 My name is Dan Moguloff. I'm from the Campus Office of Communications and Public Affairs and today really pleased to welcome Vice Chancellor Julie Hooper who runs University Relations and our Development Operation. As usual I'm going to read a really short bio. Julie will have some opening comments and then we're going to do the usual question and answer and again if you have questions fill out your cards now but also find to do that in the course of the conversation. So Julie Morgan Hooper is the Vice Chancellor for University Development Alumni Relations at the University of California Berkeley. As Vice Chancellor she provides campus wide leadership on all philanthropic endeavors and manages development programs involving a staff of 260 employees and I understand that number may be going up and an operating budget of 56 million dollars. In her role she serves as President of Berkeley's Foundation, a not-for-profit corporation that raises, invests and administers private funds for the campus. She also provides oversight and guidance to the activities of approximately 50 different fundraising programs in our schools, colleges and campus units. Julie came to Berkeley in July 2014 from the University of Texas at Austin and during her seven and a half year tenure there she served as Assistant Dean for Development and External Relations in the School of Architecture and as Associate Vice President for Development for the University's Development Office. Julie also served as Executive Director and Senior Director of Development for various non-profit agencies in Texas. She holds a master's degree in Historic Preservation from the University of Georgia and a BA in History from Boston University. Without further ado. Thank you. It's great to be here with everybody today. I have to confess that I just got off a plane from Shanghai. I'm going to do my best to be coherent and I'm thrilled to be here. It seems very very fitting for us to visit in the month of November which of course I think of as a month of gratitude and a month of thanks and that seems quite fitting when talking about philanthropy and giving back. Dan asked me to just give a few opening comments and so these are not in any particular order but I've only worked for public universities and non-profit institutions. I've never worked for a private university but I have spent a lot of time with private and public colleagues around the country and you know public universities are really new to the world of philanthropy and new to the world of advancement. We've had three campaigns at Berkeley, three comprehensive campaigns. We're in a silent phase right now of planning the fourth comprehensive campaign for Berkeley but it's only in recent decades that we really have paid attention to philanthropy as a revenue source and have thought holistically about the advancement operation as a whole but we're not alone in that. If anything you know I would say that I've come from an institution the University of Texas that I think is a little bit behind Berkeley in terms of its trajectory but I'm very familiar with the University of Michigan who I would say is ahead of kind of all of us in the public university sector because they really had to start doing this work in the 70s and thinking differently about their funding streams. I really am drawn to the public mission of a public institution. I'm sure I used to joke with my colleagues at Rice so it must be so nice in Houston at your little small university easy to make decisions and it's all very compact and simple but the mission of a public institution is very compelling for me as a person. I went to a private university as an undergrad and a public university as a grad student and I just really resonate with the mission of Berkeley and I'm really honored to get to represent Berkeley as the Vice Chancellor for Alumni Relations and Development. There's some fundamental shifts going on in how we do our work here at Cal. We really started thinking about this back in 2014 at the tail end of the campaign for Berkeley which you may know ended December 31st 2013 3.13 billion raised that's a billion with a B. We really started looking deeply at how we do the work how we think about advancement work and what might it take to take to get to the next level you're always thinking about that and you know we joke in fundraising you end a campaign on December 31st and the very next day January 1st you're raising money again you never stop raising money so this work began under the umbrella of something we called fundraising 2.0 and some of the the things that we've been working on that you'll hear the fundraisers and advancement professionals talk about one idea is to think about Berkeley as one Berkeley when it comes to fundraising and advancement we are very decentralized as many of you know and feel we are a decentralized large organization but at the end of the day we all wear our Berkeley hat too and to shift toward a one Berkeley mode of fundraising means that we really meet the donors and what we call a donor centered way i.e. where they are and what things matter to them and what they'd like to invest in and how we can help them make their philanthropic dreams come true versus showing up with a laundry list of needs for our particular department or our particular division and i worked for a dean for four years so trust me i absolutely have the unit understanding and perspective and i really respect deans i think they have hard jobs another part of the fundraising 2.0 work was to think about well how can we have lifelong engagement with our Berkeley alumni and and that lifelong engagement not not beginning when they graduate and leave but actually beginning when they're admitted to Cal and how can we get people to think about from the moment that they're admitted that they're part of something incredibly special others have given back to make the place what it is and they'll be called upon to step up and continue that going forward for their lives because they're part of this family that is new for our institution and for public institutions to think that long term and