Chicago — Can you prove that spending $60-million on fund-raising staff members, travel, and resources will produce $750-million in private donations? Why should a college infuse millions of dollars into an operation that won’t produce results for five years or more?

Those are the kinds of return-on-investment queries posed by college presidents and board members that higher-education fund raisers increasingly are having to answer. But the numbers are not always easy to calculate.

Development officers from Northwestern, Rice, and Southern Methodist Universities shared their strategies today at a packed session here at the annual conference of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, or CASE.

The biggest obstacle in measuring return on investment in private giving is that while standard measures easily calculate the efficiency of the operation (how low the cost of raising a dollar is), they do not take into account the long-term effectiveness of the work that is being done.

It’s standard to measure the performance of fund raisers by the number of visits they make to donors, the dollars they bring in, and their incremental success over a number of years. But it’s difficult to prove that some work is helping fuel long-term growth or furthering the goals and strategic plan of the institution.

Campaigns, apparently, don’t help the situation. “The whole focus of a campaign can become hitting the number, and not what the money is doing to fulfill the mission of the college,” said Mark A. Petersen, associate vice president for development and alumni affairs at Southern Methodist. “You can raise $1-billion and make no difference in the ranking, reputation, or performance of an institution.” —Erin Strout