Tone Down the Senior Gift Sales Pitch

As fundraising events go, the annual Senior Gift to Harvard College makes a lot of noise.

Each year, more than 100 graduating seniors are recruited to join a committee charged with organizing the donation. Once on this prestigious board, they spend their time actively soliciting classmate for contributions to Harvard in the name of the Class.

But the Gift doesn't raise a lot of cash. Last year, with 57 percent of graduating seniors contributing, the Class contributed slightly more than $41000 to the College--an all time Senior Gift dollar record. Annual giving to the Harvard College Fund, by contrast, typically tops $200 million.

What the Senior Gift lacks in money, its organizers make up for in enthusiasm. Indeed, their tactics for pumping their classmates for dollars could hardly be called anything but strong armed.

In the past few days, members of the senior class received a solicitation letter from the Gift's co-chairs. In this document, they were told that the Senior Gift is "an integral part of Harvard's operating budget?"

"In short, if you have taken advantage of any of Harvard's assets, then you have benefited from past Senior Gifts," the letter suggested.

Next, seniors can look forward to a personal phone call--most likely from a friend on the Gift committee. In past years, Gift representatives have each been charged with calling about 10 classmates and asking them for contributions. In this way, the Gift committee consciously puts seniors who don't want or can't afford to contribute in the uncomfortable position of having to say "no" to their friends.

Gift Co-chair A. Jabbar Abdi 94 comments that the point of the Gift is not so much to raise a lot of money as to get people in the habit of giving to the College funded on donations, whether is was John Harvard or Anne Radcliffe," Abdi says. give, we're saying this is why they should give."

In fact, the committee spends a great deal of effort trying to get everyone to donate. Abdi himself say that the goal of this year's campaign is 80 percent participation (based on an all-time high of 79 percent set by the Class of 1982).

And the point is not just to habituate participation, it's to habituate a certain level of participation. Abdi notes that the average gift is $35. But he concedes that the Gift Committee also includes a Special Committee to target graduates from wealthy families and get them to give more. "The who point is proportional five create an elitist atmosphere."

Indeed, the financial competition encouraged by the Gift is largely a competition involving how much money seniors parents can afford to contribute, not how much the seniors themselves can afford. How else can we explain the Special Committee?

Most importantly, the Gift emphasizes values we shouldn't be emphasizing about the importance of money. There are money other ways people can and do "give" to Harvard, without giving money, through their participation in University life and their lifelong maintenance of contact with the University.

In pursuit of the dollar, the Gift committee employs high-pressure solicitation tactics that are, quite frankly, distasteful. Students should not feel that they must contribute to the Gift in order to be a part of their class.

For these reasons, the Senior Gift is inherently flowed. And while we realize that too many people have too much invested in its continuation for it to be entirely given up, we do have some suggestions for how it should be conducted.

We propose that the Gift planners tone down their sales pitch this time around. Stop having friends solicit friends for contributions and eliminate the Special Committee. Maybe in this way, the Senior Gift can be saved from itself.