holistically about lifelong engagement but i were really delighted that the golden bear orientation i think i saw steve satin come in i don't know if kathie sir there's steve you know this is this was the second year of the golden bear orientation when all of our incoming students come together for one orientation to help build their relationships class identity learn about how its legacies and traditions i think we're going to see the positive seeds from that decades down the road but that's a really great start for us and something that private universities have done for a very long time the other thing i would say about fundraising shifts and fundamental shifts and how we're doing our work we're in chancellor speaks a lot about this we're thinking of fundraising and philanthropy now as support and levers for the core not just the nice to haves and that is also how private institutions look at philanthropy and well what is the core well the core is you guys i mean the core is the people the faculty the students the staff the core berkeley doesn't run without the core berkeley won't be berkeley without the core and we need to be very focused on our fundraising efforts and looking at gifts and opportunities with our donor partners that benefit and support the core versus things that are on the fringes the nice to haves and it's it's an interesting cultural shift and an interesting moment we're going through but i think you know under our chancellor's direction and leadership she is a very compelling figure as you know a compelling leader and she's this message is resonating in the donor community and people are understanding and want to help um now when i say funding for the core versus nice to haves i don't mean fundraising to fill budget deficits and for my fundraising colleagues in the room i would say that don't you know just know that donors give to the future donors give to ideas donors don't give to budget deficits it's good for our donor community to understand how our financial model works we want them to but that's not the motivator in making philanthropic gifts and and i think sometimes when you're in a moment of challenge on a campus it can be easy to default to the the negative narrative of this is why we need a gift because we've got budget difficulties and even when that's happening it's incredibly important that we realize from a donor's perspective yes they want that address but they they are looking at how can we do something inspiring and hopeful and and that is driven about the future um and we've come through some hard years here and the great news is that as you heard from rosemary ray probably when she did this this campus conversation we will end our budget deficit a year early a year early and we didn't do it all through cuts in fact we did it more through revenue shares than we did through cuts which is an exciting story for us i believe i guess the last thing i would say is just my general philosophy about fundraising and philanthropy is that i never forget that giving is voluntary it's a choice somebody makes you're not obligated to give to an institution simply because you are an alum of the institution or because you benefited from the services of a hospital or a non-profit you know our job here is to inspire alumni friends and parents to want to choose to give back to us but it is a choice and i it's important to not forget that and then i would say that all of us are ambassadors for fundraising not just the fundraisers i mean dan you play a role in this everybody here plays a role in fundraising and outreach and i think that shifting our culture on campus to where everybody sees kind of the part they play and building the philanthropic culture is is an exciting opportunity for us to as well right now so that's it for my my opening comments dan i hope i didn't answer all the questions you did see everyone um so i was there's a number of issues you put on the table before that just a personal question i mean i'm projecting the idea of spending my days trying to separate people from their money seems daunting and impossible and how do you get into it and why do you enjoy it as somebody said to me recently you have the hardest job on campus and i was so surprised i said i have the best job on campus are you kidding i first of all i don't see it as separating people from their money because that sounds like i'm forcing them to do something they don't want to do uh the the joy in working with people who are philanthropically minded is that if you're doing it right they're driving the bus and it is all about what they want to accomplish and how to take their dreams match them to berkeley's opportunities and make it a win-win for both parties um i will reflect back on a gift that i got to be a part of working on at the university of texas which was the 50 million dollar gift from michael and susan del to name and begin the del medical school it's one thing about campaigns we started an eight-year campaign without a medical school we ended a campaign with a medical school things can change they had a ceremony at their foundation with a hundred dignitaries uh you know people from the system people from the university people from elected office but the happiest people in that room the people who exuded joy were michael and susan del they were happier than anybody else and i thought to myself that's what the philanthropy is about when the donor's the happiest person in the room you know you've done something right and i have seen that here at berkeley with gifts that have been made i think about um you know when the legends pool opened and being there with the donors when the student athletes the swimmers and the water polo players said thank you and go bears and all their different languages that they represent of all the countries that they represent and there were something like 30 languages i mean it was just it was you know pin drop sort of wow that's incredible so i guess that's one of my answers dan is i actually think my job is a great job and i and i don't see it as twisting your arm enforcing you to give i feel like my job is to help