IDEAS THAT WORK
Naming gifts are a part of almost all capital campaigns, but a new effort in Pittsburgh is drawing small gifts as well as large ones.
The Carnegie Museum of Natural History, which is trying to wrap up a $36-million campaign, has raised nearly $800,000 by offering companies and individual donors the opportunity to attach their name to a dinosaur bone. Donors can spend as little as $25 for a dinosaur tooth and up to six figures for an entire dinosaur skeleton as part of the museum's Adopt-a-Bone campaign.
The money will be used to offset the cost of cleaning and remounting more than 5,000 dinosaur bones from 15 specimens. The bones will become part of an enhanced permanent exhibit, called "Dinosaurs in Their Time," in which dinosaur skeletons are arranged by the era they roamed the earth.
A permanent plaque in the museum will soon bear the name of all donors who make a gift or the name of a person a donor wants to honor. Those names will also be displayed on an interactive kiosk with a computer screen that enables visitors to examine dinosaur skeletons more closely.
In addition, donors will receive a certificate to commemorate their adoption of the bone.
To date, the museum has raised $615,000 from corporate "sponsaurs" and another $175,000 from individual donors, whose gifts are expected to reach $200,000 by June. That's when the institution will mount and open the most eagerly awaited display in the newly expanded exhibit: the skeletons of two Tyrannosaurus rex, the fiercest of all carnivorous dinosaurs, posed in scientifically accurate positions depicting a ferocious fight over the fallen carcass of an Edmontosaurus regalis, a slow-moving dinosaur that roamed the North American continent in herds.
Of the nearly 2,000 individual donors to date, about 600 are first-time donors, says Daryl Cross, who oversees the Adopt-a-Bone campaign. Most gifts are in the $50 to $100 range.
While the money raised from the small donors has been helpful to the capital-campaign goal, the focus on small naming gifts was designed to bring in new donors and get people excited about the exhibit, he says.
To raise more significant money, in the 18 months before the public was offered a chance to "adopt a bone," companies were encouraged to become sponsors for a minimum donation of $5,000.
Employees of those companies and members of the museum were also offered an advance chance to adopt bones that were more affordable. The museum is still seeking corporate sponsaurs for some of its more expensive specimens, including Tyrannosaurus rex, offered at $250,000.
Corporate sponsors to date include the local office of Microsoft, which gave $10,000, including $5,000 in employee gifts that were matched by the company. Its name is now linked to the skeleton of Pachyrhizodus caninus, an ancient ocean predator in the exhibit.
Mr. Cross himself was one of the first to adopt a bone, paying $150 in honor of his nephews for a neck vertebra of a plant-eating dinosaur named after Andrew Carnegie, whose money helped found the museum. Mr. Carnegie, who loved dinosaurs, paid for the dig that discovered the dinosaur that now bears his name, as well as several others, including one that uncovered the first known Apatosaurus louisae, another herbivore specimen housed at the museum that scientists named after Mr. Carnegie's wife, Louise.