 Hello, I'm Leigh Ann George, Coordinator of the Spec Survey Program at the Association of Research Libraries, and I'd like to thank you for joining us for this Spec Survey Webcast. Today we'll hear about the results of the survey on library development. These results have been published in Spec Kit 359 and it is freely available at publications.arl.org. Before I begin, there are just a couple of announcements. First, everyone but the presenters has been muted to cut down background noise, so if you're part of a group today, feel free to speak among yourselves. But we do want you to join the conversation by typing questions in the chat box in the lower left corner of your screen. At the end of the presentation, I'll read the questions aloud and the presenters will answer them. This webcast is being recorded and will send all registrants the slides and a link to the recording in about a week. Now, let me introduce today's presenters. Brian Keith is the Associate Dean for Administrative Services and Faculty Affairs for the George A. Smothers Libraries at the University of Florida. Joe Salem is University Librarian at Michigan State University Libraries. And Kurt Kaminski is Associate Director of Development at Duke University Libraries. You can use this hashtag in your lower right corner of the screen, ARL Spec Kit 359 to continue the conversation with them on Twitter. Now, let me turn the presentation over to Brian. Thank you, Leigh Ann. As an overview of our presentation, Joe, Kurt and I are going to cover these topics. Joe will begin with development activities and donor access and cover the backgrounds of library development officers and their professional activities. I will cover the involvement of library directors and university leadership, how personnel are evaluated, and how libraries and foundations coordinate efforts. Kurt will cover capital campaign goals and outcomes and communications and boards. We have a lot to cover, so here is Joe. Thanks, Brian. As Brian indicated, I will be discussing development programs overall, programs overall, and the position of the Chief Library Development Officer, as well as access to donors. When I made the most sense, I have tried to offer comparisons to the 2006 Spec Kit to document the change over time. The components of the Libraries Development Program is a good example of noteworthy change over time, as you will see on this chart, and in some cases, a lack thereof. When you look at the chart here, the most noteworthy change over time was in, quote, a history of private support in access of $500,000 per year, which increased 14 percent from 2006 to 2018. Another noteworthy, although less so, change was a decrease in the number of friends of the library organizations. The rest of the components were either similarly distributed among respondents over time. We also asked respondents to indicate the level of access to donor groups. The majority of respondents have unrestricted access to only four groups of donors. Current fiscal year donors to the library donor groups who have lapsed for a year, current library employees, and library retirees. The majority of respondents also enjoy limited or special project access to other groups, including current students, current year and lapsed donors to other areas of the institution, parents and grandparents of current students and alumni, and university trustees. The majority also enjoy unrestricted access to, quote, other potential donor groups. Respondents were asked to define these, and there was great variation, but noteworthy examples included community borrowers, event attendees, foundations, and friends of the library. We did want to see what kind of change there was in access over the 12-year period from 2006 to 2018. This chart reflects that change. We did was combine both restricted and unrestricted or restricted access and unrestricted access to get a total idea of access to donors, and looked at the change over time. It is worth noting that all combined access to all donor groups increased during this period. Library employees, retired employees, institutional employees outside the library, that big group of other potential donors, non-donors, the never-givers, to other areas of the institution, lapsed fiscal year donors to other areas of the institution, and retired employees of the institution outside the library, all went up 10 to 20 percent. The rest increased even more significantly between 2006 and 2018. I will now shift my focus onto the Chief Library Development Officer. In addition to asking about the programs led by the Chief Library Development Officer, we saw data on the positions and notes filling them. Of initial interest is the educational attainment of the Chief Library Development Officer. The BA or BS degree was clearly the most common among development officers in 2018. The decline in the MLIS or equivalent is also noteworthy. In 2006, 19 percent of development officers in the data held the MLIS or equivalent, and by 2018 it was down to 10 percent. I may speculate that the training and background for these incumbents has been more focused on professional fundraising as a result. The professional preparedness for the Chief Library Development Officer is also evident in their professional experience. We asked respondents to indicate the position held by the Chief Library Development Officer just prior to their current one. The majority of responding institutions had development officers who held other fundraising positions in higher education, but not within the library, just prior to their current position. The next most common experience was a fundraising position, not within higher education or libraries. Very few were promoted from other positions in the library. Finally, the reporting lines for the Chief Library Development Officer were sought. Although there was some variation, the most commonly reported was at the department head level. There was variation in the response to, quote, other level, but many of these were to units outside the library like central development. AUL level may be somewhat underreported or confused in the data as well, because some of the responses to, quote, other level included directly to the dean or director. We also asked responding institutions to indicate the percentage of their time spent on various activities. As you can see from this chart, all activities reflect fairly even portions of the time commitment for the Chief Library Development Officer with the exception of major gifts, which represents the majority of their time. These activities were also stable between 2006 and 2018, again with the exception of major gifts, which has increased in time commitment by 18% during that time period. I will now transition to Brian, who will discuss the library director's role in development. Thank you, Joe. As Joe mentioned, we were also interested in the director's activities. Only 25% of institutions require the library director to spend a specific amount of time on fundraising activities, which is comparable to the findings in 2006. When there is a requirement, the average amount required is 50% of the director's time. Despite a limited number of institutions with requirements, library directors do actually spend a significant amount of time engaged in fundraising on average 36% of their time. And a number of comments suggest that soft requirements or expectations do exist. Is there a point when library directors become involved? We examined financial thresholds for a variety of fundraising activities, and many institutions do require a specific gift or proposal level for director participation. 