The Oculus: Fall 2011

Editors Note
Dear U.Va. Community, It is with great pleasure that we present to you the Fall 2011 edition of The Oculus, the University of Virginias multidisciplinary undergraduate research journal. You now hold, in your hands, a collection of four exemplary papers demonstrating the high caliber and hard work that U.Va. undergraduates can achieve when conducting research. The papers published in this edition, which come from the fields of engineering, history, and economics, demonstrate a significant degree of insight and intellectual contribution from the authors that we believe will make you want to continue reading about each topic. In particular, we commend the authors on their ability to report their technical subject matter in way understandable to a wide audience of scholars. Our editorial board, composed entirely of undergraduates from a range of disciplines, carefully reviewed the submissions. Over the course of six weeks, our editors met to discuss and evaluate each submission in terms of novelty, originality, and writing quality, ultimately selecting these top four papers. We heartily congratulate the selected authors for their outstanding research and hope that they will continue to be leaders and mentors to those looking to become involved in the challenging but rewarding process that is research. The Oculus could not have been possible without the efforts of a large number of people. We would first, and foremost, like to thank our editors, who dedicated several hours each week out of their busy schedules towards the journal. Additionally, we greatly appreciate the extra time and effort that our layout editors and cover designer have put into creating a beautiful journal. As always, we also give a special thanks to our sponsors at the Center for Undergraduate Excellence for another year of support, advice, and insight. Finally, we would like to thank our authors, their faculty advisers, as well as you, the reader. We hope that you enjoy reading about the phenomenal work presented in this issue, and that this journal inspires you to engage and participate in U.Va.s scholarly community. Best,
Jessleen Kanwal Co-Editor-in-Chief
David Wu Co-Editor-in-Chief
Guest Letter
Dear Readers, A constant in the history of human endeavor has been the thirst for knowledge, and a striving for advancement of the human condition. Today, our striving to understand the world and improve it balances the goals of advancing the human condition with that of achieving a sustainable earth and human dignity around the world. U.Va. has a dynamic research environment. People make this so. The authors of the student papers in The Oculus are among the brightest minds of a new generation. As undergraduates, U.Va. students take leadership roles in formulating new questions and creating new ways to develop solutions. The excitement of research infuses the classroom, where new knowledge and breakthroughs enliven the learning process. The Oculus publishes this exciting work, and we are proud of what our students have accomplished. We hope many will publish here in the future. The Undergraduate Research Network (URN) is working to match undergraduates to faculty researchers and external partners in every area of research. The new URN research advising program will be a superb addition to the opportunities for research. In every department there are opportunities for student-initiated research as well. The Oculus articles capture current outcomes, and we look forward to seeing the impact of U.Va. student research grow. In these pages may lie the next Einstein, Curie, Picasso, or Jobs. Picasso said, Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once one grows up. I urge you all to remain the unique artist you are, and seek out new ways of seeing and thinking, exploring frontiers throughout your lives. Best regards,
Thomas C. Skalak Vice President for Research
The Oculus
The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research
Volume 10, Issue 2

CoNtENts
Around the University: Professors and their students Professor W. Dean Harman, Professor t. Brent Gunnoe, and Vlad sviderskiy Michelle Choi Mathematical Modeling of Building-Wide HVAC systems Virginia Smith Coordinating Efforts by Volunteers and technical Communities for Disaster Preparedness, Response, and Relief Erin Boehmer solicitation Effectiveness in the University of Virginia Class of 2011 Class Giving Campaign Ruika Lin Bred From Nobler stock: British Investment in the American Cattle Industry Mark Goldberg A No-Nonsense Guide to Getting Involved in Research Jessleen Kanwal submission Guidelines 1
11
21
35
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46
Editorial Board
Jessleen Kanwal and David Wu
Co-Editors-in-Chief
Tim Allan, Kirsti Campbell, Michelle Choi, Arun Dutta, Charles Banks Griffin, April Hyon, Venkat Iyer, Leah Kim, Mitchell Leibowitz, Shaun Moshasha, Shruti Patel, Sharon Rogart, Grace Segars, Janet Shin, Sarah Smith, Jason Ya
Editorial Committee
Sarah Smith, Grace Segars, Jason Ya
Layout Editors
Photographer and Cover Designer

Michelle Choi
The Oculus is published by the Undergraduate Research Network (URN) in conjunction with the Center for Undergraduate Excellence (CUE). All copyrights are retained by the authors; URN holds the rights to non-exclusive use in print and electronic formats for all pieces submitted for publication in The Oculus. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not constitute the opinion of The Oculus.
