Dr. Bruce E. Bigelow

A founding partner of Charitable Development Consulting, Dr. Bigelow served as Senior Vice President at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, from 1989-2003.  Prior to that appointment, he was the Associate Vice President for Development and, earlier, the Director of Planned and Major Gifts at Gettysburg College.  While at Gettysburg and Hood, he directed three comprehensive campaigns and built programs that consistently produced gifts comparable to many colleges with larger staffs, bringing in $8-12 million per year from an alumnae base of roughly 12,000-13,000, with an average cost per dollar raised of 10 percent, well under the national average of 16 percent.

During his three years on the Board of Directors of the National Committee on Planned Giving (now the Association of Charitable Gift Planners--CGP), Dr, Bigelow chaired the national task force on planned giving research for NCPG and wrote and directed the first two national surveys of donor motivations and behaviors across the broad planned giving spectrum.  He also chaired the Committee on International Outreach and helped to write the national standards of conduct for planned giving professionals.  He recently chaired a national CGP Task Force that has developed guidelines for counting and reporting planned gifts, especially in a campaign context, a set of recommendations that now guides the policies for countless campaigns across the country.  He currently serves on a national Task Force to develop metrics for planned giving programs and practitioners.  In 1992 he chaired the national NCPG Annual Conference.  In addition to his role as a founding member and past president of the Chesapeake Planned Giving Council in Baltimore, he is a member the CANARAS Group, a select group of planned gift professionals from such colleges and universities as Cornell, Princeton, Duke, Colgate and Hamilton, which he chaired in 1997.  He is or has been a member of the editorial boards of both the Journal of Gift Planning and Planned Giving Today, the two most widely respected publications in the country devoted to gift planning.  He has written extensively in the field of planned giving and has presented a number of papers at a variety of development seminars and conferences, including NCPG/CGP national and regional conferences, a variety of CASE conferences, and the American Council on Gift Annuities.  In his many presentations, he has addressed issues as diverse as the intricacies of real estate transactions and Installment Bargain Sales, the key essentials of a successful planned giving program, how to integrate faculty into a planned giving marketing plan, how to create and effectively use gift acceptance policies, and how to turn planned gifts into current cash.

Dr. Bigelow has conducted a number of audits and directed a wide-ranging series of campaigns for charitable organizations, ranging from small liberal arts colleges to social service organizations to private primary and secondary schools and national membership foundations.  Some of his firm’s services have encompassed the broad range of fund-raising; some have focused on a more specific objective, such as preparing for a capital or endowment campaign, using board members wisely and preparing board members to assess the effectiveness of development programs, or developing and nurturing a planned giving program.  He serves as a mentor for a variety of organizational planned giving programs, providing technical counsel as well as strategic advice to a wide range of non-profits. He and his firm have conducted a series of campaign feasibility studies for a number of diverse charitable organizations, almost all of which have retained them as continuing campaign counsel.

A strong believer in the value of community involvement, Dr. Bigelow has served on a number of Boards, including the Frederick MD YMCA, the Barnesville School, the Adams County Community Foundation, The National Community Foundation, Maryland Citizens for the Arts, and the Alumni Board of the College of Wooster, as well as Project Gettysburg/Leon, a sister-city project linking the citizens of Gettysburg, PA, and Leon, Nicaragua. 

Before entering the development field in 1983, he taught Eastern European history for eight years at Denison University, receiving tenure there, while leading a series of summer semester programs to Yugoslavia for Colgate University.  He also served for four years as the liaison between the research and program offices of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in Washington, D.C.  Dr. Bigelow has a BA from the College of Wooster in mathematics and history and both an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago.  He also received a number of grants and awards, including a Fulbright research grant to Yugoslavia.