After 11 years as Stony Brook’s director of annual giving, Rick Guarino is taking his talents over to athletics.
He was named the Executive Director of the Stony Brook Athletics Fund on Oct. 4.
The Stony Brook Athletics Fund is a new fundraising initiative, created to help advance Stony Brook’s athletics program upon the completion of the Stony Brook Arena.
The goal is to raise money to help fund the 20 intercollegiate sports programs at Stony Brook. All of these programs compete in Division I athletics.
Guarino’s role as executive director will involve creating a team that develops programs for sports-specific fundraising.
He plans on creating new initiatives to go along with the arena and bring alumni back to the school through sporting events and entertainment.
“It’s a great opportunity,” Guarino said. “I just see tremendous opportunity and growth potential.”
Guarino says the program will generate revenue through “small checkbook gifts” and “major gifts, things you might see a person’s name on when they make the gift.”
Although he sees some parallels to his time as the director of annual giving, Guarino says his job as the executive director is different because of “the audience.”
“Athletics itself is a very different beast and a very competitive environment,” Guarino said. “The arena is a very different initiative. We may reach out to more friends than, say, alumni or students.”
Although the program is still in the developmental stage, Guarino already has a few ideas.
“There’ll be some different things that will happen—it could be in the volume of communications we send out to our donors, it may be in the tone, the type of appeal or the type of communications that’s being sent out, how we try to engage our alumni to come back,” Guarino said. “There’ll be a lot of change because a lot of it will be new.”
Guarino’s main concerns are alumni of Stony Brook, with whom he is going to work to “re-engage” through a variety of ways that include “great sporting events and entertainment” in the new arena.
When Guarino worked as the director of annual giving, he increased the amount of annual fund dollars from $400,000 to $1.5 million.
