The hot news at Rutgers is a telefundraising program that has seen steady growth for the past eight years.

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

“When I heard about the pre-call letter, I didn’t buy into it right away,” he admits. “But Vicky said, ‘We’re doing it,’ so we did it and it worked amazingly well. In the first year (1996-97), the average gift increased 43 percent, and there was a 20 percent increase in giving.”

The pre-call letter approach makes sense, Brennan says.