60 to 70% of respondents reported there was a minimum for director involvement in strategy sessions, prospect meetings, gift closings, and proposal presentations. And as the orange figures on the chart indicate, for all four of these development activities, there's a pronounced increase in the frequency of required gift levels for director participation from the 2006 figures. The dollar amount of these thresholds for director participation range widely from activity to activity. For example, for gift closings, the lowest level reported was $5,000, and the highest requirement reported was $250,000, with an average of about $79,000. The range of minimums for director phone calls to donors range from $500 to $250,000, with an average of about $77,000. We found that over 70% of library directors participate in fundraising calls without the chief library director or other fundraising staff members, which is also comparable to the figures from 2006. Based on the comments received, the solo interactions are often the result of a personal relationship with the donor, and the solo interactions are not typically proposal deliveries, but relationship building or sustaining in nature. We also investigated the evaluation measures used for those involved in development. The results for development officers and other development personnel and library directors all showed show the importance of metrics and evaluation. For library development officers, a variety of performance measures were deemed important or very important. The most common metrics were dollars raised, numbers of asks, closures, qualified donors, and visits, and their overall goal level. As reflected in the orange figures, the importance of visits, of counts for qualified donors, closures, proposals, and moves, along with qualified donors, all saw significant increases from 2006 to current. In addition to evaluation measures, we also queried on evaluation authority, who actually performs the evaluations. This was of interest because we felt the relationship would reflect how development personnel are organizationally situated. Most frequently, the evaluation of the library development officer is conducted jointly by the library director and a senior manager in the university level development unit. This was the case in 43% of respondents. For library directors, an interesting variety of development performance measures were also reported as important or very important, which seems reasonable given the reported amount of time devoted to fundraising by these leaders. Dollars raised and overall dollar goal were the most common important or very important performance measures reported in 2006 and 2018. However, both of these measures were reported with significantly less frequency in our study. Counts for visits, qualified donors, proposals, and closures were more commonly reported as important or very important performance metrics for library directors this year. We also wanted to learn how the library development program was supported in the larger organization. So, our libraries positioned and supported comparably to other units in terms of fundraising opportunities. Unfortunately, nearly 60% of respondents indicated this was not the case. In the 2006 study, 53% of respondents had indicated their libraries were comparably situated, so this represents a 12% increase in these negative responses from 2006. Comments from this survey's respondents point out that other units have assigned development personnel and more development support staff. They also indicated the libraries do not have as many highly rated prospects and suffer from a lack of an alumni base. Less than half of respondents reported active fundraising on behalf of the library by other campus administrators, like college deans, provosts, and presidents. While describing the importance of these supportive efforts in cultivating and recognizing donors, the submitted comments suggest this assistance is in fact infrequently and typically only received in response to requests from the library. In contrast, 68% of respondents reported support from development personnel in other colleges or units, including the central fundraising units for the university. At the college level, the support often takes the form of joint proposals and seems to represent institutional cultures of collaboration. Examples of the centralized support include regional and international development personnel and annual gift and plan giving programs in which the library participates. The library development officer's involvement at the campus level is another indicator of the library development program's organizational circumstances. Per our responses, 61% of library development officers are invited to participate in institutional level meetings about major prospects, while roughly equal numbers are either always or never invited. That library development officer engagement pattern that we just saw closely matches the responses for how often the library director is invited to participate in institutional level strategy meetings about fundraising. Very few library directors are always at the table, and a comparable number are always excluded. Not surprisingly, the responses indicate that the occasional invitation of the director is on a case-by-case basis based on the prospect. In regards to institutional fundraising activities, like phonathons and direct mail solicitation, the library is most commonly an occasional explicit donor option, and 37% of responses the library is always listed. Additionally, 98% of respondents reported that the library is included on the institution level giving website as a possible gift designation. Libraries engage in a wide range of fundraising activities in varying