URI must act more like a private school to compete

GIVING THEIR ALL: Michael J. Smith, president of the University of Rhode Island Foundation, says the people who give to Habitat for Humanity or the United Way are the people who are also going to be URI donors. / COURTESY URI FOUNDATION
GIVING THEIR ALL: Michael J. Smith, president of the University of Rhode Island Foundation, says the people who give to Habitat for Humanity or the United Way are the people who are also going to be URI donors. / COURTESY URI FOUNDATION

At a time when public funding for institutions of higher education can be limited, the role of fundraising foundations such as the University of Rhode Island Foundation becomes increasingly important to support scholarships, research, faculty and other vital educational needs. Michael J. Smith took over as president of the URI Foundation Dec. 1. He continues a tradition that saw donations raised by URI in fiscal 2011 reach approximately $20 million, an amount that has stayed steady over the past five years.
Fundraisers have a large pool of potential donors to choose from; URI alumni currently number approximately 170,000, with 48 percent residing in Rhode Island.

PBN: Can you tell us about the foundation and what it does?
SMITH: The foundation is in place to try to meet the needs and the priorities of the University of Rhode Island as determined by the university administration and the deans, to engage and create relationships with alumni, friends, corporations and other foundations that will ultimately help meet the needs that the campus set. It was founded in 1957. The endowment [valued at $102 million as of June 30] is part of and managed by the foundation.

PBN: Are alumni the group you most often target for donations?
SMITH: Building relationships with alumni is what we do the most.
Then there’s a very significant portion that would be considered friends and those would be parents, spouses of alumni that are interested in our university, and so there’s a whole grouping that would fall under “friends.” And then there’s the corporate and foundations-relations area that we create partnerships with, business partnerships with. We try to add to their bottom line in the same aspects we hope they will meet the needs of our campus, whether it be student needs, faculty needs or research needs.

PBN: How do most people give to URI? Is there any one vehicle that you find people use more than others? SMITH: The main vehicle for giving to URI is cash gifts and that comes in the form of people writing a check. The other piece that parlays into significant gifts, quite honestly, is there are a lot of stock transfers as well. … A great way to make a charitable contribution is appreciated securities with capital gains if you sold it yourself. You can use those capital gains to increase your charitable deduction and you don’t have to pay the taxes on it.

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PBN: Do donors usually designate a specific purpose that they want their money used for and, if so, what purposes seem to be the most popular?
SMITH: Yes, the donors designate where their contributions would go and that’s really all over the board. Sometimes it’s for a scholarship in a certain area; it could be a scholarship that goes into an account for general scholarships. It could go into an account that might be created by the donor that is for support of a scholarship in a specific area or college or department of the university.
So the donor really has the choice of [designating contributions to] where their passion is and where their passion is where they’re going to give the most. One of our main focuses is to try to match up the needs of our university with a donor’s passion, so you win on both ends.

PBN: Do you feel like you know enough about the URI alumni body in terms of identifying passions and then trying to match them?
SMITH: Well, obviously, I need to learn more about it. But we have [workers who] have been there for quite some time who understand a lot of the alumni body. They have relationships with a lot of the alumni and understand what their interests are.
In many cases, we just need to sit down across the table with our alumni and our friends and ask them: “What area of the university are you most passionate about?” and then be able to talk to them about whether the priorities and needs of the university, especially in that area, can be matched up.

PBN: Who is your competition for having those kinds of conversations right now?
SMITH: I never look at this as competition. You can always say that the university down the road is competition, but when it comes to universities you always seem to act with one at a more significant level than another. That’s usually where you got your undergraduate degree. So there doesn’t seem to be that conflict.

PBN: Do you see competition in the rest of the philanthropic, nonprofit world?
SMITH: The people who give to Habitat for Humanity or the United Way are the people who are also going to be [URI] donors. I think it’s important for us to promote philanthropy in general because if people are philanthropists they’ll give to more than one. … [That] makes the pie bigger.

PBN: How important are donations to scholarship funding?
SMITH: Donations are a critical piece for our student financial-aid package. Scholarships are a huge need, with 60 to 65 percent of our students qualifying as students of need.

PBN: Is it more difficult to raise funds for a public university, a state-supported one, than it would be for a private university?
SMITH: Yes, it is more of a challenge. It certainly is an issue within a public institution that our alumni base and people of Rhode Island need to understand that a public institution has great needs beyond what the state is providing … we need [alumni] to understand that their support is what’s going to make their degree so much more valuable. … Quite honestly, we have to act and feel as we move forward like a private institution. The way we do business has to be more like a private institution. •INTERVIEW
Michael J. Smith
POSITION: President of the University of Rhode Island Foundation
BACKGROUND: He most recently served as vice president of development for the Kansas State University Foundation, a position he held from 1997 to 2011. He has had a 20-year career in higher education philanthropy, including work on three major campaigns at institutions in Kansas that netted more than $800 million collectively. He led the development team that increased charitable gifts to Kansas State from $21 million to more than $100 million.
EDUCATION: Bachelor’s degree, animal science, Kansas State University, 1982; master’s degree in education, University of Kansas, 1986
FIRST JOB: Paper route
RESIDENCE: Narragansett
AGE: 51

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