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www.development.duke.edu

Major highlights:

As it prepared to launch its Financial Aid Initiative, a new multi-year fundraising effort to increase financial aid endowment, Duke University raised $275,815,542 in charitable gifts during the 2004-05 fiscal year. Gifts came from 100,031 donors, 44,938 of them alumni.

The giving total is an approximately $19 million increase, 7.4 percent, over the previous year, and the third largest annual philanthropic cash total in Duke history.

Fundraising efforts were led by Robert S. Shepard, who became Duke's vice president for alumni affairs and development at the start of the fiscal year, and Ellen Medearis, named executive director of development in Fall 2004. Shepard called the year's performance "very encouraging, particularly as we seek to build greater support for Duke's most compelling need—endowment dedicated to produce need-based financial aid for students."

The public announcement of Duke's Financial Aid Initiative came on December 1, 2005, when hundreds of alumni and students met to launch publicly a quest for $300 million in scholarship endowment over the next three years. The effort quietly began months before its public announcement and by the launch had raised more than a third of the final goal, the majority of which came in The Duke Endowment's record-setting gift of $75 million in October 2005.

The $275.8 million raised in 2004-05 represents dollars received during the year, not pledges. Duke's two higher annual philanthropic giving totals came in 2002-03 ($296.8 million) and 1999-2000 ($302.6 million).

The Duke Endowment of Charlotte, the charitable trust created by university founder James B. Duke, was the largest single donor, with gifts totaling nearly $38 million for a variety of purposes, including scholarships and academic and community outreach programs.

Duke's Annual Fund, supported by more than 44,000 alumni, parents and friends, set a new record with $23.1 million.

Between January 1, 1996, and December 31, 2003, the comprehensive Campaign for Duke raised $2.36 billion in gifts and pledges. When it ended, it was the fifth largest fundraising campaign in American higher education. Some of the cash gifts of the past year are payments on campaign pledges.