levels of partnership with the parent institution. Our studies sought to determine how these activities were staffed and funded. We found, not surprisingly, many centralized systems like IT and centralized supports like record keeping and research were most significantly staffed and funded by the university. Only in the cases of development communications and major gift and special event activities were the staffing and funding more significantly supported by the libraries. Now, I will hand it over to Kurt. Thanks, Brian. More than two-thirds of the responding libraries indicated that they are in a capital campaign or had recently finished one. While there are many factors that can determine whether an academic research library succeeds or fails in raising money from things outside their control like the economy or tax laws to things for which they should have more control like size of their donor base and organizational structure, we looked at how each of these libraries responded to several questions on the survey to try to determine if there were obvious factors that might predict success or failure. The 13 libraries that claimed they had recently completed a capital campaign are sorted here by how near they came to achieving their campaign goal with a high of 200% over goal and a low of 76% under goal. Eight libraries met or exceeded their capital campaign goals while five did not. In short, within this group, the libraries that met or exceeded their capital campaign goals were more likely than the mean to have determined their capital campaign goal either on their own or in consultation with the university, central development office or the foundation office, to have the development office overseeing the communications operation, to have a development board, and surprisingly, to have fewer staff devoted 100% of their time to development work. Of the 44 libraries responding to the question, how and by whom was the library capital campaign goal established, 48% claimed the decision was made jointly between the university and the libraries. 23% said that the libraries alone decided and 29% said that the university alone decided. The campaign goals of the eight libraries that met or exceeded their target were determined jointly between the university and the library and by the library alone, 63% and 25% of the time respectively. In only one case was the library's goal determined by the university alone. For the five libraries that failed to meet or exceeded their campaign goal, there's a different story. The goal for none of them was decided jointly between the university and the library. 40% of the time the goal was determined by the library alone and 60% of the time by the university alone. Overall, the library's campaign was determined 71% of the time, but either the library alone or the library jointly with the university. The eight libraries that had successful campaigns exceeded that mark 88% of the time, while the unsuccessful libraries fell far short, 40%. There are many benefits of better coordination and communication with central development, including setting realistic campaign goals, sharing information about prospects, and coordinating solicitations. Of the 51 libraries that responded to the question, do the library's communications professionals or unit report through the library development officer? Only 16% indicated communications fell under development, while 84% said it did not. But those libraries that met or exceeded their campaign goals were nearly three times more likely to have communications reporting to development, while those libraries that failed to meet or exceed their campaign goals were nearly identical to the overall mean. Of the 60 participating libraries, 52% said they had a development board. Those libraries that met or exceeded their campaign goals were more likely 63% of the time to have a development board, while those that failed to meet or exceed their campaign goal were significantly less likely to have a development board, only 20% of the time. This is one of the things that surprised me the most. The eight libraries that met or exceeded their campaign goals at 1.375 FTE had fewer staff than the mean of 1.48, while the five libraries that didn't meet or exceed their campaign goals at 2.6 FTE had significantly more staff than the mean. Of the eight libraries that met or exceeded their campaign goal, the chief library development officer is evaluated 88% of the time by either the library director alone or jointly between the library director and a senior officer in central development. Only 12% of the time is the LDO evaluated only by someone in central development. Of those five libraries that failed to meet their campaign goals, none of the chief library development officers are evaluated jointly by the library director and central development. They are evaluated 40% of the time by the library director alone and 60% of the time by central development alone. This is just another indication perhaps that a closer working relationship with central development is extremely beneficial. So to conclude, we've seen some evidence of the further professionalization of development programs among responding institutions between 2006 and 2018. Chief library development officers are decreasingly coming from within the library, increasingly have professional fundraising experience, spend more of their time engaged in major gifts, and although still relatively restricted, enjoy more access to donor groups in 2018 than they did in 2006. A couple of other changes over the past 12 years. Sadly, we saw an increase in the percentage of institutions that feel they are not positioned comparably to other units on campus. Perhaps this perception relates to the increase in the use of development outcome metrics in the evaluations of library directors and development officers. Happily, however, we saw an increase in access to donors and prospects across a variety of categories and the majority of respondents reported active engagement by development officers from colleges and other units in library fundraising. Additionally, libraries are benefiting from significant central investment in the form of personnel and cost coverage for development systems, supports, and activities. The libraries that met or exceeded their capital campaign goals were more likely than the mean to have determined their campaign goal either on their own or in coordination with the university's development or foundation office. They were more likely to have the development office overseeing communications operations to have a development board and have fewer staff devoted 100% to development work. Thank you, Brian, Joe, and