around thE univErsity: ProfEssors and thEir studEnts

Professor W. Dean Harman, Professor T. Brent Gunnoe, and Vlad Sviderskiy
hough still an undergraduate Chemistry major in the College of Arts and Sciences, Vlad Sviderskiy is a force to be reckoned with. The fourth-year College Science Scholar has been working since the summer of his second year to synthesize a catalyst that may be instrumental in the generation of a carbon neutral alternative energy source. Vlads work has garnered him a Harrison Undergraduate Research Award, a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship honorable mention, and membership in the Beckman Scholars Program. Up until recently, Vlad was the sole investigator assigned to this challenging, graduate-level project. The undergraduates two mentors, Professors of Chemistry Dean Harman and Thomas Brent Gunnoe, have been instrumental to his success throughout the entire process. Vlads research is actually a joint project between Professor Harmans and Professor Gunnoes labs. The collaboration between the two professors is not a first, though, for Professor Gunnoe himself was a postdoctoral researcher in Professor Harmans lab several years ago. This fact is not very surprising because the two professors do share several striking similarities; both are exemplary researchers, beloved instructors in the University
community, and recipients of numerous teacher and mentorship awards. It seems that the apple does not fall far from the tree and that Vlad has quite the legacy to uphold. In a recent conversation with The Oculus, the three reflected on their work together and offered advice for undergraduates hoping to get involved in research. Before joining Professor Harmans and Professor Gunnoes labs, Vlad was lucky enough to have had some prior research experience. Vlad attended a high school with a math and science center that required its students to complete yearly science projects; he worked on his junior year project through a lab at VCU. I started my junior year of high school But I didnt do it to this extent. I kind of got started reading articles, going to lab, learning a few simple procedures and how I should think about certain things, and I think that really helped me out just having some basic training, says the young investigator. But how did Vlad get his successful start in undergraduate research here at The University? Through persistence. The young researcher had initially approached another faculty member who was not able to take an undergraduate at the time and instead re-
Fall 2011: Volume 10, Issue 2
directed Vlad to several other members of the Chemistry department. Unfazed, Vlad met with Harman and Gunnoe, and the rest is history. That is not to say, however, that finding a lab does not take work one must first establish a studentprofessor connection. Indeed, Professor Harman and Vlad were already well-acquainted with each other through the professors CHEM1810 course. [We] already knew each other since first yearAnd so Ive gotten to know him very well as far as his intellectual abilities and his independence and his proactivenessI knew what high quality we were looking at, says Professor Harman of Vlad. He adds that, It is much more effective to make that personal connection to somebody you are comfortable enough with because you have established a relationship, like Vlad and I did. If you are not familiar with your professors, however, Professor Harman suggests that you introduce yourself in order to give the professors a better sense of who you are. Ill never respond to an email just wanting to get started. I want to know who that person is, what their motivations are for joining the lab. The University community is large and gives rise to many opportunities for undergraduates looking to get involved in research. Unfortunately, it is also easy for students to get lost in the commotion of a big school. How should students overcome this? According to Professor Harman, students just have to get over the intimidation of approaching professors and start actively seeking out research opportunities. Its just a matter of time before you find the right fit. I would say that from day 1, start looking for opportunities and dont be afraid if the first few people you start talking to discourage youGo onto the next professor, go on to the next possible opportunity. Thats the crucial thing. It comes down to believing in yourself, says Professor Harman. Both mentors stress the importance of getting involved early and even advise students to start looking for opportunities as soon as first year. There is no need to worry about not having enough experience or background knowledge; most labs would love to take younger undergraduates and will tailor each project to a students experience level. Although some professors tell undergraduates to wait until they have finished two or three years of classes, Professor Harman and Professor Gunnoe suggest otherwise. There is great value in getting started early, says Professor Gunnoe. One, if you really like it, it gives you something to do that you enjoy which is great. Second, the longer you do something the more you will learn from it. Third, often times time when you join the [research group], you join the community. And having a little social network in this large university can be really valuable. Indeed, the students themselves are not the only ones who benefit from the undergraduate research experience. Undergrads contribute greatly, and in
