This is from 2013 and it provides an interesting look back at the overall situation when Dan Radakovich took over as AD:
NOTE: Tigerillustrated.com is conducting a wide-ranging assessment of the Clemson athletics department that Dan Radakovich inherits after 10 years under Terry Don Phillips. Today, we meet with IPTAY board president Charles Dalton.
CLEMSON – IPTAY is in the midst of major change, and there’s no better person to reflect on that change than Charles Dalton.
Dalton recently took time to sit down for a lengthy interview with Tigerillustrated.com. Here is Part 1:
TI: How would you sum up the state of IPTAY right now?
DALTON: “From my view, I think we’re in the best position we’ve been in a while and that’s where we need to be. Because the landscape is obviously changing in college athletics. If you’re not ramping up, you’re getting behind. So we’ve taken some serious looks at IPTAY and kind of compared what’s going on around the country from a broad perspective. From a full fundraising enterprise, we’ve lost some ground – not on the annual fund, which is still one of the top in the country. But what’s happened is other schools have gone to a more comprehensive approach where they’ve got major gifts, planned giving. We were a little bit slow getting that in place.
“But overall, today, IPTAY is very strong. Membership is continuing to increase. We’re significantly ahead of where we were at this point last year. All the indicators, contributions and season tickets, are back up and show excitement about the future.”
TI: What kind of comparisons did you look at?
DALTON: “We looked at the SEC and the ACC, pretty much.”
TI: Is it middle of the road?
DALTON: “Annual fund, we’re still one of the leaders. But when you come to total giving, that’s where we don’t rank nearly as high as we should. We’re probably middle of the road in the ACC in total giving.”
TI: I’m sure most people probably understand what total giving means, but can you put it in layman’s terms the different facets of it?
DALTON: “IPTAY became known and was a leader on the annual fund. That’s where you have a lot of people giving a smaller amount every year, and they renew that gift pledge every year through their membership. In 1934, seat location and parking was not an issue. You’d come stand on the sideline and you’d walk to the game. It was just the love of Clemson and athletics at that time, and wanting to see athletics get more competitive. But in the more recent years, the seating and parking has been an incentive for promoting and driving IPTAY contributions. And those giving-level contributions, that’s called the annual fund. And the annual fund is tremendously important. If you’ve got anybody that’s willing to send you that membership year after year after year, you can just build a good, strong base because you know what you’ve got. And in IPTAY’s case, that’s used to pay scholarships which has been our number one commitment from the beginning. And then there’s operations of IPTAY, and some reserves, and then support of any facilities or additional needs for the athletic department.
“So as the conference revenues, the TV contracts and all of that, as that has grown, the fact that we were leading the nation for so many years with our annual fund, we were well positioned. But then as other conferences and other revenue sources began to fill that void for other schools, then those total revenues kind of surpassed our situation. So we were leaning more heavily on IPTAY, and then all of a sudden the $20 million annual fund is not enough.
“When I became pretty active with IPTAY, I think the annual fund was maybe $16 or $17 million. Well then you make a commitment of $15 million to the West End Zone out of your reserves to help bring that out of the ground, when you’re not bringing in much more than that on an annual basis it doesn’t take long to figure out, ‘Well if we’re going to support these kinds of projects we’ve got to broaden our base. We’ve got to enlarge IPTAY’s footprint.’ Well, what do you mean by that? Well, just the annual fund will no longer work. Because scholarship costs are going up. Operating IPTAY is going up. Running Vickery Hall is going up. All those expenses are going up. So you have less and less to do the West End Zone project, or the golf project, or the improvement at the baseball field, or some projects with basketball. So a few years ago we took a look at what other schools were doing, and we realized we had to put major-gifts fundraisers on the ground. And that is any gift that is above and beyond your annual gift. If someone is giving $1,400 a year and they want to give a $250,000 gift to have a football stadium gate named for them, or half a million dollars to doing an upgrade to baseball, or a million dollars for a basketball facility – that’s what we call a major gift. That’s a one-time gift or one-time commitment paid over years. But that’s aside from the annual fund. And then the third leg of that is planned gifts, and that is where you put Clemson athletics, IPTAY, in your estate or in your will. That’s a planned gift, and that has become a real opportunity that we just have not taken advantage of in the past.
“And then there’s a leg of it that I’m not real familiar with, but the Letterwinners Association is going to become a part of it. And my assumption is there will be a higher concentration on getting graduate athletes to give back through various functions and trying to raise some additional money. So that will be another piece of the new, expanded IPTAY going forward.”