you accomplish something that you want to do but aren't there people out there who are haven't been involved in philanthropy and you know need to sort of bring them to the lord on this and so how do you do that well there's a lot of different ways to engage people so you hear us talk about engagement and that's dan which you're sort of alluding to engagement is what leads to giving we we know that um that's kind of a tried and true of our profession we're sitting in a place of engagement obviously alumni associations um the alumni work that the college units do the alumni work that we do in udar this work is very important so you know there are lots of ways to get people back to campus um i i'm going to give a little plug to jim nolton in athletics because he's here i if you had asked me 25 years ago would i follow college football rankings my answer would have been no and i would have laughed at you but i do now and i think that you know there are lots of complexities in the discussions about academics and in collegiate athletics but i will say this it is a fabulous front porch back to the campus this saturday when we play stanford a big game especially having beaten usc there's not a lot more that we can do that gets that many alumni and that many parents and students on campus in one place together for that moment in time um so i actually think of things like these football games as alumni engagement moments um people feel excited proud whatever disappointed but they're they're participating i think that you know other ways that people participate that then leads to further engagement our alumni want to mentor students they love interaction with students they want to give students internships they want to hire the students they want to give advice on job searches in in their fields and you know so when you know when you've got volunteers here at c a a reading scholarship applications or you've got volunteers working with tom devlin alumni who are coming back to campus to recruit these are engagement points that get people excited about being back at a place that means so much to them um you know another way to get people engaged and move them along the trajectory to be able to talk about fundraising dan is certainly peer to peer um we find in the nonprofit sector in higher education and fundraising that peers are the sometimes the best entree to someone who hasn't participated hasn't been involved um their friend their peer who says well i'm on the college of natural resources advisory board and i created a scholarship and i hire berkeley students through the career center to their friend that's that's a real testimony for the the value they get out of their engagement and and and there's really in my opinion there's no better way to engage a non participating alum than a peer who is actively engaged because the enthusiasm is genuine and real too so you talked about two things that it seems there may be an inherent tension or it seems to me there may be an inherent tension between the two one following the donor's passion and then on the other hand the chancellor talking about how we want more funds for core operations so if i'm joe billionaire i'd really dig the idea of my name by the way yeah i really dig the idea of my name on a building yeah helping buy new lawn mowers not so much so how do you reconcile those two yeah yeah well i think the first step is that the fundraising professionals on campus and the finance people the caos need to work really closely together and be talking to each other i i found that when i worked for dean the the assistant vice president for administration and i office next door to each other so anytime i was working on a gift i would sit down with him and say what do you think of these parameters what do you think of this use of the gift can we do this is there something i should try to steer the donor to that would be more impactful and why you know we had a really close relationship i don't think that's as common as i would like for it to be i think that whereas marie ray and i at a kind of cabinet level definitely talk a lot about opportunities and how to sort of frame things in a way that both meet the donor's vision but also have budget relieving parts of the gift but that's not what we lead with with the donor and the proposal right there are ways to do this for certain and we've done it i think of a recent example which is the gift from the tang family to create the silk road studies institute and we worked really carefully with kevin o bryan the faculty director to think through okay the family wants to create the institute and fully endow it what are all the parts and pieces you have to have to achieve their goals and it's not coming to them and saying and this is budget relieving and this isn't budget relieving it's here's what the business plan looks like to use your investment to achieve your goal to have silk road studies institute doing some of the best research in the world and the content area that you as a family care about so i think that yes there can be an inherent tension i mean i will say this you also have the the other way this this happens dan which is a donor comes to campus and says i have an idea for something and i had this happen in my prior job somebody who had a vision for creating a 13th library for a specific academic discipline and the campus had to politely end up saying no because it wasn't something that the campus needed could really use would really make sense would really be sustainable there are 12 other libraries that are underfunded we tried to pivot the donor to look at some other opportunities for other libraries he wasn't going there and the campus had to walk away and sometimes that happens because i think the worst thing we can do is accept a gift that we really can't deliver on and that we really don't see as a priority for the campus because no matter what even though if we accept the gift and we think we make the donor happy if we don't deliver on what we say we're going to do at the end of the day it'll be a mess and no one will be happy we won't be happy they won't be