By Nanette Light
Amid a lag of 22 percent in dollar values for private giving at OU -- credited to a lackluster economy -- more OU alumni are reaching for their checkbooks, signing more checks for smaller totals to their names.
"We're getting more donors when the economy is down. We're not getting as much per gift, but we're getting more gifts," said OU President David Boren during the last OU Board of Regents meeting of this approximate one-fifth slump from reports of the last six months of 2008 to the last six months of 2009.
Boren said during his 15 years at the university, the number of donors has grown from 17,000 to 110,000 and private scholarship donations have risen from $100 million to $250 million total, mainly accrued through smaller gifts.
Boren speculated that tax laws currently inhibit some donors from making larger-value donations, since he said the law states donors can't give more than half their gross income each year and receive a tax deduction.
"It's impacted our larger donors for sure because as their incomes fall, it affects how much they're allowed to give us. It's the effect of the general economy," said Boren, tacking on the example of a donor's $2 million salary falling to $1 million, alongside a $1 million pledge to OU.
"Even if you don't need that $1 million to live off of, for whatever reason, now you can't give it and get a tax deduction for it," he said.
Guy Patton, president of the OU Foundation, established to invest university donors' philanthropic dollars, said this trend is on par with other universities. He said most "mega gifts," which are down at OU, are generated through windfall profits from selling companies and rapid run-ups in stock prices.
"There just aren't as many of these financial windfalls as there were four or five years ago," Patton said, crediting the loyalty of OU alumni to retaining individual givers.
Despite a decline in large gifts to the university, Boren said small gifts, mostly earmarked for scholarship funds, have held steady as OU continues to stoke its donor pool, prioritizing giving toward scholarship and OU's presidential professorship, a campaign initiated by Boren to recruit and retain faculty.
"We may be in a financial situation that won't allow us to help as much as we have in the past, but that doesn't mean we don't give at all," said Patton, who mentioned the "self-healing" properties of capital markets and the "small, green shoots of recovery" under way in the foundation's 2008 report to donors.
"Things don't look as grim as they did a year ago, and I think the mood of our donors is reflected in that. But it's not growing at some rapid pace. It's not exploding," he said.
Boren said he expects giving numbers to recover as the economy revives.
OU's link to the oil and gas community has helped it weather many of the country's economic pitfalls, said Robyn Tower, assistant vice president of development at OU.
"But at this point, we're definitely seeing a hit," she said of the drop in giving from $89,040,740 as reported for the last six months of 2008 to $69,042,774 in 2009.
Tower said through a survey by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, nationwide about 40 percent of nonprofit organizations experienced decreases in end-of-year giving, compared to a decline of 22 percent for the last six months of calendar years 2008 and 2009.
"There's no getting around the fact that giving in general is down," said Patton before posing the query of why the giving dollar-value is down compared to a steady hold of OU's donor list. "Even though people can give less, they still understand the trouble students have paying for college and the pressures that come with that."
Nanette Light 366-3541 nlight@normantranscript.com
