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King's College launches £500m fundraising campaign 1

Fundraising | Rebecca Jeffrey | 3 Nov 2010

King's College London has launched an international fundraising campaign with a global and humanitarian focus to raise £500m by 2015 for its research programme.

The ‘World questions/King’s answers’ campaign, which was launched today at events in New York, London and Hong Kong, is emphasising the university’s research programme and its global impact on people. While £10m of the money raised will also go to the annual fund, scholarships and unrestricted use, the campaign will focus on attracting funds for research in the areas of cancer, neuroscience and mental health, and leadership and society.

At launch £200m has already been raised for the research. The remaining £300m is expected to be sourced largely from philanthropists and major donors; however it is expected that smaller income streams will be gained from trusts and corporate fundraising. Research funds raised will also benefit from the Higher Education Funding Council's three-year matched funding programme.

A quarter of individual donations given to the campaign has been from international donors and 80 per cent of donations have been from non-alumni so far.

Gemma Peters, development director at King's College who is heading the campaign and a team of 70, said the university is keen to encourage a diverse income stream from the campaign which has been in development for five years.

Peters admitted that universities face a long battle to secure sustainable income in the wake of the government’s £4.2bn cuts to higher education funding, but she is positive about the future of her university. “People have an appetite for giving,” she said, adding that King's College London, which has been fundraising for 20 years, is “ahead of the game”.

The university has seen an increase in private donations since its last major fundraising scheme in 2004 and expects a further increase if the campaign goes to plan.

Universities raising larger sums

The launch of the campaign comes after both Cambridge and Oxford University announced they had reached over £1bn in their own multi-year funding campaigns this year. But big-figure campaigns are not only for the highest-profile universities, Peters said, stressing that growth in university fundraising is incremental.

“I don’t think there is any danger of being over-zealous. We’re certainly not asking too much,” she said.

Peters also expressed slight concern that with universities going to private donors to raise money for their own research programmes, charities - which often fund university research as part of their own charitable mission - may cut back on their own funding of universities. 

The global campaign launch today will also see the release of results of a poll revealing the biggest global concerns streamed live on King's College London’s website. 

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