TI: Some of the changes with IPTAY haven’t been finalized yet, according to my understanding. What can you share about that process and some of the particulars?
DALTON: “The biggest change that we’ve put in place was we needed to build an organization large enough to have authority to hire people. So we will re-establish the CEO over IPTAY. We’re looking for a fundraiser, truthfully. We’re not looking for an assistant athletic director. We’re not looking for someone who’s coming out of the internal workings of an athletic department. Obviously they need to know about athletics. They need to know about Clemson. They need to love Clemson. They need to love this whole idea. But we’re really looking for a development, fundraising person.”
TI: You served on the athletic advisory committee that recommended changes with how IPTAY and the athletics department goes about its business. Can you give an idea of what that was like and what all you addressed?
DALTON: “In order to house and fund a large fundraising organization, we needed office space. We needed employees. We needed a machine, a mechanism, to run that kind of fundraising enterprise. We needed to be able to hire people, we needed office space to put them, and we needed a legal structure that provided a better organization, one that fit in the university better from a liability standpoint and protecting IPTAY members’ contributions and all that. So IPTAY had been formed in 1934 as an independent association. In talking with the university, we realized there was a need to become incorporated. So that caused us to change the legal structure.
“From an outward, IPTAY-member standpoint, that didn’t make a difference. It didn’t change anything. You still write your check to IPTAY. It’s still tax deductible. But we became an official, 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation separate from the university for tax-deduction purposes and that sort of thing. So because things were changing, because there are more demands for resources, because Clemson was falling behind on the comprehensive thing, then that’s what put the focus on, ‘Let’s get IPTAY expanded. Let’s grow it. Let’s do the full comprehensive fundraising.’ And if we’re going to do that, then we’ve got to have a foundation upon which to build that organization. If we’re going to hire people, if we’re going to hire fundraisers, if we’re going to get aggressive in raising more money, then we’ve got to have the organization to do that. And that’s what caused the other things to come into place.”
TI: A consultant named Carl Beard did two studies in 2006 and 2011 that strongly suggested emphasis on the major-gifts part. Did the athletic advisory committee make the same conclusions and recommendations last year?
DALTON: “Yes, there were similarities. They obviously had access to those studies, and there were certainly things there that they agreed with. And the advisory committee strongly supported the CEO position. They felt like that needed to be put into focus.”
TI: Can you shed some light on past IPTAY presidents no longer having voting power? They have emeritus status now, correct?
DALTON: “The original organization had past presidents stay on the board as voting members. And now past presidents will stay on as emeritus members. The voting aspect was taken away. They’ll stay on as active members of the board. Their viewpoints will be heard. They will give their influence. They will speak to issues. But they will not be voting members of the board.
“So moving forward, voting members of the board will be 10 district directors, two trustees, President Barker, the alumni association, and the NCAA faculty rep. Something like 20 voting members of the board going forward, whereas in the past it would be 27 or 28 depending on longevity of past presidents. So that number has been reduced.”
TI: What impresses you most about Dan Radakovich so far?
DALTON: “Probably his communication skills, not only his ability to convey his thoughts and his ideas and his vision, but his ability to listen and discuss openly. He’s not at all afraid to talk, listen, discuss.”
TI: Dan made a statement recently that basically said: “What we have is great, but we must go faster.” Does that mentality impress you?
DALTON: “Everybody at Clemson felt pretty good about the indoor practice facility, how fast that came out of the ground. But his very first conversation with us was, ‘My gosh, how long does it take to build a practice facility?’ And that was one prime example on campus that we thought got done quick for Clemson.”
TI: You said something recently about the focus being on “big, bold projects.” Can you elaborate on that?
DALTON: “When you have roughly 20 people in an IPTAY board that have been involved in IPTAY for a long, long time, these men and women have invested a lot of time and money. So we feel like we’re in touch with these 15,000 folks. We see them all the time. These people feel good about their contributions going to an indoor practice facility, a golf facility, a West End Zone, somewhere where they can say, ‘My contribution helped build that.’”
TI: Dan has said he wants to be aggressive with debt. What’s your take on that?
DALTON: “In general I agree that this is a good time to have debt, because interest rates are low and construction costs are not low but more reasonable. And I think we’ve seen visible signs that facilities improvements do improve recruiting and do improve the whole athletic environment and atmosphere. So long as we do it with a plan that we can service the debt at a comfortable number, I’m personally fine with it. But it is an aggressive plan. And what it looks like is, instead of taking IPTAY contributions and building these things, you take IPTAY contributions and service the debt while doing a larger investment, larger construction, and the smaller amount back here services that debt rather than trying to pay for it all as you go.”