happy related to this i've heard the chancellor speak often about the need for a new what she calls hybrid financial model what role is development or or will philanthropic funds what what role will they play in that new model and right now today are philanthropic dollars being used for the university's operating budget or are they all to endow chairs or is that part of the operating budget sort of help sort of contextualize and explain that for us if you can sure well both the model and our currency yeah yeah well i think the model is certainly um in part looking at hybrid funding model um can we do more at the unit level around finding other opportunities for philanthropy and and uh you know degree programs revenue generating degree programs but it's not just philanthropy i mean i think that's important for everybody to know that's one thing uh you know how can we take our as she calls it our our things she learned this from rich lions our our assets our what's the word i'm looking for our orphan assets that aren't really doing anything for us to generate money is there a way to use those assets differently to generate money with philanthropy i think the main focus for us is the following we have thousands and i mean thousands of good prospects who our data show us have capacity and haven't been engaged prospects are not our problem it's the discipline and willingness to do the work to engage new people because it does take time it doesn't happen overnight it's our willingness as a campus to be more um metrics driven around the fundraising work and more meaning that instead of eight fundraisers wanting to see the same donor who we already know let's have one fundraiser work with that person as the primary point of contact representing all the things that the person cares about making sure they you know they can get in everywhere most donors at a certain level at cow give to multiple things those other seven fundraisers go see new people go find new people bring them into the fold that's what that means uh you know and i think that especially in a budget constrained time i can understand the psychology of thinking i desperately have to raise money to meet my budget target so i'm going to go to the names i see around this campus on the buildings but what that what that does is it frustrates those donors and i've had uh you've probably some of you heard this we have a very significant campus donor whose name is family name is on many things say one time giving to cow sometimes feels like death by a thousand mosquito bites that's not a great message not a great feeling ouch yeah but the good news is he's telling us and we can fix that and uh because if he didn't tell us and he just went away that would be far worse but to fix the mosquito bite issue we've got a deal over here with the non-engaged prospect issue which means you know we need to manage fundraisers to metrics which that is a standard way of doing our fundraising work at any high-performing university um we've gotten much better about it at Berkeley uh but i would say after the last economic downturn with some of the layoffs that took place uh and the sort of stressors of trying to finish the campaign under under resourced and under the economic stress i think that some of those best practices went by the wayside and we're really refocusing on those now as not just in UDAR but with our campus-wide colleagues as well and within the units because you know where i would say about the majority of prospects something like 80 percent of prospects are managed at a unit level by a unit fundraiser about 20 percent are managed at the central level so we we are all in this together between the units in the center so you've been talking in a forthright way we'll be talking more about ways that we can improve and sort of expand and engage but all the same you raised what 569 million last year that was a record so something's going right um what do you attribute that to is it the improved efficiency and operations of your unit was it change in the tax code is it new leadership on campus all the way how do you where how did that happen well it wasn't any one thing um and just to share with folks it was the first time in Berkeley's history that we surpassed 500 million in commitments in a year uh it was a very exciting moment and i should also say that the College of Engineering had their record best year ever for fundraising at 110 million so kudos to engineering they played a huge role in this i do think having gone through a leadership transition and then having our chancellor's first year as chancellor absolutely helped in terms of donors coming forward who's been sitting on the sidelines and we're ready to make a commitment because donors particularly major gift donors and principal gift donors which you know think of those are sort of six seven and eight figure gifts maybe not the annual fund but the the gifts where you're giving from your assets not your checkbook you know they this is a serious decision somebody makes in their life one of the you don't do this very often in your life and and it's an emotional decision too and by golly you want to know who the chancellor is when you're going to make this kind of decision so that i think in part the fact that we went through transition carol came out as our chancellor we were very lucky that the campus constituents already knew her so well for the most part i mean that you know that is a blessing for us that she's been here so long and is trusted and known so it meant it meant that she could hit the ground running in a different way i would also say that i think the work we started doing in 2014 around how fundraisers do their work and how we work together more collaboratively and how we incentivize collaboration i think that paid off as well and we have examples of gifts that were closed where two three or four fundraisers across the campus were working together on these gifts and doing so in a very collaborative fashion knowing that some units might get more some units might get less or nothing but that we were putting some aspirational ideas forth to donors