been $200,000.
And to think, in 1989, according to Stone and several sources familiar with negotiations, school and city officials turned down a $1.5-million offer from the Karcher Corp.--a package that included stadium naming rights and advertising--because they felt naming rights were worth more.
Throughout the campaign--and even before the campaign started--Fullerton administrators were always under the impression that the lead gift was just weeks away.
“At the time we reviewed the feasibility study, the lead gift was discerned to be there,” Rinella said. “It seemed solid.”
But for whatever reasons, it hasn’t materialized. As the campaign wore on, optimism around the Titan athletic department gradually turned to skepticism.
By the spring of 1992, it became a running joke around the halls of Titan Gym:
If we had a dollar for every time they told us the lead gift was 30-45 days away, we’d have reached our goal by now.
“We were always told that progress was being made, that potential donors were lined up,” said Lynn Rogers, Fullerton women’s gymnastics coach. “All the input from staff meetings was always positive, that we were close to either reaching the goal or making real good progress.”
Sharp and school officials still remain optimistic.
“You’ll see the campaign total climb to $3.5 million relatively shortly,” Sharp said.
Gianneschi said he wouldn’t have extended the campaign if he didn’t believe there was a good chance for success.
“I know there’s skepticism, people who say we’re extending this because we don’t want to admit defeat, or that it didn’t work, but that’s not the case right now,” Gianneschi said.
“We’re realistic. We’re not dreamers. We’re not afraid to say it didn’t work if it didn’t. This still appears to be a viable campaign, and until we have every opportunity for those gifts to mature or not mature, the campaign will continue.”
Falling Short of Expectations
Range of Number of Projected Actual Donation Prospects Donors Donors $1,000 900 300 4 $2,500 450 150 18 $5,000 150 50 4 $10,000 75 25 5 $25,000 45 15 17 $50,000 30 10 4 $100,000 21 7 4 $250,000 9 3 0 $500,000 3 1 0 TOTALS 1683 561 *69
Projected pledges: $4,000,000; Actual: $1,360,000 *--Includes 13 pledges of less than $1,000. Sources: Robert B. Sharp Co., Cal State Fullerton