NOTE: Tigerillustrated.com is conducting a wide-ranging assessment of the Clemson athletics department that Dan Radakovich inherits after 10 years under Terry Don Phillips. Today, we meet with IPTAY board president Charles Dalton.
CLEMSON – IPTAY is in the midst of major change, and there’s no better person to reflect on that change than Charles Dalton.
Dalton recently took time to sit down for a lengthy interview with Tigerillustrated.com. Here is Part 1:
TI: How would you sum up the state of IPTAY right now?
DALTON: “From my view, I think we’re in the best position we’ve been in a while and that’s where we need to be. Because the landscape is obviously changing in college athletics. If you’re not ramping up, you’re getting behind. So we’ve taken some serious looks at IPTAY and kind of compared what’s going on around the country from a broad perspective. From a full fundraising enterprise, we’ve lost some ground – not on the annual fund, which is still one of the top in the country. But what’s happened is other schools have gone to a more comprehensive approach where they’ve got major gifts, planned giving. We were a little bit slow getting that in place.
“But overall, today, IPTAY is very strong. Membership is continuing to increase. We’re significantly ahead of where we were at this point last year. All the indicators, contributions and season tickets, are back up and show excitement about the future.”
TI: What kind of comparisons did you look at?
DALTON: “We looked at the SEC and the ACC, pretty much.”
TI: Is it middle of the road?
DALTON: “Annual fund, we’re still one of the leaders. But when you come to total giving, that’s where we don’t rank nearly as high as we should. We’re probably middle of the road in the ACC in total giving.”
TI: I’m sure most people probably understand what total giving means, but can you put it in layman’s terms the different facets of it?
DALTON: “IPTAY became known and was a leader on the annual fund. That’s where you have a lot of people giving a smaller amount every year, and they renew that gift pledge every year through their membership. In 1934, seat location and parking was not an issue. You’d come stand on the sideline and you’d walk to the game. It was just the love of Clemson and athletics at that time, and wanting to see athletics get more competitive. But in the more recent years, the seating and parking has been an incentive for promoting and driving IPTAY contributions. And those giving-level contributions, that’s called the annual fund. And the annual fund is tremendously important. If you’ve got anybody that’s willing to send you that membership year after year after year, you can just build a good, strong base because you know what you’ve got. And in IPTAY’s case, that’s used to pay scholarships which has been our number one commitment from the beginning. And then there’s operations of IPTAY, and some reserves, and then support of any facilities or additional needs for the athletic department.
“So as the conference revenues, the TV contracts and all of that, as that has grown, the fact that we were leading the nation for so many years with our annual fund, we were well positioned. But then as other conferences and other revenue sources began to fill that void for other schools, then those total revenues kind of surpassed our situation. So we were leaning more heavily on IPTAY, and then all of a sudden the $20 million annual fund is not enough.
“When I became pretty active with IPTAY, I think the annual fund was maybe $16 or $17 million. Well then you make a commitment of $15 million to the West End Zone out of your reserves to help bring that out of the ground, when you’re not bringing in much more than that on an annual basis it doesn’t take long to figure out, ‘Well if we’re going to support these kinds of projects we’ve got to broaden our base. We’ve got to enlarge IPTAY’s footprint.’ Well, what do you mean by that? Well, just the annual fund will no longer work. Because scholarship costs are going up. Operating IPTAY is going up. Running Vickery Hall is going up. All those expenses are going up. So you have less and less to do the West End Zone project, or the golf project, or the improvement at the baseball field, or some projects with basketball. So a few years ago we took a look at what other schools were doing, and we realized we had to put major-gifts fundraisers on the ground. And that is any gift that is above and beyond your annual gift. If someone is giving $1,400 a year and they want to give a $250,000 gift to have a football stadium gate named for them, or half a million dollars to doing an upgrade to baseball, or a million dollars for a basketball facility – that’s what we call a major gift. That’s a one-time gift or one-time commitment paid over years. But that’s aside from the annual fund. And then the third leg of that is planned gifts, and that is where you put Clemson athletics, IPTAY, in your estate or in your will. That’s a planned gift, and that has become a real opportunity that we just have not taken advantage of in the past.
“And then there’s a leg of it that I’m not real familiar with, but the Letterwinners Association is going to become a part of it. And my assumption is there will be a higher concentration on getting graduate athletes to give back through various functions and trying to raise some additional money. So that will be another piece of the new, expanded IPTAY going forward.”
TI: Some of the changes with IPTAY haven’t been finalized yet, according to my understanding. What can you share about that process and some of the particulars?
