Despite my having been out of touch blog-wise for a while, I did have an array of amazing experiences. One might wonder I haven’t been blogging about them (right, Paige and Sukanya?). Well, I can only say I will try to make up for my absence in these last weeks of school.
One of the greatest experiences of the past months has been working with the Darden Annual Fund, as one of the four co-chairs for the Class Gift. We are raising money (or pledges to donate) from the graduating class.
Whenever I mention the word “gift” my classmates ask me whether we are donating a fountain like the one standing at the end of Flagler Court in front of Thomas Jefferson or a modern version of Café ‘67. The answer is no: the money goes into a pool of “unrestricted” fund the school uses at its discretion. These funds are spent for alumni relations, prospective students’ events, communication and marketing. The second question students raise, especially international ones is more or less “Wasn’t tuition enough??” The reality is that only a part of the school’s costs are covered by tuition, and it is not to say that we are not a fiscally responsible institution. We are! It’s just that these beautiful grounds and the rest of our experiences don’t come for free…
As good MBAs would do, we hired others to “do the dirty job” – in our case a committee of 30 students, chosen because they either honed their persuasive skills at Darden, because they are “celebrities” in our community, because they are extremely energetic, the type of person you cannot say no to, or all these things together. Our campaign officially kicked off at the end of March after Spring Break. We took advantage of a wonderful March evening and invited the Second Years to Mellow Mushroom for an evening of pizza and trivia. It must have been the prospect of a large gathering after the weeks abroad, the free pizza or the trivia - we had a wonderful participation. Our campaign was off to a great start.
Few weeks later we had tables outside the mailrooms, in an area of high traffic, and since then we have resorted to every possible marketing tool we know to promote the Cause. Email being officially last century, we are using our Facebook Page, competition between sections, announcements in classes, flyers and word-of-mouth. After all we are competing for attention during the last weeks of our Second Year, and believe me our “competition” is fierce and organized. I’m talking about beautiful weather and golf courses , not classes!
The idea is that giving now, before year ends, will help instill a habit, which should make our job easier in the next years. We are one of the b-schools with a higher participation to our Annual Fund and we want to do even better in the future. Hence our main goal is participation of the entire class, or at least beat last year’s 99% participation. Darden 2010: you’d better represent!