i also think the good economy in the stock market you know for what it's worth this i i say that as this fall has not been so great but when i think about last year you know there is a correlation between people's confidence in the stock market and how they're doing and the philanthropy at a certain level of donor there's a certain level of gift where that doesn't matter and there's a certain level of philanthropists where that doesn't matter but i'd sort of say in the middle of the pyramid that definitely matters so i'm going to turn to a question from the audience which actually anticipates what i was about to ask because you're talking a lot about the promise of fundraising but there also seems to be some potential peril and i'll i'll ask this question as a faculty member in the humanities i'm greatly concerned that private interests steer us to stem and forget a deep commitment to public interest to inclusion to ethics and labor what will ensure equity of distribution of private interest fundraising and i would actually add on to that how do we put up a firewall how do we create safeguards so that our institution isn't being driven by the voices that stand behind seven eight nine figure gifts yeah it's a great it's a really great question whoever asked it i think it's an inherent tension at any institution the size of ours and with you shared governance with the faculty the board of regents you know and everything in between how we think about the gifts in that way something i think about quite a bit there is a tension between being donor centered and also trying to address all parts of campus i know jerry may quite well he's the long time vp at michigan and he's about to retire he's been there forever and is a mentor to a lot of us and one time he said at a meeting he said the problem is major gift fundraising is not a democratic process donors get to choose but what i would remind us of is that the campus also gets to choose in terms of the possibility of declining gifts that don't meet our interests or aren't where we want to focus as a campus so that you know every gift is not one we have to accept now the other thing i'd say about philanthropy is and this gets back to kind of the hybrid model of funding it does seem to me that if we're thoughtful and proactive and working together about the different kinds of funding streams that come in if philanthropy is playing more of a role in a particular area there if we're thinking about it there are ways to freeze up free up other kinds of funds and resources for things that we want to do that funders philanthropy may not fund right but the problem is all of your budgets are so decentralized the the budgeting process is unique to every unit in every department that it does make it a little more challenging at a global level to have those conversations but here's and here's something else i would say so you may have heard that last year we received a 50 million dollar gift to be used to build out new faculty and stem disciplines it's a matching gift it's it's tremendous and this supports the chancellor's goal of having 100 new faculty lines now what the chancellor is saying to other philanthropists to her the board of visitors to the trustees out there in the alumni world is we would love to find a corollary gift for the arts and humanities and i believe in this this notion that when a donor does something and we talk about it in the donor community people tend to start thinking about their own philanthropy like hey i saw this donor create this thing or do this thing i could do something like that or i know her or i know him i could think about this i hadn't even before considered it but now i see this person doing it so i guess i'm hopeful i have to say i'm optimistic that the fact that we have been able to create this stem fund and that i think we're going to be successful raising the 50 million dollars in matching funds lays the groundwork to be prepared to have a conversation with someone about doing the same thing for the arts and humanities on campus can i guarantee that that'll happen no but i think that i think it's important for everybody to know that the chancellor thinks that way as well you know i i'm a humanities person i'm a history history major historic preservation you know try raising money for historic preservation it's a small pool of people but they really really love it you know you know you have to also recognize that you know impact is going to be somewhat differential in terms of what you need in different disciplines right so you know what would make sense for the art history department what we would consider a transformational gift for the art history department is going to be different from what we consider a transformational gift for ekes and i don't think anybody's disputing that but but can we guarantee that in philanthropy you can carve very equally that philanthropic dollars go to every single part of campus in an even share way you can't do that with major gifts and principal gift fundraising it just doesn't work that way where we could get a little more creative and we've talked about this is around the annual fund because i think that what we've done with the annual fund is we've just let everybody have as many annual funds as they want whenever they want without much focus on strategy and our annual giving is average i would say at best and we've wondered well could we have more centralized annual giving programs that represent the whole of berkeley that then the funds are distributed in some sort of financial model to the different parts of campus we'd have to work that out with the cfo obviously and but the message to the the broad base of donors is you're giving to berkeley because of three things you know that are three overarching things about berkeley not this department desperately needs money from you it's your department um and we haven't implemented any of this but we had the consulting firm marz and lindy take a deep dive on annual giving here at cal and compared to our high performing peers our annual fund we're spending more money and our results are not as