DALTON: “The biggest change that we’ve put in place was we needed to build an organization large enough to have authority to hire people. So we will re-establish the CEO over IPTAY. We’re looking for a fundraiser, truthfully. We’re not looking for an assistant athletic director. We’re not looking for someone who’s coming out of the internal workings of an athletic department. Obviously they need to know about athletics. They need to know about Clemson. They need to love Clemson. They need to love this whole idea. But we’re really looking for a development, fundraising person.”
TI: You served on the athletic advisory committee that recommended changes with how IPTAY and the athletics department goes about its business. Can you give an idea of what that was like and what all you addressed?
DALTON: “In order to house and fund a large fundraising organization, we needed office space. We needed employees. We needed a machine, a mechanism, to run that kind of fundraising enterprise. We needed to be able to hire people, we needed office space to put them, and we needed a legal structure that provided a better organization, one that fit in the university better from a liability standpoint and protecting IPTAY members’ contributions and all that. So IPTAY had been formed in 1934 as an independent association. In talking with the university, we realized there was a need to become incorporated. So that caused us to change the legal structure.
“From an outward, IPTAY-member standpoint, that didn’t make a difference. It didn’t change anything. You still write your check to IPTAY. It’s still tax deductible. But we became an official, 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation separate from the university for tax-deduction purposes and that sort of thing. So because things were changing, because there are more demands for resources, because Clemson was falling behind on the comprehensive thing, then that’s what put the focus on, ‘Let’s get IPTAY expanded. Let’s grow it. Let’s do the full comprehensive fundraising.’ And if we’re going to do that, then we’ve got to have a foundation upon which to build that organization. If we’re going to hire people, if we’re going to hire fundraisers, if we’re going to get aggressive in raising more money, then we’ve got to have the organization to do that. And that’s what caused the other things to come into place.”
TI: A consultant named Carl Beard did two studies in 2006 and 2011 that strongly suggested emphasis on the major-gifts part. Did the athletic advisory committee make the same conclusions and recommendations last year?
DALTON: “Yes, there were similarities. They obviously had access to those studies, and there were certainly things there that they agreed with. And the advisory committee strongly supported the CEO position. They felt like that needed to be put into focus.”
TI: Can you shed some light on past IPTAY presidents no longer having voting power? They have emeritus status now, correct?
DALTON: “The original organization had past presidents stay on the board as voting members. And now past presidents will stay on as emeritus members. The voting aspect was taken away. They’ll stay on as active members of the board. Their viewpoints will be heard. They will give their influence. They will speak to issues. But they will not be voting members of the board.
“So moving forward, voting members of the board will be 10 district directors, two trustees, President Barker, the alumni association, and the NCAA faculty rep. Something like 20 voting members of the board going forward, whereas in the past it would be 27 or 28 depending on longevity of past presidents. So that number has been reduced.”
TI: What impresses you most about Dan Radakovich so far?
DALTON: “Probably his communication skills, not only his ability to convey his thoughts and his ideas and his vision, but his ability to listen and discuss openly. He’s not at all afraid to talk, listen, discuss.”
TI: Dan made a statement recently that basically said: “What we have is great, but we must go faster.” Does that mentality impress you?
DALTON: “Everybody at Clemson felt pretty good about the indoor practice facility, how fast that came out of the ground. But his very first conversation with us was, ‘My gosh, how long does it take to build a practice facility?’ And that was one prime example on campus that we thought got done quick for Clemson.”
TI: You said something recently about the focus being on “big, bold projects.” Can you elaborate on that?
DALTON: “When you have roughly 20 people in an IPTAY board that have been involved in IPTAY for a long, long time, these men and women have invested a lot of time and money. So we feel like we’re in touch with these 15,000 folks. We see them all the time. These people feel good about their contributions going to an indoor practice facility, a golf facility, a West End Zone, somewhere where they can say, ‘My contribution helped build that.’”
TI: Dan has said he wants to be aggressive with debt. What’s your take on that?
DALTON: “In general I agree that this is a good time to have debt, because interest rates are low and construction costs are not low but more reasonable. And I think we’ve seen visible signs that facilities improvements do improve recruiting and do improve the whole athletic environment and atmosphere. So long as we do it with a plan that we can service the debt at a comfortable number, I’m personally fine with it. But it is an aggressive plan. And what it looks like is, instead of taking IPTAY contributions and building these things, you take IPTAY contributions and service the debt while doing a larger investment, larger construction, and the smaller amount back here services that debt rather than trying to pay for it all as you go.”
