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State of the University: The Power of Penn Campaign

At the University Council meeting on October 24, the annual State of the University presentations were made.

The President’s portion was introduced by President Amy Gutmann and then given by John Zeller, senior vice president of Development and Alumni Relations, who spoke about the current Power of Penn Campaign.

The Provost’s portion was introduced by Provost Wendell Pritchett and given by Zeke Emmanuel, Vice Provost for Global Initiatives, who talked about Three Pillars for Global Engagement. His portion will be in next week’s issue.

The Power of Penn Campaign

John Zeller, Senior Vice President, Development & Alumni Relations

I look forward to giving you a 30,000-foot overview of what the Power of Penn Campaign is about and how it came to be where we are today. It is an incredible partnership across the institution. It really is a team effort that begins with the great leadership we receive from Dr. Gutmann, Dr. Pritchett and also our Trustees, Deans, Development and Alumni Relations staff, and our students, who are great ambassadors for what it is we are trying to accomplish.

Let me begin with a fundamental question, “Why do you even do a Campaign?”

Obviously to raise the necessary resources to do our highest priorities. It gives us an institutional planning platform for determining priorities. Obviously we hope to stretch gifts if people want to participate. Engaging and attracting volunteers. It brings excitement and purpose but also creates urgency in that you have a timeframe in which you want to accomplish this. We develop shared goals and priorities that necessitate collaboration. Penn is really the poster child for opportunities in interdisciplinary work beginning with the Penn Integrates Knowledge professorships that Dr. Gutmann put in place. But even at the granular level, having 12 graduate and professional schools and four undergraduate schools physically co-located on the campus gives us tremendous opportunities. I always add this, and this is more for our staff, but the Development and Alumni Relations program is always significantly better at the end of a Campaign than it was at the beginning. We are really a good group of people, but we will grow over the next three years as well.

The Power of Penn Campaign timeline is a little unusual. Many people think of how Campaigns work in terms of quiet phases and public phases. But we actually have a Campaign within a Campaign. If you look at the early years—2014, 2015, 2016—what Dr. Gutmann crafted was the Penn Compact 2020. That was focused on the institution’s highest priorities of graduate and undergraduate aid, faculty, programs and support. That was really what we’d call a bridge Campaign coming out of the Making History Campaign. This was kind of a first in our field to try to do this. It also accommodated the fact that we had seven new Deans and two new center directors that were appointed during this period of time. It gave them an opportunity to build out their messaging—their core priorities—as part of our overall ongoing planning process. After that, as these new leaders began to formulate their strategies going forward, Campaigns began to emerge as a conversation. Rather than having 12 disparate Campaigns or 18 different Campaigns, Dr. Gutmann and I talked about the fact, particularly with the extension of her presidency, that it was a great opportunity to leverage, as an institution, the energy and focus of all of the Schools and centers as well as University priorities. Hence the Power of Penn Campaign was launched. We publicly launched it in April and it goes through the end of the fiscal year 2021.

But how did we get to the Campaign goal structure?

We, as an institution, have always done annual planning and five-year planning. Within the Development of the Alumni Relations program, we were also looking every year at what were the highest priorities for that year and what were the subsequent years’ highest priorities. When you begin to do a Campaign, you put a hard dollar need to those priorities, and then develop fundraising goals associated with them. And that was the work we did in 2016-2017. That is where the Strategic Funding Priorities emerged. These are the highest priorities across the institution for all of the programs as well as for the University itself. The second piece is Increased Engagement. In our last Campaign and then post-Campaign, the Penn Compact 2020 and now the Power of Penn, we have very purposefully focused on engaging our constituency—our Penn family, if you will—both domestically and internationally, bringing them closer to the institution. And that engagement may take on any number of forms. A classic example is our Penn Alumni Interviewing Program. In 2008-2009, that program had around 4,000 alumni interviewers around the world. We now have over 20,000. People are very anxious to have some role in what the future of the institution is. The third block is what we call Aspirational Opportunities. We know that when you launch a Campaign, there are things that we would love to have that aren’t necessarily the highest priorities or that we feel would fall within that time span. But we also know these Campaigns take on a life of their own and many times opportunities present themselves that afford the opportunity for donors and institutional priorities to merge.

