Firm handshake, velvet glove

By Barbara Black

Kathy Assayag is a good listener. It’s a genuine attribute, not a pose, and it has made her a phenomenally successful fundraiser. She brings to the new post of Vice-President Advancement and Alumni Affairs a sensitive, soft-spoken manner and a reputation for effectiveness.

Last fall, the university created a vice-presidency that would give a higher profile to fundraising and building support from hundreds of thousands of Concordia graduates. The search to fill the post extended around the world, but the incumbent was in our own back yard.

In an interview, Assayag said she wrestled with the prospect of leaving her job as campaign director of Montreal’s Combined Jewish Appeal. At the CJA, “everything was positive — the sense of community, the team spirit. It had become a family.”

She had taken the campaign to raise funds from a relatively small community of 92,000 Jewish Montrealers from about $40 million in 2001 to nearly $50 million in 2004. It won her an award, conferred in Israel last spring, for being the best fundraiser for Jewish communities in the world.

After a struggle, she realized that she was ready for a new challenge, and came to Concordia last month. The university’s reputation for innovative programs, its commitment to accessibility, and its dedicated leaders and volunteers won her over.

Meeting challenges appears to be a pattern with her. At 21, she was a third-year student at McGill, already married, and had just been overwhelmingly elected as a senator for the Faculty of Arts when she responded to a campus recruitment campaign by an international bank. The interview went so well that she was hired on the spot. She left McGill one course short of her degree, figuring she would have time to complete it along the way.

Her rise in Deutsche Financial Services (formerly ITT Commercial Finances) was brisk, and by age 27, she was a vice-president. She handled major corporate lending, and was responsible for a quarter-billion-dollar portfolio in Quebec. When the company moved to Mississauga, she stayed in Montreal to take up her successful fundraising job for the CJA.

She feels that in the corporate and non-profit sectors, with clients or with donors, her job requires the same skills.

“My passion is to cultivate relationships, to build trust, support and loyalty. The key to any successful fundraising is personal relationships. That has been my guiding principle.”

Assayag focuses not on getting her message across, but on the needs of the donor.

“It’s a mistake to try to sell something. People give money for different reasons. You have to listen carefully not only to what they say, but to what they mean.” These may be finding a good home for a treasured collection, enabling the name of a loved one to be remembered, or just the feeling of having done something meaningful.

Concordia is positioned for success, she said, and there is work to be done. She is encouraged by the academic health of the university and the support in the community. The general financial climate is good, and because of the new buildings, there will be many “naming opportunities.”

She plans to work with the deans and the Provost on a table of needs that goes beyond the perennial need for scholarships and bursaries. “We are working on defining the strategic priorities that will give each faculty a competitive edge. This will lead to opportunities for prospective donors.”

She wants to establish a stronger program in planned giving, i.e. alumni bequests. She intends to strengthen the annual campaign, enlisting more volunteers, and to bind alumni more closely to their alma mater.

She intends to launch a new capital campaign, and establish more endowments, the gifts that keep on giving. In assuming leadership of Advancement and Alumni Affairs, Assayag will lead a staff of 45 employees — “a good team with a significant structure and meaningful resources.”

She is understandably keen to join her staff in the Faubourg Tower as soon as her new office is ready; at the moment, she is in a small conference room in Bishop Court, with a laptop, a phone, and her papers in careful piles on a big table.

As for that missing statistics course that would complete her degree, now that she’s back in the academic milieu, she plans to go for it this summer.