different ways, to the research process. They come in with less experience and less knowledge in the sense of facts that are memorized, but with a very different way of looking at things than the grad students have and just boundless energy And that really rubs off on the grad students. Its a really nice synergy that happens there, explains Professor Harman. [Taking a student] is much more than just making room for an undergrad and trying to help the undergrad out. They become, in many ways, a big part of the research enterprise. Furthermore, the two professors also find great satisfaction in mentoring their undergraduate protg. I dont view what I do asproviding students with what they dont already have, but giving them opportunities and watching them seize upon those opportunities and grow and learn in new waysAnd as a mentor, that is really very satisfying, says Professor Gunnoe of the mentoring experience. I think a great mentor is someone who really enjoys helping open avenues for people and helping people achieve success that they can achieve, adds Professor Gunnoe. Vlad plans to obtain a dual MD/PhD degree and to continue research in the medical field after college. The talented fourth year, however, had entered school on the pre-med track with no intention of pursuing research as a profession. The two mentors have been influential in Vlads change of heart, and in fact, Professor Gunnoe had similarly made the switch to research while seriously considering medical school as an undergraduate. A lot of students who come in have no idea what research is. They know what medical school leads to and they know what dental school leads to. But what I always say isI want to encourage you to think about different thingsWhat I want for every student is for them to find what is going to make them happy, whats going to challenge them, excite them. He adds that, Even for the students who do not pursue research [as a career] there is great value for doing research because the learning experience is completely different than in the classroom[The students] come out better on the other side and sometimes for very different reasons. They grow in different ways. Research, though rewarding and enjoyable, comes with its own challenges. Many bright undergraduates come into research never having failed in their academic careers. However, research is applied problem solving and it is unavoidable that all students no matter how talented will struggle at some point. Even Vlad admits to running into problems with his experiments. During the first couple weeks of research, he became comfortable performing literature searches and simple lab procedures. That kind of got my confidence up a little bit that [the procedure] actually works. That procedure went great. This is awesome. And I thought everything else will work great afterwards, which is ridiculous, Vlad scoffs, jokingly.
The Oculus: The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research
However, Professor Harman and Professor Gunnoe both agree that facing these obstacles is a valuable experience. The education system today is based on organization of facts this, however, is not true learning You very often get into college and its one of the first times you are faced with, How do I get through this problem? Theyre not just asking me to regurgitate information, I have to actually come up with solution to a problem that no one has solved before, and that is really unique, reflects Professor Harman. Even if one leaves research forever, learning how to persistently, thoughtfully, and thoroughly attack the seemingly insurmountable problems posed in research will provide each person with valuable skills that will last a lifetime. But how does one learn to deal with these challenges? Professor Harman says that we must redefine the concept of success. You need to change from the idea that success is Im going to get to happen what I want to happen in that test tube to success is the number of experiments you run correctly and that you run with an open mind so that you can learn from these outcomes. After all, the journey is the reward.
MathEMatical ModEling of Building-WidE hvac systEMs

Virginia Smith
A significant amount of the worlds energy is used for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. This makes them an important target for energy efficiency improvements. One step towards these goals is to find a math-ematical model that accurately predicts the performance of current systems. This is difficult as there is a large variety of HVAC configurations used in both residential and commercial buildings. One of the most common types of configurations is the Variable Air Volume (VAV) system, which is commonly found in large commercial buildings. To study this setup, we have collected data from the fourth floor of Sutardja Dai Hall, a commercial-sized building on the UC Berkeley Campus which has been outfitted with sensor networks. We use semiparametric regression to identify a mathematical model of temperature dynamics based on experimental data. Using this model, we study the effects of occupancy on temperature and isolate certain control variables within the system. The results from this model can be used to improve the efficiency of similar HVAC systems by helping to determine more effective control schemes.
