By Jerry HillBaylor Bear Insider
Doug Smith has a way of making everyone in the room feel like they're the most important person, whether it's a major-gift benefactor like Drayton McLane or John Eddie Williams, or a $200 donor that's been a lifelong Baylor fan.
"It's not that Doug was just great friends with me, he was great friends with everyone on that board," said Brett Beene, a Bear Foundation board member and former president. "Doug has a heart of gold. And Doug is a genuine person. If he tells you he's going to do something, he does it. Doug is honest, he's true, and he just has a heart for student-athletes and this university."
Smith, who led the Bear Foundation for 16 years before transitioning to his current role as Assistant AD/Director of Development, is retiring after serving at Baylor for the last 22 years.
In previous stints at Kent State, Pacific, SMU, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Rice, Doug barely stayed long enough for a cup of coffee. Spending nearly half of his athletic fundraising career at Baylor, he stuck around long enough to enjoy a full, seven-course dinner, and had a table full of friends.
"It's such a great institution. We need a school like Baylor. We need the Christian values it represents," said Smith, who will turn 75 in January. "Twenty-two years, that's a long time. This is my home, I just love it. This is just a very special place. There is nothing better than friends, and that's what I have here. And they all love Baylor University."
As Baylor VP and Director of Athletics Mack Rhoades put it: "Doug has never met a stranger."
"When I was first hired (at Baylor), Doug reached out to me, personal phone call, and checked to make sure that I didn't need anything," Rhoades said. "What I thought was even more special was that he didn't just ask about me, he asked about (my wife) Amy and the girls, if we needed anything. And when I arrived in Waco, both (Doug's wife) Loraine and him extended a helping hand and invited us over for dinner. That's just a really small flavor of what a very thoughtful person he is."
Doug calls it his "secret to success" in athletic fundraising: he actually cares for people.
"That's just who I am," he said. "I don't go out of my way to try and care for people. I just do. I listen, I know what their families are like. It's just something that comes naturally to me. When I drop by and talk to someone, sometimes we never even talked about Baylor. We'd talk about a hunting trip they had taken or a vacation they were going on, just something to make people feel better about themselves and show that I cared about them."
Cody Gougler, who followed in Doug's footsteps and now serves as Associate AD for Resource Development, calls him "the ultimate people person."
"His profound gift to carry a conversation, and natural ability to make the person he's speaking with feel special, are what I will always remember," Gougler said. "His humility and love for Jesus shines through his actions, and it's easy to see why Doug was so successful fundraising for a university with Christian values as its core principle."
A native of Toronto, Canada, Doug left his roots to play football at Kent State. That's also where he got his start in athletic administration, initially working in the admissions office and then becoming the school's first executive director of athletic fundraising.
Considered a pioneer in the volunteer team concept of fundraising, Doug first heard about the team concept at the inaugural National Athletic Fundraising Association convention in Beverly Hills, Calif., from Lynn Elefson and Lew Cryer.
Essentially, the volunteers are divided into teams that compete for prizes for bringing in the most donations and recruiting the most new members in an annual fund drive.
"The key, and it's been my philosophy my whole life, is if you're going to work and you're going to be a volunteer, you have to enjoy it. You have to look forward to it," Smith said. "We'd have these meetings and announce who the winners were that week, and people could hardly wait to go out and tell their neighbor or their business associate, 'Hey, I was MVP for the Baylor fund drive!" So, it was a lot of fun, and we had so many great people."
Doug McNamee, who followed Smith as executive director of the Bear Foundation and is now president of Magnolia, said Doug "established a grass-roots approach to team fundraising at Baylor which fostered the network of donors to make incredible capital projects and scholarship funding over the last two decades possible."
"Doug Smith dedicated his entire professional career to supporting and improving the opportunities for student-athletes," McNamee said. "That is simply what drove him every day. I'm forever thankful I had the opportunity to learn from Doug and see his impact first-hand."
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Hired at SMU in 1979, Doug remembers then-athletic director Russ Potts asking him on his first day, "How much do you think you can raise here? Do you think you can do $200,000?"