Kurt. And now we welcome your questions. Please join the conversation by typing questions in the chat box in the lower right corner of your screen. And I'll read your questions and our presenters will answer them. And Brian, I think our first question may be for you. When you were talking about evaluation measures, you mentioned the number of moves. What's a move? So the idea is that that's someone moving in the chain of being a prospect in the cultivation process to the ask process through varying phases of that process. That's what we're referring to by moves. And while we give our participants a chance to type in their questions, the spec kit has quite a variety of documents that were submitted by respondents to the survey. Are there any particular examples that stood out for you? This is Joe. I can take a first kind of response to that. I think there are really great documents and examples that were shared. One section, I think, illuminates one of the questions that I was in my section, the one about where the development officer reports. So the department head level might be getting a little confused in the data with the idea that the development officer is a department head. There's a whole section in the, and of course it's not fully representative and this might just be by chance, but there's a section of org charts within the documents. And all of the org charts have the development officer reporting directly to the library director. With one exception, there's one from Penn State, which that's my former institution. The example there is the other half. It's a dual reporting line. So it's the org chart within central development and I happen to know that within the library, the reporting structure is up through the library dean in the library's half. So I think that question of where it sits in the organization is, it may vary less than the data suggests. There are a couple of other sections that I think are really noteworthy. There's a section on value statements, its title statements on intellectual freedom, inclusion, and diversity. Brian's institution, Florida, has a nice statement on intellectual freedom and inclusion. My former institution does as well on diversity. And then University of Toronto has a really nice statement. I think it's good to get the values of the organization out there as part of this work. The capital campaign section is really good. Iowa State has really nice materials. NC State does too. It's hard to not have good materials when you can have a photo with Michelle Obama and it's part of your campaign documentation. And then the last one I thought that was really worth noting, there's a section on friends groups and development boards and there are really good documentation there. It's probably a little bit drier. But the University of Kentucky has what they call a national advisory board and they've shared the constitution for that board which really spells everything out very nicely and I think would be a good document to look at if organizing a new board. So to piggyback on Joe's response to that, one of the things I would point out about the statements on intellectual freedom, inclusion, and diversity, what we were actually seeking were examples and I think these are great statements, particularly in that one of them is from the University of Florida where I work. But one of the things that we had asked was to receive examples of how these were actually used in donor communications. We were interested to see if that was the case and we regrettably didn't get specific examples of that. So that's kind of a gap in what we had hoped for. And then I also thought what was interesting reading were the gift and donations policies which are included. One of the things we found out that was interesting was that there are, there's kind of a disparity between institutions who have formal conditions for accepting gifts and kinds and requiring processing money for that. And so I thought it was interesting to see the gifts and donations policies and how they touched on gifts and kinds. And so I would draw people's attention to that. So join us by typing your questions into the chat box and we'll get answers from our presenters. A little bit more on the boards. About a little over half of the respondents said that there was a library development board or even a student advisory board. And you asked if they were getting either financial support or advocacy support from those groups. Can you talk a little bit more about the role of boards that you found in the survey? Well, it was more common for the library development boards. Kind of, I would think this would have been intuitive, the idea that they're more frequently both involved in financial support and also through advocacy. The fringe group is less engaged. Most other groups are less engaged in advocacy and then the library development board. The alumni association, student advisory groups, those are almost entirely engaged in advocacy and do not have a financial element typically. Yeah, one of the things that this gets into and there's additional material in the spec kit, we were trying to get into the idea of the expansion beyond fundraising to something that we described as friend raising and the idea of advocacy and support that wasn't necessarily tied to many of those metrics that we covered in the evaluation measures that were used for people involved in development. And so that's kind of in the broad stroke what our findings were. Anything else that kind of surprised you from the survey results or comparing the 2006 survey to this year's survey? Yeah, this is Kurt here. As I mentioned near the end of my piece, the one data point that really surprised me was that the libraries that failed to meet or exceed their campaign goals had twice as many FTE devoted 100% of their time to library development. And I'd like to go back and when the other 28 libraries that are in the middle of a campaign have finished and find out if the numbers that we found with the small group of 13 hold true, but it seemed to indicate to me that just throwing more staff at the issue isn't necessarily the problem, that it's actually much more important to have some of these other things in place like a board or to have communications reporting to development and to have a very, very close relationship with the folks in central development. So that surprised me a little bit. I guess this is Joe. I guess for me the one data point that was so much surprising was the decrease in emphasis on the dollar goal for the library director, that the increased emphasis in that time period from 2006 to 2018 was on activity. We've seen from the other data point that there