Mutually assured survival: library fund-raising strategies in a changing economy

Information of the sort offered by Salamon helps contextualize the place institutions of higher learning, including libraries, occupy in the nonprofit sector, while throwing into sharp relief the economic and philanthropic environment in which fund-raisers function in the best of times. It is essential for librarians with fund-raising responsibilities to ingest this knowledge and maintain its currency by keeping apprised of proposed legislation affecting charitable giving as it moves through Congress, changes in tax laws as they pertain to charitable gifts and bequests, and marketplace fluctuations affecting the overall economy.

COPING WITH THE NEW REALITIES OF FUND-RAISING

With so many donor priorities now fixed on solving problems whose solutions are more urgent or visceral than those presented by academic libraries, a reappraisal of fund-raising objectives, strategies, and investment practices must take place within higher education, and specifically within libraries. As development professionals are waking up to the new realities of fund-raising in an altered environment, so too must librarians if they are to achieve success in securing outside funding.

Contemporary and future fund-raising will require librarians to express more than their institutional missions and case statements to funding agencies and donors. It will assume a level of expertise that extends beyond events planning, stewardship, and familiarity with a donor's intellectual and philanthropic passions. Successful fund-raising will demand librarians who comprehend on a profound level the societal importance of their work and who can persuasively convey this importance to sophisticated grant makers whose charitable predilections may not have leaned traditionally toward higher education, much less toward research libraries. Those librarians and library development officers able to make their institutional cases to individual donors and funding agencies (that may regard such investments as outside their philanthropic missions to cure disease and educate disadvantaged children) will succeed in the new funding environment.

Academic libraries, as integral components of their parent institutions, inevitably have been drawn into this shifting world of twenty-first-century philanthropy. Many are viewed by senior institutional administrators as being less relevant to the newer goals and priorities of the university. Just as the parent institution is compelled to justify itself as worthy of support, so must the library demonstrate that it is essential to the ongoing mission of the university and to the betterment of society at large. Simply chanting that the library is the heart of the university will no longer suffice--if it ever did. Proof is now required that the heart is still beating.

The task of successfully positioning the academic library within the context of a harsh economy, changing patterns of philanthropy, and institutional relevance is not, indeed cannot, be solely the province of the library's development office of that of the university. As Susan K. Martin, writing in the Journal of Academic Librarianship, states, "A library director intent on operating a successful development operation will need to devote time to fundraising ... The amount of time may increase to 25-50%, and perhaps more than 50% during a capital campaign" (Martin, 1998, p. 8). Martin does not limit library participation in fund-raising to the director, however. She adds, "Other members of the library staff will participate in the development process. A few people are obvious candidates: the head of special collections, the curator of manuscripts, and the gifts librarian" (Martin, 1998, p. 8).