UNC-Chapel Hill completed its second-highest fundraising year on record, raising $606 million in fiscal year 2026, Vice Chancellor for Development Mike Andreasen told the Board of Trustees on Wednesday.
Andreasen’s announcement comes a year and a half after he restructured the development staff so that top fundraisers in different schools would report to the central University Development Office, or UDO, rather than to their respective deans. This change, announced without consultation from most deans, sparked frustration and hurt among development staff, which The Assembly previously reported.
Andreasen and his leadership team set new performance goals as part of the overhaul, measuring first-time visits with potential donors and tracking the number of formal written proposals and gifts.
“The new management structure and the expectations that we put in place at the beginning of each year about these metrics that are in place—it turns out what you measure has a direct correlation to what we actually see,” Andreasen said to the trustees.
Individual donors supported $480 million of the yearly total, with more than 50,000 people donating, and the remainder comes from grants. These numbers are preliminary and will be broken out in greater detail in September, Andreasen said. His team secured 17 gifts of $5 million and above, up from six in fiscal year 2025 and nine in 2024.
Andreasen mentioned that development was just the first in a wave of restructuring, a process the university has marketed as ServiceFirst. The university’s communications and marketing department is currently undergoing a similar centralization, with other departments to come.
“Development was the first to lean into leveraging and acknowledging that together and with stronger ties across the university, we could have better performance and achievement,” Andreasen said to trustees.
This year’s fundraising total is up 28% from last year and 48% from fiscal year 2024. The vice chancellor started his tenure in 2023 after the conclusion of a successful $5 billion campaign, and the university recorded its highest fundraising totals in 2022 at nearly $800 million. Fundraising totals dipped after that, and the university brought in $410 million in fiscal year 2024, well below the five-year average at the time of $514 million.
Development also saw substantial staff turnover after the last campaign and into Andreasen’s tenure, with 17.5% of the staff leaving in the time between Andreasen taking office and spring of 2026, The Assembly reported.
At Wednesday’s meeting, Andreasen called this period of turnover and low fundraising totals a “catch-your-breath moment” after the last campaign.
The university announced that $25 million will go toward a mental health facility at NC Children’s Hospital, donated by Coca-Cola Consolidated. An anonymous donor gave $20 million to support cancer research at the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, Andreasen announced Wednesday. Other funds are directed toward a new telescope survey system, a project led by a UNC-CH faculty member.
Andreasen’s team also has plans to enact a new gift fee of 5% starting in January 2027 to go toward operational costs, he told The Assembly in an interview. Donors will be asked to give an additional 5% to cover the fee, and for donors who decline, UDO will take 5% out of their gift to support those costs.
Peer institutions have similar policies, including a 7% gift fee at NC State University and 5% at the University of Florida.
Andreasen said the fee will eventually go toward supporting additional staff, with about 60% of the hiring in schools and other academic units and 40% in the central development office. These new hires will be mostly frontline fundraisers, Andreasen said. He said there may also be new hires at the management level as the team grows.
The gift fee will also go toward updating technology and potentially AI tools to support fundraising.
The new gift fee is separate from the existing Endowment Administration Fee, which is 0.8% pulled from donations to UNC-Chapel Hill’s endowment to support UDO. Andreasen said he may increase that amount in the months to come.
“Our goal is to build the overall development program, so we can raise more money for our students and our faculty,” Andreasen said.
