Following the money

By Boaz Dvir

When Terry Hynes took the helm of the College in 1994, she lacked a key weapon in a dean’s arsenal: fundraising firepower. She had little experience in this crucial category.

“There were concerns about her fundraising abilities,” said Prof. Dave Ostroff, chair of the Department of Telecommunication.

So what did Hynes do? She dove right in. She asked for a report on all contributions of $1,000 or more during the previous three years to identify potential donors to the fellowship endowment started in Ralph Lowenstein’s name when he left the dean’s position. She noticed that one giver – Jerry Davis, ADV 1968, of Jacksonville – mailed in a $5,000 check without being solicited in person. “I figured if we met with him,” she said, “we might be able to get him to give us $20,000.”

Hynes asked the College’s first development officer, Diane Crawford Evans, to set up a meeting with Davis for both of them. It took nearly a year, mainly because Davis, who founded and ran Computer Management Sciences, was busy taking his company public. They finally met at a College alumni reunion at Alltel Stadium in Jacksonville and later for lunch. That’s when Davis said he was considering giving $100,000.

After lunch, as they waited for the valet to bring their car so they could drive to Cocoa Beach to meet with USA Today founder Al Neuharth, Hynes turned to Evans and said, “This fundraising business is easy.”

She still remembers the look Evans gave her. “As soon as I saw her face,” Hynes said, “I knew I’d just said the dumbest thing Diane had ever heard, and she was trying to find a polite way to tell that to a neophyte.”

Yet Hynes’ fundraising naïveté paid off. After touring Weimer Hall with her in 1996 and seeing its outdated computers, Davis donated $2.7 million, which garnered a 100 percent state match.

The College set up the $5.4 million Jerry Davis Technology Fund and has been updating its computers ever since.

“When you invest in something,” Davis said, “you invest in the person who’s running that enterprise.”

Davis, who survived stomach and prostate cancer, was only getting started. Together with his wife, Judy, who beat breast cancer, he gave $5 million to UF’s Shands Cancer Center in 1998. The state matched it, helping to create a $10 million endowment.

Today, Davis, who prior to meeting Hynes kept his Gator involvement mostly to football, chairs the UF Foundation board and serves on Shands’ board.

Fun fundraising

Besides a healthy curiosity, several factors propelled Hynes’s fundraising efforts, including the realization that the College needed private funding to achieve many of its goals and the sense that few people around campus expected little from her in this area. Some of the low expectations stemmed from her lack of fundraising experience, some from her predecessor’s success – Lowenstein had posted 18 years of steady growth – and some from the fact that she was UF’s first female dean of an academic college, outside of nursing.

“One high-ranking administrator on campus said, ‘I wonder if those girls [Hynes and Evans] can do it,’ “ she recalled.

Hynes had little time to sharpen her fundraising tools. UF’s It’s Performance That Counts capital campaign started its five-year countdown in 1996. The College’s goal: a scary $13.1 million. So Hynes hit the road, using the opportunity to get to know alumni and friends of the College.

“I’ve been in her presence on the ‘campaign trail,’ and I know the value of having a dean who is ever-present externally as well as internally,” said Margo Pope, JM 1970, associate editor of the St. Augustine Record.

Sitting at a dinner table with Hynes and UF alumni during a Performance event in Jacksonville in the mid-1990s, Pope never guessed Hynes was new to this.

“She kept us all talking and connected during the evening,” Pope recalled, “as if we had known each other for ages.” 

Home to one of the largest Gator Clubs in the country, Jacksonville proved fertile ground for Hynes. During the campaign, she received a call from Allbritton Communications officials saying they wanted to swap space on the Jacksonville cable lineup for their Northeast Florida ABC affiliate with the College’s WUFT-TV.

Since Northeast Florida never fell under WUFT’s coverage area (another PBS station, WJCT, is based in downtown Jacksonville), Hynes agreed to trade signals – for the right price. Let’s say, $1 million.

Allbritton officials didn’t balk at this figure. But when Hynes picked up the phone to finalize the details, she changed her mind. She decided to bargain for another $200,000, which would qualify the donation for a 70 percent state match.

“I love doing deals,” she said. “I bought and sold four homes in California. I lost money, but I loved the deals.”

In the last moment, she hesitated, asking herself: Is it worth risking $1 million? But she pushed on, and Allbritton officials blinked first. They forked over $1.2 million, helping the College set up a $2 million endowment that supports WUFT and telecommunication grad students.

The donation also helped the College become the first to surpass its Performance campaign goal. Halfway through the campaign, the College had raised $16 million. The UF Foundation responded by moving the finish line to million marker 21.

By campaign’s end, the College surpassed $27 million, more than doubling the original goal and burying any concerns about Hynes’ fundraising abilities.

“She showed them,” said Rebecca Hoover, PR 1982, the College’s director of Development since 2000, referring to the doubters.

In Hynes’ 12 years, the College has raised – through private and corporate contributions, state matches, grants and other fundraising means – nearly $70 million.

“She left a very strong record of fundraising,” Lowenstein said.

Spending the money

After raising a hefty chunk quickly, Hynes shifted focus to make sure the College invested, managed and spent the funds in accord with donors’ intent, she said. She became deeply involved in the budgeting process year-round. This raised concerns among several faculty and staff members.

ACEJMC’s recent report, which recommended the College’s reaccreditation, cited Hynes’ budget micromanagement as a main reason for finding the College noncompliant on one of nine standards – Mission, Governance and Administration.

Hynes said she had little choice, for several reasons:

• The College went through four business managers in five years, forcing her to stay on top of financial details.
• The implementation of a new UF-wide human-resources system, PeopleSoft, taxed the staff in recent years and demanded her hands-on involvement.
• The Wall Street collapse at the turn of the century made endowment returns unpredictable.

“If I hadn’t been involved in the budget process,” Hynes said, “when the stock market fell, we would have been $70,000  short of the scholarship funding we had promised to students.”

The College used to give out endowment returns to students and faculty based on projected income. Hynes instituted a system that distributes the funds only after income posts to the account, eliminating inaccurate predictions that can cause disappointment.

“We now earn the money before we spend it,” she said.

This system delayed some payments, especially in the first few years after Hynes launched it in 1999, but it also kept the College solvent.

We did it at just the right time,” she said.

In recent years, Hynes has returned to fundraising – although to a lesser extent than when she started.

“We’ve been trying to expand the pool of donors,” she said.

Hoover tries to get her in front of potential donors as much as possible.

“She’s an incredible public speaker,” Hoover said. “She shares her vision with alumni in a way that captures their hearts, spirits – and wallets.”