By Gintautas Dumcius
Special to the Reporter

Within the first week UMass-Boston's fundraising website went up last November, re-tooled with a coat of crisp and clear orange paint over the old light blue, the university received two $1,000 gifts.

"That's two more than we got last year," Vice Chancellor Darrell Byers says, chuckling. Byers, the former vice president of development at Caritas Norwood Hospital, was Chancellor Michael F. Collins' first major hire last June, charged with taking over the university's fundraising arm, the Office of Institutional Advancement.

The crumbling parking garage, which serves as the foundation of the campus's five main buildings has been getting much of the attention in the press and from the Legislature, having suffered from many years of neglect. But so, too, has the university's fundraising and Institutional Advancement suffered.

The university's first &endash; and last &endash; full-fledged capital campaign, dubbed "UMass-Boston First" and co-chaired by Atlantic Monthly editor Jack Beatty, ended five years ago, after raising its goal of $50 million.

"The idea was we wanted people to think of UMass-Boston first," explains Michael Luck, Byers's predecessor and currently the vice president for philanthropy at the Research Foundation of State University of New York (SUNY). "And people did."

But after Luck and his associate vice chancellor left in fall 2001, the fundraising operation fell apart. "I think many people feel that after Michael Luck left, we did not find another equally effective leader&emdash;until now, I hope!" Monica McAlpine, head of the Fellowships Office in the Honors Program, wrote in an e-mail.

Enter Byers and his new team, which includes John Hayes from Fidelity Investments (and, like Collins and Byers, a Holy Cross graduate) and Kerri Cleghorn from the Boston Public Library, hoping to refocus and re-sharpen the office, and raise $6.1 million by June. Plans include an expansion of the donor database, an annual fund campaign and a larger focus on major gifts with three new major gift officers, each one an expert in two or more of the university's six colleges. The team tries to get the chancellor in front of a potential donor at least once a day, but they aren't always successful. Collins also regularly travels to alumni events in New York and Washington D.C.

While Collins' upcoming inauguration is considered a weeklong "pep rally" for the students (with a performance by the controversial and Grammy-winning rapper Kanye West), the university is also looking to attract donors back to campus and inviting folks from the corporate world at the Annual Scholarship Gala on Saturday, April 29.

On the menu: a dinner that includes "Tasting on the Point," offering samples from eight local restaurants from Dorchester, South Boston, and Roxbury, tickets for which are $250. For $10,000, you can get 10 dinner tickets, a full-page ad in the program book, and the company name on a banner in the Campus Center, as well as on the screen and stage.

Ninety-nine percent of the money raised - at the gala and overall - goes towards scholarships and meeting students' financial aid, according to Byers. "Frankly, [that] resonates with people. It resonates with corporations, it resonates with alums, it resonates with friends," Byers says. He points to Tufts Health Plan recently endowing a scholarship for the College of Nursing, and the South Boston-based Mt. Washington Bank putting $2,500 towards financial aid, awarded to a freshman from Dorchester last fall. The Boston Globe, the university's largest corporate donor year in and year out, just renewed its support.

Byers plans to increase overall giving by 22 percent this year, and raise alumni participation to 7.5 percent from 6 percent. For a commuter school such as UMass-Boston, the benchmark is at 10 to 11 percent, he says. UMass-Boston has 77,000 alumni.

Though faculty and others caution it's too early to tell, initial results look promising. In the first six months of the fiscal year, there's been a 38 percent increase in alumni participation, and 89 percent increase over where fundraising was last year in overall money raised. "What it really shows, some of the different things we've done, it's resonating with everyone out there," Byers says.

But at best, it takes a good year to build or re-establish a relationship with a donor, Byers said, and as many as twelve significant meetings with a donor looking to part with a large sum. In other words, expect this to take a while.

On campus, naming rights to colleges and rooms in the Campus Center are also getting a look. When then-Chancellor Jo Ann Gora first arrived on campus in 2001, she was reportedly chagrined to learn that many buildings had already been named &endash; for no money &endash; many years ago. But there are still some naming opportunities left, and Institutional Advancement is taking an inventory of various rooms across campus and colleges that can be named for big donors, Byers said. "There's a price tag on every college," he adds.

The biggest room on campus is the Campus Center. The $80 million, 331,000 square foot building opened nearly two years ago and is nameless, despite efforts by Gora, one of which included an attempt at getting the Yawkey Foundation to be a donor. (The current price, according to Byers, is a cool $10 million.)

Among some in Dorchester, there has been a push to name the Center after former lawmaker, state Sen. George V. Kenneally, Jr. Rep. Martin Walsh (D-Boston) filed a bill last year to officially make it so, before it got sent to die in study. "We're still working on" getting something named after Kenneally, Walsh said, adding that after talking with UMass system officials, the plaza area outside the Healey Library is a possibility, as are other areas on campus.

In the meantime, another capital campaign may soon be on the way. "We're starting that kind of research now," Byers says. But for now, the focus remains on building new relationships and mending old ones.

Last month, when the UMass-Boston men's basketball team left for New York to take on SUNY-Cortland State in the playoffs, 200 alumni in greater Syracuse were contacted about coming to the game. Four came. Some turned up in their twenty-five year old UMass-Boston or Boston State jerseys, with their lettering chipped and peeling.

"One guy, who used to play for Charlie [Titus, vice chancellor of athletics and basketball coach for 30 seasons], he couldn't come, but he was ecstatic that we were doing something like this," Byers says. "We're looking to do more things like that."