Ronald Stein is vice president for university advancement and development. He oversees "The Campaign for UB: Generation to Generation," the university's $250 million capital campaign.

Why is it so important to give to a public university?

	Stein

There's a cliche we use in the business: for public universities, the state pays for good; it doesn't pay for excellence. So any conversation about public universities has to begin by acknowledging and appreciating the level of state support that we get. It is substantial, but the truth today is that if you're going to compete for the very best faculty,then you have to be able to offer them endowed chairs and if you are going to be able to retain your very best faculty from being raided by other universities, you have to be able to offer them those extra incentives that other universities are offering them. This campaign will begin to level the playing field for UB to allow us to compete and retain the very best faculty. And the same thing's true for students. We need to have endowed fellowships to attract and retain the very best graduate students and we need to have endowed scholarships to attract the very best students. The case has been made because the Distinguished Honors Program, which is the result of a gift we received anonymously from a donor, has brought to the university 99 students whose average SAT score is 1513 and average high-school average is 98. Many people argue that those students would not be here if it wasn't for the endowed Distinguished Honors Scholarships. That's why this campaign is important. The other thing that the campaign does, which is not financial, is that it has reconnected the university to its alumni-a connection that was broken when we became a public university in 1962. And for the first time, we're reconnecting to our alumni, not only in Western New York, but throughout the country and the world. And they want to be reconnected-there's this thing called alumni spirit. They're mad at us because we have not embraced them as members of the university family for 30 years.

What is unique about this campaign?

In preparing for this campaign, I went back and looked at all the campaigns the university has conducted through the years, both when we were a public institition in 1986, as well as the three major campaigns we conducted when we were a private institution in 1920, 1929 and 1955. As far as I can tell, this is the first time ever that the campaign has been alumni-driven-that is, the campaign chair of every campaign committee except for one is a UB alum; most of the members of the campaign committees are UB alums. So the volunteer leadership is UB alums. Secondly, this is the first national campaign. Even in the campaign of '86-which was successful in raising $56 million-they talked to only one person outside of Buffalo when they did the feasibility study, and that was somebody in Rochester. Most of our gifts (for the current campaign) are coming in from California, from Florida, from New York City. So it's the first truly national campaign for the university. And most of those gifts are coming from alumni. And the third thing that's important is that this is the first federated campaign. In other words, this is a campaign involving everyone in the university-every faculty member, every staff person, every department, every program, every decanal area. Those programs are the programs for which we are raising money. That's different than in the past campaigns where the campaigns were run primarily by the president and a small group of volunteers from Buffalo, most of whom were not even UB alums. What I've described is the first for UB, but very typical for campaigns for other public universities. One of the reasons it's taken a little extra time to get this campaign going is that we had to build the infrastructure to allow for this broad-based campaign.

What role will the volunteers play in making this campaign a success?

The major role of giving themselves at the leadership level, and asking others to give at the leadership level. It's a different conversation when a staff person talks to an alum and says, "I'd like you to give to the university," than someone who's an alum who says, "I believe in UB so much that I've given a gift that's stretched me. But I believe in UB and I'd like you to believe in UB and join with me in giving a gift." That's a conversation that I think is best done by a volunteer. That's why major campaigns, public and private, are volunteer-driven and staff-supported.

How do you define a successful campaign, other than achieving the goal?

First of all, the intangible success is re-engaging the alumni in the university-communicating with them, creating that "warm and fuzzy feeling" and a sense of passion for the university. That's an important outcome of this campaign. Another is not only the money you raise during the campaign, but what that has done to your level of fund-raising post-campaign. It's not always apparent that one of the goals of the campaign is to substantially increase annual fund raising at the post-campaign level. We went into this campaign with a giving level of about $10 million. It is our hope to raise this on an annual basis to at tleast $25-$30 million. That's what universities do-they use the campaigns to build the machinery, to sharpen the tools and to create a habit of giving on the part of alums that substantially increases annual gifts to the university. And then of course you've got the legacy effect. That is, this will not be our last campaign. We hope to put in place a structure of people and processes to allow the next president and vice president and university community to launch a campaign at the billion-dollar level. That's for someone else to do.

Could you ever have imagined, when you were a UB student, that this is what you would be doing?

When I was vice president for university relations, I used to look at Joe Mansfield (a former executive director of the UB Foundation) and say, "I've got the best job at UB. I'm in charge of PR, and press and media, and we've got all this good news at UB. I could never ask people for money. That's got to be the worst job in the world, sitting in someone's kitchen at 4 in the afternoon and making nice talk. How in the world could you do it?" And I can tell you (now) that I love this job because you actually make things happen. You make a difference.