good as they should be so we'd like to really radically rethink that and that is a place where i think we because annual giving is obviously unrestricted giving and so the campus has more control over divvying it out to different parts of campus so you actually anticipate the the next question which is if you can be a little more specific what are we actually doing to sort of improve the speed and efficiency and simplicity of how funds are raised what other findings were there in that marz and lindy report that have sort of established for you the kind of things you need to do if we're going to hit it on all cylinders here yeah yeah so we actually have had let's see four reports from marz and lindy since last year looking at different aspects of the campus advancement work there's there's there's not enough time here to go through everything that we'd like to do and as i say to the staff just remember marz and lindy was paid to tell us what we need to do better not what we're doing well and so but there's many recommendations i would say first and foremost we have 22 000 prospects in the united states who are rated through wealth screening with the capacity to give between a hundred thousand and two million dollars 18 000 of them are in california and about nine percent are under what we call active management meaning there is a fundraiser working with them that means 91 percent or not if we could at least crack that here in california and engage this high net worth population you know because remember with philanthropy it's one thing to have the capacity to give but if you don't have the inclination to give we're not going to get your gift right you got to have both so this 22 000 feels to me like in this campaign one of the most important things we have to do as a campus to do that we need our frontline fundraisers meaning people who day in and day out see donors i mean i see donors as vice chancellor everybody does but these are people who don't have management responsibilities they're just frontline fundraisers we have a tendency to give them a whole bunch of other jobs writing a newsletter putting on an event managing an advisory council they're underperforming in the sense of the percentage of time they spend on major gift fundraising work they need to be at 80 percent of their time on major gift work so to do that we've got to beef up the resources on the back office functions to support them which is something you just spoke you mentioned earlier in increase in staff one of the things we're investing in we went to all the units and said what do you need from us in order to get your fundraisers to 80 percent major gift productivity what's the leader up to you say what's your return on investment for a dollar spent on development in this camp in the last five years it's been anything between six and seven dollars we calculated annually so every dollar in yields six dollars in six to seven yeah so why aren't we spending more well we are spending more we were given a bit of an increase that's allowing us to hire 25 new positions it's a mixture of frontline fundraisers we also were given funding let's see it was three years ago to allow us to put to basically buy out 51 percent of every unit chief development officer salary and fringe and then free up that money for the dean or the director to reinvest in the advancement operation so we actually have been spending more will we ever be able to spend at the level of michigan or stanford i don't know you know we are when you look at fte headcount we are on the lower end in our peer group that's just the truth but i have a suspect that in a number of your enterprises you are also on the lower end of your peer groups in your respective areas so um it's important that you know we won't get we won't have enough bodies to get to all 22 thousand people right i never expected we'd be able to hire that many people but if we use our data and analytics and it's berkeley we should be able to be the best at this to help us really screen further down who are these people and what's who what are the factors that make make up the likelihood of somebody wanting to become engaged and ultimately a philanthropist that's how we screen those 22 thousand and get our fundraisers out in front of the best group of people we can we can identify um you know that's it's i'm giving you a lot of back back in stuff that's maybe more than you want to know but you know sort of how the sausage is made and please know when i talk about screening for wealth we're using publicly accessible information with industry standard tools we're not doing things that you would be that anyone would be embarrassed that we're doing we're doing you know but we do have ways of figuring out assets right we could be sec filings for stock holdings it could be you know house values there's a lot of things you can look at that are publicly accessible so we've had a few questions come in i'm not quite sure this quite uh meets the standard of a third rail but it is a tricky subject and it has to do with the independence of the california alumni association and the questions about you know given that we want to engage and given we want to improve and up our game isn't this a problem that there's this division or separation or lack of structural unity right between the campus and between its alumni association right well what we've seen in the last decade or even 20 years around the independent alumni associations has been that there's been more integration of those associations with campuses you see it at washington ohio state certainly stanford 20 years ago went down that path i think that for the purposes of what we want to do here at berkeley you know maybe the organizational structure the reporting lines the wrong conversation to have it the right conversation at this time is the campus and martin lundy said this to us the campus needs to own its own alumni relations strategy for all berkeley alums not just those who are members of a membership organization which c a is and it's not the only one that's membership although that's a changing model too um we would want