I. IntroductIon
uildings account for 75% of the electricity and 43% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the United States [1], [2]. The heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system is the largest building expenditure, consuming 38% of the energy within buildings [1]. This makes HVAC systems an important target for energy efficiency improvements. Current work in HVAC energy reduction is moving in several directions. One such direction is in the design of new, more efficient equipment. However, buildings and equipment are often replaced slowly [3]. This has made the retrofitting of old HVAC systems an important area of research with regards to energy reduction. One step towards retrofitting HVAC systems is to identify a mathematical model that enables temperature and energy con-trol. Having an accurate model of the system allows for more effective control schemes. However, one difficulty with this is that there are a large variety of HVAC configurations. There has been considerable research performed on the modeling and control of different HVAC systems [4][9]. Our research focuses on the modeling of Variable Air Volume (VAV) units, which are commonly found in commercial buildings. The goal is to develop a model for this system that accurately describes the temperature
dynamics in a building, while incorporating specific control variables from the system. These variables may then be later utilized when developing a control scheme to seek efficiency improvements. We begin by describing the Sutardja Dai Hall testbed, an area which has been outfitted with sensor networks for the purpose of experimentation in situ. The data from the sensors is accessed through sMAP (Simple Monitoring and Actuation Profile), an online system which allows for the monitoring of live
Virginia Smith is a fourth-year student from Blacksburg, Virginia, studying Mathematics and Computer Science. She hopes to combine her technical skills with an interest in the environment by pursuing graduate studies in the field of Computational Sustainability. Virginia wrote this paper during the summer of 2011 in a Computer Science research program at the University of California, Berkeley. She would like to thank her mentors, Anil Aswani and Professor Claire Tomlin, for all their help on the project.
Figure 1. Sutardja Dai Hall, 4th Floor is the testbed used for this study. The 9 VAV units on the floor (numbered above) are used to develop a mathematical model for building-wide HVAC systems based on experimental data.
streams of data and acts as a database to store past measurements [10]. Next, we discuss the physical characteristics of the HVAC system at hand. This is an integral part of developing an accurate model of the temperature dynamics, and it will likely be scalable to many similar systems. Furthermore, it will be important to understand the trends apparent in this data in order to identify areas for efficiency improvements. Observing trends in the data and understanding the physics behind HVAC systems sheds light on the model that we have chosen. One challenge is that the heat load due to occupancy, equipment, and solar radiation are highly nonlinear over time. An approach to the issue of occupancy is to combine occupancy sensor measurements with models of human behavior [11]. A next step could be to add measurements from equipment and weather, as well. However, these measurements are not easily observable or quantifiable as parameters in a model. The scalability and computability of the model quickly decreases, which is a potential problem when creating a control scheme for the system. Our solution is to use a semiparametric regression approach [9], [12], [13] that estimates the heat load due to occupancy, equipment, and solar radiation from temperature measurements alone. This is advantageous because it does not require extra sensors other than sensors that are already outfitted in the thermostat. After developing this model, we discuss our results and compare our predictions to actual data from the building. We conclude by analyzing these results and describing the role the model will play in future research.
