Charities get inventive with name-dropping

Wanted: Vivid presentation of good taste
But of course, it’s rarely that simple. The “donor” is also paying for a vivid presentation of his/her name and good taste. Among the publicly wealthy, your name on a building is a fourth good reason — after birth, marriage and death — for its appearance in the newspapers. The cause du jour gets not only the cake it needs, but also a cherry on top: a potent reminder to the ambitious of its cultural and social centrality.

How ambitious does one have to be? The Metropolitan Museum provides a glossy price list of “opportunities for donor recognition,” ranging from $10,000 for a plaque beneath a piece of art and $50,000 for a gallery bench to that $2.5 million you’ll have to cough up to place your name on the roll call of New York society on the Great Hall stairway. Only nowadays, those plaques are getting crowded and are full of corporations, too, so it’s unlikely you’ll be incised in stone close enough to J.P.Morgan to feel warmed by the glow of his name. Better, perhaps, to give the “minimum gift of $3 million” required for a named curatorial position “similar to the naming of a university chair.” No word on the cost of a toilet stall.

There are relatively inexpensive naming opportunities. In Sheboygan, Wis., Kohler Credit Unions put its name on two high school gift shops for $60,000. The principal’s office in the Newburyport, Mass., high school was up for grabs for $10,000.

Business school naming rights, perhaps oddly, generally sell for less than those for medical schools. Patrick and Lore Harp Mc-Govern gave $350 million for the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, David Geffen gave $200 million for his School of Medicine at UCLA. But the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon cost only $55 million and the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas, Austin, was named for a mere $50 million after “Red” McCombs, a San Antonio car salesman. Still, in 2006, Stanford University sold the name of its Graduate School of Management to Nike founder Phil Knight for an impressive $105 million.

Kenneth Lay YMCA?
Just do it? Well, no, one may want to pause first. Name games can lead to trouble as well as tribute. For every Rockefeller University, there is a Kenneth Lay YMCA like the one in Katy, Tex., which had to rename itself following the late Enron chairman’s conviction for corporate fraud and conspiracy.

Christopher Dawson The New Museum of Contemporary Art, photographed before its December 2007 opening on the Bowery in Manhattan.

And sometimes, there’s a real train wreck, like when New York’s Metropolitan Opera put investor Alberto W. Vilar’s name on its Grand Tier in recognition of a $20 million pledge but removed it when he failed to cough up the cash and was soon indicted for an unrelated fraud (the trial is set for September 2008). Luckily, donors are like subway trains, there’s always another: Sid and Mercedes Bass replaced Vilar’s pledge as an outright gift (with a $5 million kicker in cash besides). That’s what one might call hitting a high note.

But careful how you treat those donors. The family of Andre Meyer, former head of Lazard Frères, nearly came to blows with the Metropolitan Museum some years back when it rebuilt its European Painting Galleries, and the Andre Meyer Galleries disappeared. Family members thought his name would grace those galleries in perpetuity. The museum’s bosses were reportedly furious that Meyer had promised it his art collection but reneged on what would no doubt be called an “unenforceable oral promise.” When his family refused the museum’s request for another donation for its new galleries, the museum removed Meyer’s name. Descendents now joke about “the Andre Meyer wall.” To be sure, you don’t always get what you paid for. (The Museum declined to comment.)

‘The definition of perpetuity has changed’
The family of Avery Fisher had more luck when it heard that his name might be removed from his hall at Lincoln Center, endowed with $10.5 million in 1973. The family was no longer flush enough to pay for a new building, so no one even bothered to ask them to “top-up” his gift. But — surprise! — they had enough to hire a lawyer and force a compromise: the interior could be renamed but not the building. “Donors have to be very careful,” says Rockefeller’s Bauer. “Institutions have to be very clear. The definition of perpetuity has changed.”

David Lamb The heirs of Avery Fisher settled a recent naming-rights squabble with Lincoln Center that keeps Fisher’s name on Avery Fisher Hall, but not inside it.

Indeed, what was once a gentleman’s agreement is now a legal negotiation. Law firms have emerged that specialize in naming gifts and they can play hardball. One specialist, who asked not to be named, tries to win clients the right to withdraw endowments and disassociate their names if, for example, a religious institution becomes a secular one. He also touts the value of “deeds of gift” with provisos, barring charities from changing the terms without a court order. “Otherwise they can run amok and embarrass your name,” he says.

Ultimately, though, only money talks—and so loudly sometimes that some donors even have begun to demand the right to get their money back should the buildings that bear their names be torn down. “Whose need is greater?” asks lawyer William Zabel, who represented the Fisher family. “In most cases, the power of wealth is greater.”

So, when the Wal-Mart billions came a-calling, one school couldn’t say no. Elizabeth Paige Laurie’s parents, Bill and Nancy—whose father, Bud, cofounded Wal-Mart with his brother, Sam Walton — paid $25 million to have the University of Missouri’s new arena named after their then 22-year-old daughter, even though she attended the University of Southern California. But before a single game was played in the Paige Sports Arena, ABC’s 20/20 revealed that Paige Laurie had paid her freshman roommate about $20,000 to write her papers, e-mail her professors, and so forth, throughout her college career. Missouri would not say if it had returned any of their money, but the school renamed its arena Mizzou, its nickname, and Paige returned her USC diploma.

New trend: Egoless naming
Naming isn’t always a crass exercise, though. Increasingly, philanthropists are naming things for others — a new trend in giving. One recent example of egoless naming comes from Alexandra Lebenthal, president and CEO of Alexandra & James, Co., a New York wealth management firm. Lebenthal took part in a quiet little campaign to name a children’s reading room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new educational center for Felicia “Flis” Blum, who’s spent 30 years there training the docents who give tours of the museum. Blum’s husband and Liz Peek, a writer and wife of the head of CIT, the financial services firm, raised the money secretly from friends like Lebenthal and sprang their surprise on Blum at a recent dinner in her honor in the American wing.

“It was really the opposite of ego,” says Lebenthal, who hopes the next big thing in philanthropy will be what she calls “Shhh-don’t-tell fundraising.” She is doing her part to make that happen. “I’m in the midst of raising money for my own secret naming effort,” she reveals. “I can’t talk about it more than that, but someone else in the city is going to have a big surprise soon, so people who know me should have their guard up — and their checkbooks open.”

And even though it goes against the current, they’ll have to keep their mouths shut, too.

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