Chancellor Mark Wrighton’s fundraising campaign, Leading Together, raised a total of $3.378 billion after ending June 30.

In an email to the University community on Aug. 30, Chancellor Mark Wrighton shared that the campaign resulted in the “creation of 153 endowed professorships and $591 million raised in support of student scholarships.”

Leading Together launched publicly in 2012 with an initial goal of $2.2 billion. The campaign’s original intent was to implement priorities identified from the Plan for Excellence, a fiscal strategic initiative that the University established in 2006.

According to Chancellor Wrighton, several of the campaign’s objectives included securing financial commitments and coming to a new level of annual, sustainable philanthropic support.

“In the last five years of the campaign, if you take a look at the average level of support, it’s more than 300 million dollars a year. We hope we can at least sustain that into the future,” Wrighton said. “For the five years preceding the campaign we were receiving annual philanthropic support of below 150 million dollars a year. So this significant increase in annual philanthropic support on an ongoing basis was one of the objectives of the campaign.”

Another main objective of the campaign was building visibility for the University. According to the Chancellor, the campaign has now attracted the financial support from about 160,000 people living in the United States and around the world.

“It’s important to realize that we enjoy and continue to enjoy great success and support from St. Louis, but a significant fraction of our alumni and employment opportunities for our current students will be outside St. Louis,” Wrighton said. “And when we receive a gift from outside St. Louis, it really affirms the importance of the University. When it’s a major gift, it’s important because oftentimes the donor is known where they live and when a major gift is given to an institution outside their hometown it really affirms us as a place that matters.”

Wrighton also emphasized that most of the support from the campaign has been for students, faculty and academic programs; only $311 million of the total raised went towards facilities.

“Another thing that I’d like to underscore about the campaign is that it’s enabled us to expand our academic offerings. To illustrate, we’ve started a department of sociology, we have made African and African American studies a department in the [College of] Arts & Sciences. We’ve started the Institute for Public Health that engages students and faculty from all seven schools,” Wrighton said. “We’ve started a program in landscape architecture in the [Sam] Fox school and all of of us benefited from the fact that we’ve been able to secure endowments that enable us to attract and retain our outstanding faculty.”

Executive Vice Chancellor of Alumni and Development David Blasingame also identified scholarships as a top priority of the campaign.

“The board approved the campaign in March of 2009, which you may remember was a time when the stock markets were not doing well, so the Chancellor and the board identified our top priority coming out of the planning retreat as increased funding for scholarships,” Blasingame said.

According to Wrighton, the initial fundraising goal for scholarship programs across the University was $330 million. The goal was then raised to $400 million and the importance of need-based financial aid was highlighted during the campaign.

“[Raising] $591 million is really wonderful. It’s perhaps one of the parts of the campaign that will have greatest impact on students directly because we know many students cannot afford the tuition and other expenses associated with attending Washington University. This of course helps us realize our goal of strengthening diversity, including socioeconomic diversity,” Wrighton said. “We’re very pleased with the total, we have a long way to [go] with securing additional commitments for financial aid and that will doubtless continue to be a fundraising priority as we move to the future.”

According to Associate Vice Chancellor and Dean of the Office of Scholar Programs Robyn Hadley, the funds raised for scholarships in the campaign allows the Office of Scholars Program to continue to be confident in knowing that these scholars programs will be around for a long time.

“In addition to being grateful for these resources, the scholarships allow [Washington University] and the Office of Scholar Programs (Danforth, Ervin and Rodriguez) to be very competitive with other universities and scholar programs in our offerings. High achieving high school seniors have lots of options when deciding on colleges and scholar programs and the scholarships and scholar programs we offer allow us to be very competitive with our peer institutions and others,” Hadley wrote in an email to Student Life.

Wrighton credits success of the campaign to University-wide planning efforts.

“We have a group of advisory councils which would be individuals, some are [alumni], some parents, some are members of our Board of Trustees. These advisory councils helped enormously in the planning, and of course the academic leaders from the schools all played a role,” Wrighton said. “The careful planning helped enormously in talking to people who could consider a gift to the University, we could say these priorities come from a process that involved all constituencies.”

Blasingame credited the success of the campaign in part to the leadership of Chancellor Wrighton and trustee Andy Taylor as well as board members John McDonnell and Sam Fox, who led fundraising efforts during the quiet period of the campaign.

“That leadership from them and other trustee members, along with the generosity of the Board of the Trustees, was very very important to the success of the campaign. I think another element of success is that the deans, the provost, the faculty all worked during the campaign to help with the effort,” Blasingame said. “Also we have a great alumni and development staff; when you do campaigns of this magnitude, they are team efforts. We had a great team working on both the one we finished and the previous one.”

Moving forward, Wrighton believes that Leading Together has created a strong foundation for future fundraising campaigns.

“One of the things that has proved to be very rewarding in this campaign is the strengthening of our volunteer network and strengthening our relationship in many areas of the United States and around the world,” Wrighton said. “In this campaign, ending in 2018, we raised more than $200 million. So the network of relationships has been strengthened and I believe this is very important for our ongoing fundraising and for the future.”

Blasingame also believes the results of this campaign will contribute to future success.

“If you do the right things, each campaign builds on the previous one. So we would expect this campaign we just finished will put us in position to do an even better job next time, if we do the right things,” Blasingame said.