Major Gifts

Drexel University on Tuesday morning will announce a whopping $45 million gift from corporate executive and alumnus Bennett S. LeBow for a new academic center for its business school, which already bears his name.

It's Drexel's largest gift from a single donor and the 12th largest to be made to a U.S. business school, Drexel officials said.

We'd like to introduce SOFII to those of our readers who don't know about it and share some of the fundraising efforts that have made it into the site's Best of the Best Showcase.

The parents of a boy who lost his battle with cancer have donated $30 million to the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto with the goal of helping more children survive the disease. The donation, believed to be the single largest private gift to pediatric cancer in North America, will establish the Garron Family Cancer Centre and fund research into childhood cancer.

Analyzing trends in the fundraising world is important on many levels. It lets you know what's happening in the industry, what that may mean for the future and how it compares to the past. Studying trends also lets you know where you stand compared to other organizations, allowing you to pinpoint what your organization is doing well and what it needs to work on.

On the day the Circle Ten Council of the Boy Scouts grew $25 million richer, Trevor Rees-Jones and Rex Tillerson were riding around in a golf cart at the national Jamboree, witnessing firsthand the power of Scouting.

That was two months ago when Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, asked fellow Dallas oilman Rees-Jones to make a $25 million donation to the local chapter. It was a lofty sum, more than anybody has given a regional Scouting chapter.

The ACLU's Leading Freedom Forward campaign transformed the organization's mind-set and major- and planned-giving strategies.

A billionaire philanthropist is backing Europe's first major school of government, which opens at Oxford University later today. Len Blavatnik, a Russian-American industrialist, has ploughed £75m into the venture so far and says he is prepared to offer more. The school, which will be launched with a message of support from the former US president Bill Clinton, aims to train outstanding graduates from around the world in the skills and responsibilities of government.

Penn State President Graham Spanier announced to the Board of Trustees (Sept. 17) the largest private gift in the University's history -- $88 million from Terrence M. and Kim Pegula to fund a state-of-the-art, multi-purpose arena and help to establish an NCAA Division I men's hockey program.

The gift paves the way for the creation of a Division I women's ice hockey program and enhanced figure skating opportunities.

Bruce Makous and Michael Rosen provided five steps to turn your direct-marketing program into a major- and planned-gift program.

The $100 million gift to Human Rights Watch from billionaire George Soros announced last week will extend the overseas presence of the influential American rights champion and ensure its financial health for years to come. But the goal of the gift is more ambitious still: to alter the way human rights are promoted in the 21st century, making rights advocacy less of an exclusively American and European cause.