are more big years for libraries, history of giving over 500,000 per year was increasing among respondents in that time period. So it might just follow that setting the goals around activity is better and that the money just kind of follows from that. But from a kind of a metrics perspective or just some of what you hear anecdotally, it seems like there's more pressure around the actual dollar amount, but the data didn't seem to back that up. For me there were kind of two findings. One of them was the support for fundraising from the development officers and other colleges or units and that I think is going to vary, as I mentioned in my comments, based upon the institutional culture. And so if you're not from a institution with a strong culture in that, it may be more of a surprising finding. But we found that the respondents majority indicated that this was actively occurring. And then again, I guess reflecting the things that we spend time thinking and talking about at our institutions, I found the gift and kind data that we got to be interesting. And the fact that such a significant percent, I think about a third of the amounts raised that are reported were on average from gift and kind, from our respondents. And there was such a small percentage that actually associated what is a fairly significant number that we're associating that with any sort of requirement that people contribute to the processing of those materials. I'd found that kind of an interesting relationship. And again, it may say something about the institution where I work and some of the conversations we're having here. Obviously donor communications are really important for development activities. And you asked about different types of both print and electronic communications. Are you seeing any trends or changes or what's more successful than others? Well, I think that the data confirmed what I've noticed here at Duke, and that's for whatever reason. People, donors are interested in receiving the library newsletter electronically, but they still want, if there's a magazine, they still want that in print format. And the data confirmed that, but we did a survey probably about five to seven years ago now with our donors, and that's what they told us. They said they, even though we could put the magazine online, they still wanted to get it in the mail, but the newsletter was fine to get monthly electronically. And I think that the data also confirmed some things that just make sense to me intuitively that people want to be thanked. They want their acknowledgement letter to be something that they get in the mail and libraries continue to do that and not thank people in an electronic way. We have time for a few more questions, so go ahead and type those in your chat box. While we're waiting for any last questions, sorry, Liam. This is Joe, while we're waiting for any more questions, I just wanted to thank everyone for attending, but also all the respondents, because the data was really great to work with, and it was, this is not the first time I've done a specket, but the first time I got to compare it to earlier results, and I found it to be fascinating to see what changed over that time period and what didn't. And so really, it's a really great opportunity right now to just thank everyone for responding and giving us all this data. Which actually is a good lead into what I was about to ask you is now that you've seen the results and seen the changes, are there questions you wish you had asked or would be good for the next development survey? This is Kurt. There are two things that I do differently. One, well, not necessarily that I do differently, but one of the things I'd like to do, as I mentioned earlier, is to go back and when all of these other, the 28 other libraries have completed their campaigns, add that to the 13 libraries that I reported on and find out if those numbers hold. But as Brian mentioned, 33% of money raised coming from gifts in kind to me seems high. And while Brian was talking about whether or not there was approaching those donors to ask for money to process, and that is interesting, but I would be interested in finding out a little bit more about gifts in kind and how important they are. And they could skew numbers sometimes, and I think it probably would be important to differentiate between cash raised and gift in kind. I can tell you one thing, and maybe the instrument, the vehicle of a spec kit, one of the things in that we got so much data and it's a challenge to kind of comprehend and process it, I wish that we had had an opportunity to have, I think we identified a lot of practices, but I don't know if we really circled back to what are considered best practices. I think we've got a pretty good idea I think we've got a pretty good grasp of activity and effort and range, but I think if we could have gone from the respond, it's kind of an open-ended qualitative, and which of this is, if you could do only three things, what would the three things be? And I think there's a lot of things you can do with our results. I'm not certain that we can create that linkage. Maybe Kurt and Joe disagree, but I think that's kind of a really interesting question too. Yeah, I would just follow up with that. I think it's part of the format. One of the things I kept when I was reading through our results and when you're trying to describe the results from these data and getting the, especially the open-ended questions kind of somewhat grouped and described. The tendency is to try to kind of group them together and be able to get a sense of what the overall trends were. What I was really wanting to do after I looked at the data were to create a forum to be able to see what some of the things that seemed new to me, what they meant and how they were working. So really I ended up, not necessarily for this particular tool or for the next spec kit wanting to ask questions in this format, but maybe more of a focus group or a community. I know there are plenty of other vehicles for this, but a community for people who maybe aren't in the development, don't have that as responsibility but are interested to get a sense of, you know, what are you trying that's working. Maybe a different format, but those are the questions I ended up walking away with. Less what the spec kit asked you to do, which is to describe the data and to kind of, you know, try to find trends, but to explore some of the more unique parts of the survey. Well, I'd like to thank you all for joining us today to discuss the results of the Library Development Spec Survey and to remind you that you will receive links to the slides and the recording in about a week. Thank you all.