On a Sunday evening last February, President Waded Cruzado of Montana State University decided to get back to work after enjoying a weekend with family visiting from out of town. She checked the generic email box listed on her page on the university’s website, which students, parents, and others often use for praise or complaints.
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Amid the clutter, one message stood out — it was from Mark Jones, a newcomer to Montana who said he wanted to make a gift to the university to honor the recently deceased man who had overseen construction of his new home near the resort town of Whitefish.
The email was the university’s first contact with Mark Jones. Five months later, in July, Mark and his wife, Robyn, signed an agreement to give the university $101 million, believed to be the largest gift in state history.
“It’s a beautiful story,” Cruzado says. “It defies everything we think we know about fundraising and how it happens and how many times we think you need to touch a donor.”
Mark and Robyn Jones (tied for No. 26) were high-school sweethearts who grew up in Alberta, Canada, but each visited northern Montana as children to ski and camp. (The Joneses became U.S. citizens in 2003.) The couple already had four kids, with a fifth on the way, when Mark, a onetime truck driver, got into Harvard Business School at age 27. The couple were eyeing big loans to pay for his education, but an alumnus of the business school provided a full tuition scholarship that was designed to help nontraditional students like Mark.
After graduation, Mark went to work for Bain Capital, and Robyn dabbled in real estate. Her frustrating experience dealing with insurance agents persuaded her that there had to be a better model — people adept at selling insurance policies are not always skilled at taking calls about auto accidents and leaking pipes.
That innovation — separating sales and service — is responsible for the robust growth of the insurance agency Robyn started in 2003. Mark left Bain to join her a year later. The company, now known as Goosehead Insurance, is based in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area and has 1,800 locations.
The couple’s holdings in the company — Mark is chairman and CEO, and Robyn is vice chairman — are responsible for a net worth that Forbes estimates at $2.1 billion. The couple first made headlines in Montana through their land purchases — 126,000 forested acres west of Kalispell and a 260-acre parcel next to the Whitefish Mountain Resort ski area, where they built a 31,000-square-foot mansion.
Back and Forth
As they began spending more time in Montana, the couple were surprised to learn that Montana had no medical school. In his initial email to Cruzado, Mark proposed that he and Robyn could be the “anchor investors” in creating a Montana State medical school.
In discussions with the Joneses early last year, Montana State officials shared their concerns about the monumental cost of starting a new medical school. And even if its creation was successful, they said, many of the doctors it produced would likely flee the rural state to earn more money in urban areas.
What Montana really needed, according to Cruzado, was a better system for producing nurses. More than 90 percent of the state’s 56 counties are medically underserved or have a shortage of health professionals, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
We don’t go to the black-tie fundraisers — that’s just not us.
The Joneses liked the university’s pitch and agreed to give $101 million to its College of Nursing. The gift will pay for new nursing-education facilities at Montana State’s five campuses, endowed professorships and scholarships, and the creation of the state’s only certified nurse midwifery program.
“We don’t call it a gift,” Mark Jones says. “We describe it as an investment that we believe will literally transform the health care landscape in Montana.”
The couple have a family foundation that they hope to expand over time — perhaps by involving their six children. Robyn Jones says they plan to spend half their time in Montana and half at their home in Westlake, Tex.
“We like to support things in our communities,” she says. “We’re very focused on women and children, veterans, and foster kids.”
The couple said their recent gifts included support for Heroes and Horses, a Belgrade, Mont., charity that helps veterans suffering from PTSD reintegrate into society through trips in Montana’s wilderness, and the Travis Roy Foundation, a Boston charity that helps spinal-cord injury survivors and their families lead independent lives. Mark’s youngest brother was hit by a truck at age 2, which left him a quadriplegic until he died 10 years later.
“We don’t go to the black-tie fundraisers — that’s just not us,” Mark Jones says. “What we’re about is how do we make a real difference for the greatest number of people.”
The Montana State gift was announced at a ceremony on the university’s flagship Bozeman campus in August. Three months later, the Montana Board of Regents approved the university’s request to name its nursing college the Mark and Robyn Jones College of Nursing — an honor the couple had not sought in the gift agreement.
“One of the things Mark and Robyn told me when they signed the paperwork was, ‘You only need to thank us once,’” President Cruzado says. “I have not been very good at that.”
