Having been fundraising for nearly 25 years, mostly in Higher Education (HE)  you would expect me to answer "yes" to the question "is HE a charitable cause?" 

So what is the compelling message that is enabling fundraising to have big impacts in HE?  Last year the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge each raised more than £100 million, and for many universities, gifts of £1 million or more are becoming sufficiently frequent that they are no longer big news.

For me the answer lies in the power of Higher Education: it teaches undergraduates to think and inspires in them the desire to change things. When training student telephone fundraisers in the early 1990s, they could all remember the Berlin Wall coming down, and that iconic photo of a young man standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square.  Who was that young man?  A student . Who was locked up by oppresive regimes like those which fell in the period after the Berlin Wall came down?  Academics, teachers, clergy and students. All highly educated people.  Educating people enables them to change the world - to me that's pretty compelling.

Then there's University research - where was Penicillin discovered, DNA unravelled, artificial hip joints developed, new ways found of helping earthquake victims, and materials created to save hypothermic victims of shipwrecks?  Where will solutions to global warming be found, new technology be developed to move our cars more efficiently, safe ways of producing food for the increasing human population be found. All, of course, in Universities.  As my American friend Sue Washburn said: "Higher Education is not in competition with mainstream charities, it is the long term solution to many of the things those charities seek to address."

So Higher Education really does make the world a better place: I'm proud to be fundraising for one of the greatest causes there is.