and the chancellor's actually tasked our office and lachelle blakemore on my team who many of you know is leading a campus task force that's looking at this the chancellor has tasked us with developing a campus alumni relations plan and we want c a a to be a part of the campus alumni relations plan and in fact three folks here at c a a are serving on that task force but we have to have an overarching berkeley strategy for how we leverage the power of nearly 500 000 living alumni 500 000 living alumni we're not the biggest alumni population but we're up there we're certainly one of them penn state and ohio state debate that point so i want to circle back to athletics um so first of all i'm just interested so back a few years those of you who have been on campus for a while knows know that there were boarded discussions about trimming the scope of the program and presented at the relevant academic senate meeting was an assessment that athletics accounts for some 20 25 million dollars a year in academic contributions i'm interested if you think that that remains a valid position of valid belief and also connected to that whether it's a zero sum game in terms of philanthropy for intercollegiate athletics cal athletics and uh philanthropy for the academic side of the house so how these things mix and match and maybe confront each other at times so last year i did a pretty thorough report for the chancellor's task force that was looking at athletics we looked at the top 20 donors to cal athletics ever in the history of cal athletics um these are really significant philanthropists and we looked at how much of the given to athletics how much of the given to academics who are they what's the what does the trajectory look like interestingly as a side note most of them start as annual fund donors just you know the power of the annual fund you never know 40 years ago the annual fund donor becomes the donor who makes the 20 million dollar gift later in life um but of the 20 we looked at all but one had given to academics as well and the majority of them had given more to academics in their lifetime they may have started with their giving to athletics and maybe had given more on the front end but over a 40-year period you see that they're giving to academics and many of them were giving more to academics when it was all said and done i suspect and i don't know this for a fact but i suspect that at oregon and alabama that is not the case with the top 20 athletic donors i i i should really call my counterparts there and find out they probably don't want to tell me but i i think that's actually a very special thing for cal that that the donors that this is how they read um i i really do believe that it's not a zero sum game and i do and i believe our donors have shown us that over decades that it's not a zero sum game now when you get down to donors in the sort of thousand plus level it is true you start to see different kind of shifts around maybe all they're giving spend athletics well part of that maybe we haven't engaged them yet to talk to them about the academic side of the house um i you know i worked for an institution where there were donors to athletics this is the longhorn foundation who had two degrees from the institution and never made a gift to an academic side and didn't want to frankly which always blew my mind to be honest i i couldn't understand that i don't i do not think that's the case here i think that for donors who are giving to athletics it's that we haven't yet begun to engage them in thinking about how to support the academic side or auxiliaries that they care about but i can tell you for the top 20 because i've studied this really closely it is it is uh i think an amazing thing to see that that the academic giving for almost all of them is as much if not more than their athletic giving um i and i think that's something that is something to be proud of frankly and so if we view athletics as a place to bring people to the front porch and a place to develop new prospects for giving um then i think it's to our benefit to get students and young alumni at the games and i can give you a very real tangible example of a recent young alum who represents us it's kevin chou from cabam and kevin's connection back to campus david shaking his head was first cabam and the cabam gift naming for the stadium for the field but you know fast forward not that many years and kevin's making the single largest gift of any alum under 40 to an academic part of campus the hot school of business to name chu hall i i think that's proof that it isn't a zero sum game the other thing and this is more kind of back of the house uh approach but the fundraisers have to get comfortable working together across the athletics and academic landscape and one of the things martin lundy found in the study they did on athletics is that actually the fundraisers we have in athletics are actually quite good at wanting to work collaboratively with unit-based fundraisers and the academic units and at some institutions it's almost mandatory that an athletics fundraiser and a unit fundraiser are always meeting with donors to talk about both it's just sort of the standard and i i think you could get to that here i really i really do and we've had some success in asking people for you know blended gifts of multiple things that they care about with all the units at the table and i i think that that is the way to approach it versus seeing it as us versus them and let's fight over who gets to go see the person first that never that never results in the biggest gift another question that came in had to do with the fact sort of queuing off the fact you just got back from shanghai how important is that the international audience are international alumni i think we've got about 10 percent of our undergraduates from overseas and probably even higher percentage than that in the graduate level is the philanthropy that comes from overseas proportionate disproportionate how important is it to us yeah et cetera so we have a small international relations office in our office headed by david jew it's a five person