Women-Led Fundraising Effort Reaps Big Rewards for Dartmouth

Elizabeth Cogan Fascitelli remembers exactly where she was the first time a major-gift officer from Dartmouth called to ask her for a meeting. The New York financier also remembers that she was not impressed.

“I said, ‘It took you this long to call me? You’ve got to be kidding me. Is it because you know of my husband?’” Cogan Fascitelli says. “I laughed in his face.”

The fundraiser then asked her if her husband would come along. Cogan Fascitelli had already amassed a large fortune on her own, yet her alma mater was showing more interest in her husband, a high-profile real-estate investor who is not a Dartmouth alumnus, than they were in her. She says the experience was maddening and insulting.

Cogan Fascitelli graduated from Dartmouth in 1980, eight years after the university went co-ed. Even though she became a successful and extremely wealthy partner at the Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs fairly early on, it took Dartmouth’s fundraisers nearly 20 years to pick up a phone and ask her to meet with them.

Robert Gill, Dartmouth College

“If I were a guy, they would have been all over me, way before I married my husband,” she says. “I was pretty insulted and vowed if I ever got involved, that would change.”

Her experience is not uncommon, say wealthy women donors and fundraising experts. Most fundraisers focus their energies on men, following habits the profession developed 50 years ago, when most wealth earners were men. Although the numbers of women who have made their own wealth continue to rise, it has been hard for fundraising to change its ways.

“Fundraising has been handed down from universities to hospitals to other nonprofits, and everyone learned the way to fundraise, and the way to fundraise works really well for the donor it was designed for back in the ‘70s,” says Kathleen Loehr, a fundraising consultant and an expert on women’s philanthropy. “The prototypical donor of that time was mainly male, mainly white, and mainly straight.”

A historic women-led Dartmouth effort that has raised large sums from women alumnae illustrates the financial and leadership might of today’s women donors. The university recently announced that 104 alumnae each gave or pledged $1 million or more. They gave a total of $386 million in direct gifts and pledges and an additional $61.5 million in planned bequests, going to a range of programs across the university. It’s the first time the university has ever attracted so much in donations from affluent alumnae. The effort was one of three peer-to-peer fundraising programs that were conceived of and led by Dartmouth women volunteers as part of the university’s $3 billion Call to Lead fundraising campaign.

“It was a seismic game changer,” Bob Lasher, senior vice president for advancement and a 1988 Dartmouth alumnus, says of the women-led campaigns. “There hadn’t been a vehicle that connected the women of the early 2000s with the women of the ‘70s and the ‘80s, so we stepped back and said, ‘Whoa, this is special.’”

Early Skepticism

The first of the three women-led fundraising efforts, the Dartmouth Centennial Circle, was an effort launched in 2014 to mark the 100th anniversary of the university’s annual fund. It aimed to persuade at least 100 alumnae to give $100,000 apiece. The second encouraged women at all giving levels to back the renovation of Dartmouth Hall, an iconic building in the center of campus. That effort has raised about $26 million from 2,838 donors, of which 2,380 are alumnae.

The effort to land gifts of $1 million or more from at least 100 Dartmouth women was an outgrowth of the success of Centennial Circle, which was the brainchild of Catherine Craighead Briggs, a marketing executive who graduated from Dartmouth in 1988. Development officials were thinking about what kinds of fundraising programs made the most sense to launch within the campaign, Lasher says.

The first women to graduate from the university were now the leaders of five generations of alumnae, and women make up half of Dartmouth’s current student body, he says.

“The question became how do we engage what is now a third of our alumni body in this conversation — in ways that they just weren’t before,” Lasher says. He notes that three out of five of the university’s current campaign co-chairs are women and that nearly half of the university’s Board of Trustees are women.

Briggs told Lasher and his team her idea and recruited several other alumnae to help her lead the effort. The advancement office stepped in with names of alumnae, data, advice about how to ask for gifts, and other expertise and assistance. Still, Dartmouth officials and some of the women leading the effort were skeptical that that many women would be willing to give $100,000 apiece. After all, only about five women had made gifts of that size in the previous two years.

The doubters were wrong. The Centennial Circle has become a fundraising juggernaut that has so far raised more than $266.2 million from the circle’s 286 alumnae members and is likely to continue to grow. Centennial Circle’s early success — the women raised $15 million from 114 alumnae in the first three months — erased that skepticism and showed the women and university officials how much more might be possible.

