Bold & Blue Makes History with $604 Million Raised

Working in tandem, the SDSU Foundation and the university surpassed our half-billion-dollar Bold & Blue fundraising goal, raising $604,345,119 in gifts and pledges from nearly 30,737 different donors.

Starting in 2017, this was the third comprehensive campaign in university history. The Bold & Blue campaign officially reached its $500 million goal in September 2023, adding another $100 million in the final seven months of fundraising. Working hard down to the wire, Jackrabbit Nation provided $43.8 million in gifts and pledges in the last 22 days of the campaign.

At its heart, Bold & Blue was designed to focus heavily on people-centered initiatives, with a particular emphasis on scholarships and endowments.

Scholarships accounted for one-third of the campaign total, revitalizing support for students.

The efforts of Bold & Blue more than doubled scholarship offerings that were available at the start of the campaign in 2017.

Another significant area of growth in the Bold & Blue campaign was endowed support for university leaders, faculty, and researchers.

Endowments are gifts invested to support a university’s growth, with an annual distribution used to ensure the fund exists in perpetuity. In effect, these gifts are of a nature that stands the test of time – and endowments accounted for 54% of funding raised during Bold & Blue.

At the start of the campaign, SDSU had commitments in place for 13 endowed positions. By its conclusion, that number had grown to 58, including endowed deans, directors, and chairs.

In fact, commitments for endowments grew to such a degree that the Foundation implemented a new event to recognize both donors for the funding and holders of the endowed positions. As a result, the University Leadership Honors ceremony, a collective investiture, is held annually each fall.

The campaign also addressed SDSU’s facility needs, with the construction of the American Indian Student Center and the Raven Precision Agriculture Center prime examples of signature capital projects. The largest infrastructure initiative was the renovation of the 50-year-old Frost Arena to First Bank & Trust Arena. First Bank & Trust provided the lead gift of $20 million for the project, paving the way for a new era of premier athletics.

An undeniable sign of the Bold & Blue campaign’s success was both the number of donors reached and the variety of gifts made, with contributions of all sizes making a collective impact.

When it comes to truly describing an impact sometimes it’s best to let the numbers do the talking:

• Of the 30,737 unique donors to Bold & Blue, 114 made commitments of $1 million or more.
• Of those, 23 made total gifts of $5 million or more.
• At the same time, 23,867 made commitments of $100 or less.
• For more than half of the total donors (17,594), it was their first-ever gift to SDSU during the campaign.
• A campaign of this magnitude equates to over $226,346 raised per day for 2,670 days, resulting in the yellow and blue community surpassing the $500 million goal by nearly 21%.

In effect, Bold & Blue will go down in history not only as the largest and most impactful campaign for SDSU, but in all of the Dakotas.

A success story like this can only be attributed to SDSU’s greatest resource: our people.

Like campaign co-chair Dana Dykhouse summed up on April 25 at the announcement of the final total, “In every campaign, we’ve exceeded expectations, because that’s what Jackrabbits do. We exceed the expectations every single time.”