"I'll never forget this, I told him, 'Russ, if I only raise $200,000, you fire me on the spot,''' Doug said. "I think the first year, we raised between $800,000 and $1 million. I was Mr. Everything, I was God. They couldn't believe how much money we raised. By the second or third year, we had 450 volunteers, and I think we got to about $3 million. Back then, that was a lot of money."
When Doug came to Baylor in August 1998, after a year at Rice, the Bear Foundation was raising $800,000 per year in annual giving. That first $1 million check to Baylor Athletics was a big deal.
"You're young, you're energetic, you're always positive," Doug said. "I had never failed. This was the seventh school I had been to, so I knew we were going to raise money. I just didn't know how much money we were going to raise. You just never thought of not succeeding, or at least I didn't. Maybe that's one of the reasons I was successful at all the different schools."
Fueled by the volunteer fund drive, the Bear Foundation saw a steady, gradual increase, from $3.3 million in 2004-05 to a then-record $12.7 million in 2013-14 in Doug's last year leading the organization.
"Quite honestly, I think the Bear Foundation is what it is today because of Doug Smith," Brett Beene said. "All the policies and procedures and the fund drives and everything Doug implemented have helped us grow it into what it is now. I think people will always associate Doug with the Baylor Bear Foundation. He's been at other places, but he's never been anywhere else for 22 years. And he has a love for Baylor, undoubtedly."
Always one to shift credit, Doug said the biggest keys to the growth in the Bear Foundation was Baylor's success on the football field, specifically to Robert Griffin III winning the 2011 Heisman Trophy. Three years later, Baylor was playing football in the sparkling-new McLane Stadium on the Brazos River.
"It's a process," Doug said. "When you're winning, people want to become more involved. But, at least early on, we established it where the Bear Foundation became a well-known organization associated with fundraising. We introduced the seat options, which every school in the country basically does the seat option mechanics now. I just thought it would be a great thing to do here because that's all I really knew."
Rhoades does credit Smith for a lot of the success at Baylor, saying there would be no Bear Foundation, there would be no McLane Stadium and there would be no Simpson Athletics and Academic Center "without Doug Smith."
"I think even more than that are the relationships that he built," Rhoades said. "There's a saying that you get out of life what you put into life, and I think that's how Doug poured into his relationships. He has such unbelievable relationships with people on campus, with in the athletic department, and even outside of the community. Baylor Nation loves him, and it's because of what he pours into those relationships. It goes back to his authenticity and his compassion and his thoughtfulness for people."
Former Baylor quarterback Nick Florence, who interned in the development office and now serves as Associate AD for Major Gifts, said it was "huge to be able to be in an office setting with a guy like that with so much experience and wisdom in the field."
"Various industries are obviously more heavily people-centered than others, but fundraising is 100% a people business," Florence said. "It's what we do, interacting and having conversations with people. We have to learn how to build trust with our donors and constituents if we're going to ask them to invest at a high level. Doug does it better than most and is one of the best in the business."
Greg Meyer, Assistant AD/Director of Development for the Dallas/Fort Worth area, said Doug would travel "day and night to go see people, to help raise money for something that he believed in."
"When you look around and you see a lot of the names on these buildings, Doug Smith had a tremendous amount to do with all of it, actually, let alone what he did for the Bear Foundation," Meyer said.
Greg Davis, former Baylor basketball player and currently the Associate VP for Development, said Doug was a "wonderful colleague and partner to work alongside."
"Thank you for your friendship and the way you modeled how to care for donors and care for Baylor," Davis said. "You will most certainly be missed, and the void you're leaving will be impossible to truly replace, but you are leaving Baylor and Baylor Athletics in such better shape than you found it. We will continue to build upon that foundation."
In a message to Doug and Loraine, his wife of 28 years, Rhoades said: "Baylor University, Baylor Athletics, our coaches, our staff, our student-athletes, are going to miss you. We're unbelievably grateful for everything you did for our student-athletes, for our staff, for our athletics department.
"Personally, I'm going to miss you, not just as a colleague but as a friend. But also, know that you're not far away. Baylor Athletics, Baylor University, is your family and will always be your family."
Honored to be an alumni by choice at the school, Doug said, "I'll always be a Baylor Bear."
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