Thought I might as well start a thread since the official announcement will be next week. Hopefully there will be a lot to talk about.

From info released a couple years ago, the target should be between $300M-$400M and will include some donations made as far back as 2016. Those early donations were made for projects that will be part of this campaign. I doubt they will retroactively make the Sudro expansion part of the campaign, but I wouldn't be surprised if aspects of the Dunbar replacement(outside of the state monies) are included. I'd put money that the Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth will be part of it($30M already raised out of $50M).

The pre-hype video is very "aggie", but I don't know if that's because ag projects will be a big part of the campaign, or if the makers of the video are just trying to appeal to that demographic. Considering the state economy, the timing sucks, but not much you can do about that. It's been too long since the last major campaign, and there's no sign of change coming in the next few years, so you eventually just have to grit your teeth and pull the trigger; campus needs aren't going to just go away.

For local comparisons, the last big NDSU campaign was Momentum. The financial times were good, so the original targets were blown away. I think the early, unofficial target was around $50-65M, and that was quickly upped to $75M by the official start. The final figure raised was around $115M IIRC. UND ran a campaign a few years later(still good economic times) with a target of $300M and they raised $325M(though a big chunk of that was planned giving and pledges - IOW, they didn't actually have $325M in hand at the end). Concordia just finished a campaign with a $150M target that brought in $157M. Unknown how much, if any, of that is future giving as opposed to cash-in-hand.



*I expect In Our Hands will include future giving, but I'm not sure if Momentum did. IIRC, just about all of Momentum were projects that needed the money up front. And the endowments showed immediate improvement which wouldn't have happened if a big chunk of it was future giving. But I could easily be wrong.

**Actually, I bet Sudro will be part of it. I thought the news article below was from last year when I wrote the stuff above. But it was from over two years ago, which brings the Sudro project back into play.



From July 2017:
https://www.inforum.com/news/4297726...on-400-million