Women Asking Women

After that success, Lasher and his team brought together the women from the different campaign committees and asked the alumnae what they wanted to do next. The women came up with the next two fundraising projects: the one for Dartmouth Hall and the push to get 100 alumnae to give gifts of $1 million or more.

Once again, people didn’t think the ambitious goal was possible. Karen Francis DeGolia, a 1984 alumna, co-chairs the university’s campaign outreach efforts to alumni in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest with Briggs. A former automobile industry and technology executive, she has been closely involved with all three alumnae fundraising efforts and is one of the 103 women who gave at least $1 million. Still, she says that before the launch of the drive, she wouldn’t have believed it was possible to get 100 women to give such large gifts.

“I would have thought that was crazy,” Francis DeGolia says, noting that only four women made gifts of $1 million or more during the university’s last capital campaign, which ended in 2010. She says the success of the efforts built on each other — and drove alumnae excitement to participate. “If they had started with the 100 for $1 million, it probably wouldn’t have been as successful. We needed to start with a $100,000 level and get that going and get people to feel good about that.”

Despite her anger at Dartmouth’s fundraisers of the 1990s, Cogan Fascitelli kept her promise and is now a Dartmouth trustee and one of the organizers of the three programs. She led the Dartmouth Hall drive and says her gifts and pledges to the overall Call to Lead campaign total in the eight-figure range. She says the fact it was successful alumnae cultivating and asking other alumnae was critical to the success of the three women-led fundraising efforts — a first for Dartmouth.

“A lot of these women had never been asked before, and if they were, they hadn’t been asked by a group of women getting together determining to make this happen,” Cogan Fascitelli says.

While they may have come from different generations and backgrounds, leaders cultivated a sense of camaraderie and belonging. Some, like Cogan Fascitelli and Francis DeGolia, held dinners in their homes. Regional gatherings in places like New York City and the Bay Area along with larger events that took place on campus also helped.

Cogan Fascitelli says that she and her alumnae colleagues’ fundraising successes would not have been possible without the assistance today’s major-gift officers gave the women.

“I don’t know how much time Lasher and his team spent trying to put all these different plans together, but I know it was a lot; we couldn’t have done it without them,” she says. She points out that it was Lasher who helped her and the other alumnae leaders figure out that if they were going to ask for $1 million gifts, they had to give donors the flexibility to support whatever programs they wanted, whether that was scholarships, athletics, professorships, the arts, or something else. “Lasher never made us feel like second-class citizens. If anything, we were on the top of his list.”

Daring Leadership

The alumnae efforts have changed how Dartmouth will think about philanthropy going forward, Lasher says. He argues that if he or his staff had conceived of the three programs, they wouldn’t have been as ambitious. Already his team is thinking about how it will apply the lessons of the women-led campaigns as it builds similar programs for and with other affinity groups at the university.

Dartmouth will long benefit from what was once an untapped talent pool of volunteer fundraisers, Lasher says.

“Yes, it’s raised tremendous amounts of money for Dartmouth, but it’s brought women into a position that they might not have seen themselves in before. It’s brought generations of women together in philanthropic action to shape the future of the institution,” he says. “Those women now are seated at the table in leadership roles.”

Dartmouth’s alumnae-led fundraising efforts show just how much cash support and volunteer leadership nonprofit institutions are missing out on when they ignore the potential of today’s women donors. Women have more money and are making more of their families’ giving decisions than ever before, Loehr says.

Plus their approach to fundraising is often daring, she says, so it behooves nonprofit leaders to get them involved from the beginning.

“You want to ask women for their input to help design it because when they’re involved, they’re often bolder than staff, not from a bravado, macho way but because they have not been seen, they haven’t been asked or paid attention to,” Loehr says. “They’ve kind of been waiting for this moment.”

It’s not enough to find women who can make big gifts, Francis DeGolia says. She recommends that institutions looking to replicate the Dartmouth alumnae’s success should focus on finding women who can also put in the time to help create fundraising programs that women will want to be a part of.

Lasher agrees. “For these things to work, it has to be authentic,” he says. “You really have to let the leadership volunteers in the kitchen and have them really develop it, with your advice and counsel, but with their ownership, their accountability, and their spark of commitment. That’s what’s going to compel its success and propel it forward.”