Society (CITRIS). The building itself houses research labs, faculty offices, a nanofabrication lab, an auditorium, and a cyber cafe. As a relatively new building on campus, it was designed according to high energy efficiency standards. Since then, it has become a popular testbed for research related to energy efficiency within build-ings, earning its reputation as a living laboratory [14]. Our research was conducted on the 4th floor of Sutardja Dai Hall. This floor holds both public and privates offices for a variety of disciplines, including the Berkeley Center for New Media and the I4Energy Center. The advantage of developing a model based on data from this floor is that it provides a setup which is easily scalable to building-wide systems. The entire building has been equipped with sensors that measure data on utilities such as HVAC, lighting, and plug load power usage. A server (LoCal) gathers this data and stores it in a Simple Measurement and Actuation Profile (sMAP) database [10]. Data from this server is then used in order to develop our model. A. LoCal The Berkeley LoCal project aims to produce a network architecture for localized energy reduction, generation, and sharing by studying how pervasive information can change the nature of these processes [16]. A key component of this project is the use of sMAP to exchange physical data about the systems involved. We access measurements from the BACnet in Sutardja Dai Hall through the sMAP interface. This provides measurements for the temperature set points, actual room temperatures, damper and valve positions, and weather, amongst other things. B. Sutardja Dai Hall, 4th floor The 4th floor of Sutardja Dai Hall is comprised of one large public area, 18 private offices, and 10 other rooms, including bathrooms, closets, and entranceways. An architectural draw-ing of the floor plan is
II. Sutardja daI Hall teStbed
Sutardja Dai Hall is a 141,000-square-foot building on the University of California, Berkeley campus. It was created in 2009 and is the headquarters of the Center for Information Technology in the Interest of
Figure 2. An example of an air handling system. The air handling system provides a framework used to supply air to the VAV units throughout the building.
shown in Fig. 1. The large public area includes cubicles and desk space. This is the area of the floor that we have chosen to model, since actuation of HVAC controls may only be possible in the public zones. The numbered areas depict the 9 VAV units included in our study. The lines show units which we assume to be adjacent, a trait that will come into play in the model we have developed.
the air quality and temperature within a space by regulating the amount of air delivered to it. In particular, they differ from other common HVAC systems, such as the single-stage heat pump, by being able to deliver a variable amount of air. Whereas single-stage heat pumps perform in two positions (on/ off), the VAV device has the ability to deliver air at a number of different intervals. This is popular in commercial buildings, which cool large amounts of air at a central location and then deliver the air in variable amounts to specific spaces. The system that we will describe below is the single-duct, pressure-dependent, reheat VAV system. We will begin by describing the air handling system, which acts as a framework for the VAV devices. We will then describe the process, control, and feedback components of the VAV application. These characteristics are important in understanding the basis for the parameters of the model we have developed. A. Air Handling System The air handling system is the central HVAC unit within a building. The main responsibility of the air handling system is to deliver conditioned air throughout the building, while removing exhaust air and carbon dioxide (CO2) from the rooms. Most of the equipment is hidden from occupants, being located on the rooftop and in ducts within the building [17]. Air handling equipment includes outside air dampers, mixed air dampers, heating coils, cooling coils, and supply air fans. These mechanisms are actuated by air handling controls, which operate through multiple terminals in order to sequence the air handling process [17]. The air handling process, shown in Fig. 2, works in the following way: First, outdoor air is mixed with the return air of the system. The pressure of this air is determined by the supply air fan. The air is then
III. cHaracterIStIcS of VaV SyStem
Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) control systems are devised in order to maintain comfort within an enclosed space. In addition to meeting a desired temperature, this comfort is maintained by achieving a certain level of humidity, pressure, radiant energy, air motion, and air quality within a building [17]. Variable Air Volume (VAV) systems are one of the most popular HVAC applications, and are often used in large commercial buildings. VAV devices control
Figure 3. A Variable Air Volume (VAV) unit with reheat capabilities.
Fig. 4. the characteristics of the VAV damper blade. There is a nonlinear relationship between the amount of air supplied to a room (air flow) and the position of the damper (angle).
Fig. 5. Temperature, damper position, and heating coil values for VAV units in zone 4 and zone 6. The values shown are measured over a two-week period from 05/25/2011-06/08/2011.
