December 2, 2008
Albuquerque Journal
NMSU Breaks Gift Goal
By Martin Salazar, Journal Staff WriterThree years after announcing a major fundraising campaign, New Mexico State University has shattered its $150 million goal by raising more than $202 million, officials at the Las Cruces school said Monday.
NMSU initially set out to raise the $150 million by this month. Nick Franklin, vice president for advancement and executive director of the NMSU Foundation, said the university reached that goal by the end of 2006.
Having met the goal two years early, the NMSU Foundation has raised the bar to $225 million — meaning it's hoping to raise another $23 million by 2010.
"This is our first major gifts campaign," Franklin said. "We've had small campaigns before that was just raising money for different programs, but this is the first time the university has gone through a major gifts campaign."
Franklin said that, through the "Doing What Counts" campaign, donors have endowed 840 student scholarships, 17 faculty professorships and 16 faculty chairs. Endowing a scholarship at NMSU requires a minimum of $10,000. Endowing a professorship requires $250,000, while an endowed chair costs $1 million.
The university also raised money for capital improvement projects like the Center for the Arts and the Domenici Institute.
"Thousands of gifts have come from alumni and friends committed to seeing New Mexico State University elevated to a new level of excellence in education and research," interim President Waded Cruzado said in a news release. "We can see how the generosity of so many permeates throughout the campus. By working together, we can continue to ensure that NMSU remains one of the nation's top-notch land-grant universities."
NMSU announced the multi-year fundraising campaign in October 2005, though it began the "quiet phase" of the campaign in 2003.
Franklin said he's grateful to everyone who made a contribution and added that the foundation continues to work to meet the new goal.
"Now is a good time to be giving money, even in hard times, because a lot of this goes to students who otherwise wouldn't be able to go to college," Franklin said. "We're really working that side of it to make sure we create a lot more scholarships than we already have."
The University of New Mexico has also been setting fundraising records, having raised $85.5 million last fiscal year. Its goal for the current fiscal year, which began July 1, is $95 million.