Gifts To UA Total $62 Million

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/JASON IVESTER --01/12/12--
Brad Choate, vice chancellor for university advancement, speaks on university donors inside the administration building on the Fayetteville campus on Thursday, Jan. 12, 2012.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/JASON IVESTER --01/12/12-- Brad Choate, vice chancellor for university advancement, speaks on university donors inside the administration building on the Fayetteville campus on Thursday, Jan. 12, 2012.

Saturday, February 2, 2013

The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville raised nearly $62 million in private gifts in the first six months of the current fiscal year, a 15.4 percent increase compared with the first half of the previous year, development workers announced Friday.

The $61,798,225 raised between July 1 and Dec. 31 brings the campus more than halfway to its annual goal of raising $107 million for fiscal 2013, which ends June 30.

It compares with the $53,547,297 raised by fiscal 2012’s midpoint, UA spokesman Jennifer Holland said Friday afternoon.

The midpoint figure released Friday is known as a “production” total, she said. Such totals include outright cash gifts, new pledges, in kind gifts and new planned gifts secured during a particular fiscal year.

The Fayetteville campus has another measure that tracks actual receipts during a fiscal year.

The two totals differ because, for instance, some donors may pledge a gift with the option of paying it over a period of years, Holland said. Other donors may give a so called planned gift, which in some instances is payable upon the person’s death.

For tax purposes, givers tend to ramp up donations toward the end of a calendar year, so it’s not unusual that the midpoint figure is more than halfway to the goal, Holland said.

The amount raised so far has been designated for academic and athletic purposes, officials said in a news release. These include scholarships, diversity efforts, new construction and renovation, and library needs.

UA’s fundraising arm is the development office, which is part of the campus’s Division of Advancement.

The division ended fiscal 2012 with a $3.37 million budget deficit, having overspent its $10 million budget by roughly 30 percent.

By the time the deficit was publicly known in early December, less than a month remained in the six-month period that Friday’s report tracked.

“I haven’t heard of any kind of dip in donor giving because of the deficit,” Holland said.

Holland worked as a development officer in the Fayetteville campus’s Walton College of Business before taking her current job as director of development communications Jan. 2, she said.

For the previous fiscal year that ended June 30, UA-Fayetteville set a fundraising goal of $103 million, surpassing that with a production total of $108.1 million.

When the university announced that figure Aug. 13, it said it marked the first time it had exceeded $100 million in fundraising totals for two consecutive years. For the fiscal year ending June 30, 2011, it secured $121.3 million in overall private gifts.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 11 on 02/02/2013