New Oklahoma AD Roger Denny to Pitch 'Impact' Amid Fundraising Efforts

NORMAN — Fundraising will be far different for Oklahoma’s new athletic director, Roger Denny, than it was at his last stop

Denny, who was introduced as the University of Oklahoma’s director of athletics Wednesday, comes to Norman after spending five years at the University of Illinois as the school’s deputy director of athletics.

At Illinois, Denny saw an increasingly large role in the Fighting Illini’s fundraising efforts, and he helped the university secure a $100 million dollar gift, the largest in the department’s history.

Denny revealed at his introductory press conference that his fundraising unit at Illinois came from within the athletic department. At Oklahoma, Denny will work with an central fundraising unit to generate money for the athletic department.

“You guys have heard me use the word partnership over and over,” Denny said. “The model here’s a little bit different.”

For the most part, Denny will work with Amy Noah and her team for the Sooners’ fundraising efforts. Noah is the vice president and chief advancement officer of the University of Oklahoma Foundation, which is an organization that manages philanthropic gifts to the school and its athletic programs.

As Denny prepares to work with Noah and the others on staff at the OU Foundation, he stressed the importance of everyone being on the same page before they try to collect new donations.

“It’s working with Amy and that team to make sure that everyone understands what our needs are,” Denny said. “Once we go out and start sharing what those needs are, what we’ve talked about a lot, what I’ve experienced around college athletics is, we’ve got to use the right language when we’re talking to folks.”

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Though Denny has been in Norman for only a couple of days, he already has a general idea of how he wants to approach monetary conversations with potential donors.

The athletic director knows that asking for a dollar amount won’t get him far. Instead, he hopes to pitch the impact on OU’s athletic department as the donors’ return on investment.

“If we’re going to them and only telling them how much we need and what we’re going to use it for, that’s not enough,” Denny said. “That’s not going to be effective at the level we need it to be. So we now have to go tack on the back end of that what the return on investment is going to be. And it’s not the same ROI that they get as business owners and executives and what not. But it is the impact on a community and a university that they care deeply about.”

College athletics have changed drastically over the course of the last decade, as student-athletes are now permitted to profit off of revenue sharing and name-image-likeness.

It’s inevitable that college sports will see more drastic changes during Denny’s tenure as Oklahoma’s athletic director.

One constant? Money.

Denny believes that an outpour of financial support is necessary for OU’s athletic department to be as successful as he believes it can be.

“If we can’t adequately get them to understand that impact, then we’re not going to be able to raise the dollars that we need to,” Denny said. “And make no mistake, we’re going to need a lot of those dollars as we move forward.”