heated/cooled to a preset temperature, and it is released into specific spaces through the VAV devices. The exhaust air from the room is then sent into the ducts according to the exhaust fan speed, and it is returned to begin the process again. B. VAV Unit The responsibility of the VAV unit is to release conditioned supply air from the duct into a specific space. There are often multiple VAV units on each floor of a building, and the units may vary in size and performance based on the temperature dynamics of the room they service. The two main components of a VAV box include the damper and heating coil. The damper is a mechanical device that allows for a variable amount of supply air to be released into a room. It consists of a thin metal sheet, rotated on an axis by an actuator. As shown in Fig. 3, if the damper is set at 90 degrees, or 0% open, the damper is fully shut and no air is supplied to the room. When the damper is set to 0 degrees, or 100% open, the maximum amount of air is released [17]. The amount of air flow versus damper position is shown in Fig. 4. The second component of the VAV box is the heating coil. If necessary, the heating coil reheats the supply air before it is released in the room. Though this is a seemingly counterintuitive feature, it is convenient when only a few rooms may require less cooling than usual. This adds diversity to the system and better utilizes the supply air. The reheat coil also serves the purpose of improving air volume and velocity. However, here we can already see one area for energy efficiency improvements in the system: If there is too much simultaneous heating and cooling between the damper/heating coil, energy will be wasted. C. The VAV Process The operation of the VAV cooling-only control system works in the following way: First, the VAV controller monitors the temperature in the room. If the room is warm, the VAV controller opens the supply air damper to allow more cold air into the room.
If the room is cold, the controller may close the supply air damper or open the valve on the reheat coil. However, if the room is occupied, the VAV damper cannot be fully shut. This is because the VAV controller must maintain a minimum amount of fresh air at all times [17]. The control scheme for such a unit is complex and must withstand several different types of heating loads. These include interior loads (e.g., people, lights, and computers), exterior loads (e.g., outdoor climate and negative loads), and negative loads generated by the control system. These include interior loads in the system such as people, lights, and computers, exterior loads generated by the outdoor climate, and negative loads generated by the control system attempting to maintain a temperature setpoint. The system functions by using sensors to detect room temperature, and then actuating the device accordingly.
IV. model
of
There are many challenges with creating a mathematical model for the VAV units at hand. One is that HVAC sys-tems themselves are large and highly variable. The system parameters are complex, and the model is often non-linear with respect to the temperature dynamics. This particular application of the model presents another challenge: the trade-off between the complexity of the model and its computability. While we aim to create a robust model of the system, it cannot be too complex, or it may ultimately risk the effectiveness of using the model within a control scheme. These challenges are compounded by the fact that we have created a predictive model using experimental data. This is difficult because the raw data is not always rich enough to allow for robust model development. Furthermore, the data itself presents difficulties from limitations and errors inherent within the sensor networks. The model that we have chosen for this system is a static, linear model. We develop the model using a two-step procedure which allows us to deter-
temperature dynamIcS
mine the heat load due to occupancy, equipment, and solar radiation. The first step uses constrained least-squares regression to model the temperature dynamics due to the weather, damper and heating coil position,and temperature in adjacent zones. The next step estimates the remaining heat load by iteratively determining the error term from this model. This procedure represents an approximate form of semiparametric regression [9]. A. Model Characteristics The parameters of the model include the weather, position of the damper and heating coil, temperature in adjacent zones, and the heat load due to occupancy/equipment/solar radiation. The weather used is a temperature measurement recorded from the rooftop of Cory Hall, the building directly adjacent to Sutardja Dai Hall. We interpolate this data so that the sampling rates match those of the sensor networks from inside the building. The measurements of the damper, heating coil, and thermo-stat temperature are read from the Sutardja Dai Hall BACnet and recorded in the sMAP database. These measurements are taken at variety of different sampling rates, from 15-minute to 50-minute intervals. There are occasional dropped points in the data, and the sampling rates are inconsistent over long periods of time. These characteristics are important to note when discussing the model that we have chosen. An example of the weather, damper, heating coil, and temperature readings for two zones is shown in Fig. 5. The model is a static, linear model in which the temperature for a particular zone is based on the current weather (W ), damper position (D), heating coil (H), temperature in adjacent zones (Tk), and the heating due to occupancy/equipment/solar radiation (q; q) (Eq. 1). Temperature dynamics within a building are non-linear [7]. However, because the temperature and airflow of the system are operating within a narrow regime, it is reasonable to approximate this activity with a linear model (Eq.1).