Together, that’s how this Campaign was assembled. Trust me, it took about 24 months of work to do this and I summarized it very quickly. This is how we got to the $4.1 billion number:

  • $334 million for undergraduate student financial aid, $235 million for graduate and professional student support—that’s roughly $560 million focused on student access. But also coupling that with dollars raised in the previous Campaign, that’s well over a billion dollars that we have directed in this area.
  • $500 million for faculty and staff endowments and term support funds—the recruitment and the retention of the most talented faculty, directors and curators is really a very high priority.
  • Strategic capital projects, roughly $605 million. Then research programs and initiatives, $2,406 million. This is predominantly term funding—dollars come in, maybe over a four or five-year period that supports a specific activity of a faculty member, a center director or a University project. And that’s where $4.1 billlion came from, and it’s not an arbitrary number that was just picked out of the sky. It was very strategically thought out that this is what we need to raise our funds for. As the chairman of the Campaign would say, and Dr. Gutmann says as well, “This is a floor, not a ceiling.” If we can raise more, which we hope we will, we will do such.

These are the initial spaces that have been identified as part of the capital projects, and you can see they literally span across the entire campus. The New College House West for student life, the entrepreneurship program that has been characterized as the Venture Lab, now Tangen Hall, to the biggest capital project, the new Patient Pavilion, which is currently under construction in Medicine. The impact is very broad-based.

And how does this lay in against the type of funds? You basically have three categories of where funds can go. A large portion of the pie is Term, that’s roughly 51%. That’s very consistent with where we were on the last Campaign. It’s really spendable money that comes in to support various projects, priorities and research. About 33% of this will go into endowment. About 16% for capital, which is pretty consistent with our prior performance, but it’s also pretty consistent with the national norm is for capital Campaigns—much is actually raised for capital projects.

This is a quick snapshot of how these goals were determined. There are 12 schools and six centers and their Campaign components. This lines up with Dr. Gutmann’s tenant of growing inclusion, sparking innovation and accelerating impact. These are just some representative examples of the Campaign priorities and how they fit underneath those buckets. There are many more details specific to that.

I would encourage you, if you haven’t looked at it, to go to Penn’s homepage, scroll down and you’ll see the Power of Penn. It is a website that you literally can track through to any School, any center, any University priority and see the descriptions about them and how they fit within the context of the overall Power of Penn initiative, https://powerofpenn.upenn.edu/

Lastly, engagement in the Campaign with our constituencies has been hallmark of the President’s priorities since the day she arrived. It’s paid off in many ways with great dividends. We thought we’d have some fun with it as part of the Campaign. So we created what we call Penn Points. This is on QuakerNet. You get a point for donating, a point for volunteering and a point for attending. The three maximum points go back to zero each year. We haven’t quite figured out what we’re going to do at the end of the Campaign in terms of the award, maybe some nice Penn socks or something like that, but we’ll see. It’s Go, Give and Lead. It has resonated incredibly well with our volunteer group.

About the Campaign kickoff and regional tour: The President has been on the road a lot. We kicked it off here in Philadelphia. We’ve gone to New York, DC, Boston, San Francisco and LA. We’re off to London in November. We’ll do Hong Kong in March and then a concluding program here in Philadelphia on April 2. Our Homecoming campus celebration will be the Penn Palooza, November 10. You need to come out, it’s going to be a lot of fun.

We are doing what we call “Campaign in a Box.” We probably have to come up with a better name than that, but it basically means we pack up all the elements of the Campaign with all the paraphernalia and we’re taking it to 21 different cities throughout the United States over the course of the next four months. It will feature local alumni speaking about their careers, their connection to Penn, interviewed by one of our volunteer leaders. We did this in Chicago with three Trustees and it was immensely successful. This is another way that we’re engaging our constituency in regions where we might not take a larger program.

That’s the high-level University update, and I look forward to returning to this group and giving you the results at some point after 2021.

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