team i think all in the budget for that office is something like a million dollars a year they raise anywhere between 25 to 50 million a year so i think it's a good investment i will say that we we have a long track record of having a presence in asia not surprising to anybody right and this weekend we were there because it was the yale cal basketball game pack 12's been for those of you who don't know it's been taking teams over for these exhibition basketball games in china and around that basketball game we we had an academic forum all day on friday with five different panels of faculty and alums on five different topics we had about 215 people 250 people attend actually some alums some not some people in industry working over in asia working in china or shanghai or other places uh and then after the basketball game which i'm sad to say we lost but yale seems to be all seniors and our team our players are all very young um but oski was there it was fun to see oski on the screen with the alibaba guy and i think they like toskies um that night release is like somewhere i mean yeah yeah talk about third rail as well the the berkeley club of shanghai held a gala to celebrate the 150th and we had about 350 people it was an over the top fun fun fun event but the you know we certainly raise money in asia we raise significant gifts in asia you all have seen of course the beautiful lee kushing center you know you know we have had significant philanthropy from asia some from alums some from non alums we have a lot of alumni there who want to be engaged there's always that kind of you have to be careful though because a lot not a lot there's a there's a group who are very focused on admissions and what do they have to do to get somebody in and one of the rules we have just so you know is that when when we have a major gift prospect who has a child or a grandchild applying to berkeley we actually don't solicit or take gifts from them in the year of the application we're super happy to talk to them after the student is admitted and has chosen to come here but we are very careful about that and you particularly have to be careful i i find in in asia um and our brand the berkeley brand is phenomenal phenomenal globally but it's particularly phenomenal in asia and i'm not even getting into all the different academic partnerships like the chingwa berkeley shenzhen institute through the college of engineering tbs i mean there's so many parts of the singapore bearers program i mean there's a lot of things happening between industry and other academic units like shanghai tech who are doing things with our faculty so it's very robust ecosystem ecosystem there so we have time for one more question it's a really interesting one um entrepreneurial efforts are starting to boom on campuses reflected by recent report from berkeley law i think it says here um vc funds are being raised as well how can your effort synergize with the campuses associated entrepreneurial efforts to both build or i guess generate more funds for berkeley and strengthen um berkeley's entrepreneurial efforts you know some sort of synergy between all of that wow that's so timely i had lunch yesterday with a house alum who's on the house board and has joined carol's board of visitors and he said i he just felt like entrepreneurship is the is the worst kept secret out there he's in boston he's a vc guy in boston that people have no idea how high we rank in terms of dollars invested in our students number two and businesses started and you know why aren't we promoting this more why isn't the word out there more and he said julie can the campaign theme be entrepreneurship i said well i'll pass it along um but i think it's a really great point i will say that in shanghai one of the panels we we brought had to do with skydeck and had to do with entrepreneurship and had uh uh also kin singer from the sudarja center as well as uh one of our alums who just uh took a public i'm sorry just sold a business at a very large amount of money um there in shanghai a tech business i i think it's very true i mean i think we can interface obviously we don't run things like skydeck or the catalyst funds some of you may know that fund through the college of chemistry um but we certainly would like to be collaborative around contacts and people and connections back to the peer to peer um you know making sure what when we have um a donor an alum who wants to connect with one of these funds on campus you better believe we connect them with one of these funds and a number of prominent donors on campus are involved with our different vc funds and and startup activities uh but there's more we could do i'm sure there's more we could do and and i also have found that like many things here it's sort of decentralized around who's doing this and i understand that in the vice chancellor for research office they're hiring an a vc for i think they're calling it entrepreneurship if i'm remembering correctly which i think will be a very interesting position to help us connect the dots across campus around all the different ways that entrepreneurship is manifest and i'll say too that um we have donors who are very very interested in supporting this landscape for us and the more we can do um to to be responsive and bring them in the better both for both for entrepreneurship and and vc funding as well as philanthropy and as you guys know especially new generation of donors they think about philanthropy as an investment not a gift and that's and i'm you know looking at jay because he's at the business school but there there is that happening as we think about generational philanthropy so before we wrap up i just want to note uh next month december 12th uh chancellor christ will be doing joining us for campus conversations it'll be in a different location the west poly ballroom and julie i know you said you were jet lag but you must have done something right because i've got this urge to write a check or something i don't know uh just an urge at this point so anyway i just really want to thank you for your time and for being here today thank you thanks