W represents the weather at that zone, D represents the damper position of the VAV unit, H represents the position of the heating coil in the VAV unit, and q represents the heat load due to occupancy/equipment/solar radiation that is assumed to be constant over the given time period. The terms , , , and j represent the coefficients determined from this leastsquares regression.
The reason that we have chosen a static model is twofold. First, we want to see how accurate a model we can develop using a relatively simpler static system. Second, we suspect that the sampling rate of the data may be low enough that the dynamics within the room appear to be static. This conclusion is augmented by the fact that there are inconsistencies within the sampling rate itself, which makes a dynamic fit more complex. B. Constrained Least-Squares Regression Least-squares regression is used to determine coefficients for the first stage of the model (Eq.2) where Tk represents the current temperature at a given zone,
It is important to note that in this setup we impose constraints on the coefficients for the model. The reason that this is a necessary step is that the data from the parameters is not always rich enough to excite the system. This is evident in Fig. 5, which shows the damper and heating coil measurements for two zones over a two week period. In zone 4, the damper has almost no variability over the two-week period, whereas in zone 6, the damper changes frequently. In contrast, the heating coil for zone 4 changes throughout the time period, whereas in zone 6, the heating coil remains at 0% for the entire two weeks. This is a problem because regular least-squares regression tends to overcompensate for this lack of richness in the data. This results in coefficients that are not physically representative of the system. For example, the coefficients for the damper position in multiple zones were positive, which is counterintuitive to the fact that as you open the damper, more cold air is let into the room, causing the temperature go down. Similarly, some of the coefficients for the heating coil were large negative numbers, which is not physically representative of the fact that heating the air will make the temperature increase. Adding coefficient constraints has the effect of making the coefficients physically representative of the system, but also greatly improves the accuracy of the simulation. The accuracy of the model at this stage is important for our assumption; we assume that most of the temperature dynamics may be explained due to the weather, damper, heating coil, adjacent temperatures, and constant occupancy. This results in a good estimate of the temperature, which we then use to calculate the remaining heat load present in the error term [9]. C. Impact of Occupancy/Equipment/Solar Radiation Using the model fit from constrained least-squares regression in the first stage, we can iteratively calculate the error in our prediction. Assuming we have described the temperature dynamics accurately with the exception of the occupancy/equipment/solar radiation heat load, we can assume that this error term gives an estimate of the heat due to these factors. This is advantageous because it allows us to calculate the heat load of these highly variable parameterswithout having to use any sensors other than the temperature sensor in order to measure this data.
Figure 6. An estimate of the heat load due to occupancy, equipment, and solar radiation for each of the 9 VAV units. The values have been calculated for a two week interval, from 05/25/2011-06/08/2011.
Figure 7. the predicted (solid) and measured (dashed) temperatures for a two week interval. Temperatures are calculated for each of the 9 VAV units, from 05/25/2011-06/08/2011.
Figure 8. the error from the predicted results (7) for each of the 9 VAV units over the two-week period 05/25/201106/08/2011.
table 1. Root mean square error from the predicted results (7)
Before adding this term into the model we smooth the error term with kernel smoothing regression. This eliminates the noise in the error and gives us a better estimate of the heat load due to occupancy/equipment/solar radiation. Furthermore, this provides the predictive model with a good fit that will be necessary in implementing control schemes in the future. The plot for the heat load due to occupancy/ equipment/solar radiation is shown in Fig. 6. The units are given in degrees Celsius, and the term is highly nonlinear with respect to time. The term fluctuates on a daily basis, matching intuition that the heat load due to occupancy/equipment/solar radiation increases throughout the day and decreases in the night. This follows the pattern of activity in the room, which is active during the day when students and faculty are present, and remains relatively empty at night. Furthermore, the term fluctuates on a weekly basis, matching the trend that students and faculty will be less active in the building on the weekends and towards the end of the week.
narrow range, this rapid change is likely to appear as noise to the system, and is reasonably captured by the predictive model. Another visible error is that the predicted temperatures occasionally fail to capture the temperature magnitude throughout the week. The largest error is about 2 degrees Celsius, a value which may be due to lost sensor data. Although this value may appear large, it still lies within an interval that would ensure comfortable temperatures for occupants when creating a control scheme. Furthermore, the average error is 0.1172 degrees Celsius, which is quite low and would certainly ensure comfort and precision within the system. The prediction error is shown in Fig. 8, and the root-mean-square error for each zone is summarized in Table 1. The root-mean-square error for this analysis is low, and the simulation error appears relatively random with respect to the temperature dynamics.
