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Colleges Weigh ‘Yes We Can’ Approach to Fund Raising

Rich Mintz thinks college fund raising needs serious help.

Bureaucracies are byzantine, messages leave alumni cold, and methods of delivering them are ineffective.

“Frankly,” says Mr. Mintz, a bushy-haired fund-raising consultant who once aspired to be a medieval scholar, “I think that a lot of institutions have probably simply given up on getting anything valuable out of their alumni under 40.”

His attitude could come across as off-putting, but Mr. Mintz boasts a unique calling card: The company he works for built the new-media arsenal that helped catapult Barack Obama into the White House.