VI. concluSIonS
V. analySIS
An analysis of the measured and predicted temperatures (7) reveals a few modeling errors. One is that the predicted temperatures fail to predict periods of rapidly changing temperature. However, because the temperatures within this region occur within a
We have presented the Sutardja Dai Hall testbed, studied the characteristics of Variable Air Volume (VAV) HVAC, identified a mathematical model of the system, and discussed the impact of our results. The approximate semiparametric model that we have developed provides an accurate way to predict the temperature in a zone based on a few, accessible param-
eters in the system. It also provides us with a way to calculate highly variable terms, such as the heat load due to occupancy, equipment, and solar radiation, without the need to explicitly measure these terms. These results may be used in future work in order to develop a control scheme for the HVAC system. The model gives us better insight into the dynamics of the control scheme, and allows for a more efficient design. This control scheme may then be used to create a more energy efficient design for VAV HVAC units. This type of work is a crucial step in developing energy-agile systems that can ultimately be used to quell our dependency on fossil fuels.
referenceS
1. U. DoE, Buildings energy data book, 2011. [Online]. Available: http://buildingsdatabook.eren. doe.gov/ 2. J. McQuade, A system approach to high performance buildings, United Technologies Corporation, Tech. Rep., 2009. 3. S. Dawson-Haggerty, J. Ortiz, X. Jiang, J. Hsu, S. Shankar, and D. Culler, Enabling green building applications, Sixth Workshop on Hot Topics in Embedded Networked Sensors, 2010. 4. G. Henze, C. Felsmann, and G. Knabe, Evaluation of optimal control for active and passive building thermal storage, International Journal of Thermal Sciences, vol. vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 173 183, 2004. 5. K. Deng, P. Barooah, P. Mehta, and S. Meyn, Building thermal model reduction via aggregation of state, American Control Conference, pp. 51185123, 2010. 6. F. Oldewurtel, A. Parisio, C. Jones, M. Morari, D. Gyalistras, M. Gw-erder, V. Stauch, B. Lehmann, and K. Wirth, Energy efficient building climate control using stochastic model predictive control and weather predictions, American Control Conference, pp. 51005105, 2010. 7. Y. Ma, G. Anderson, and F. Borrelli, A distributed predictive control approach to building temperature regulation, American Control Conference, 2011. 8. T. Nghiem and G. Pappas, Receding-horizon supervisory control of green buildings, American Control Conference, 2011. 9. A. Aswani, N. Master, J. Taneja, D. Culler, and C. Tomlin, Reducing transient and steady state electricity consumption in hvac using learningbased model predictive control, Proceedings of the IEEE, 2011. 10. S. Dawnson-Haggerty, X. Jiang, G. Tolle, J. Ortiz, and D. Culler, smap - a simple measurement and actuation profile for physical information, Proceedings of the Eigth ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 10), November 2010.
11. C. Liao and P. Barooah, An integrated approach to occupancy modeling and estimation in commercial buildings, American Control Conference, pp. 31303135, 2010. 12. P. Bickel, C. Klaasen, Y. Ritov, and J. Wellner, Efficient and adaptive estimation for semiparametric models, in Johns Hopkins series in the mathematical sciences. Springer, 1998. 13. P. Robinson, Root-n-consistent semiparametric regression, Economet-rica, vol. vol. 56, no. 4, pp. 931954, 1988. [Online]. Available: http://citrisuc.org/about/headquarters 14. A. Aswani, J. Taneja, N. Master, D. Culler, and C. Tomlin, The berkeley retrofitted and inexpensive hvac testbed for energy efficiency. Submitted, 2011. 15. R. Katz, D. Culler, and S. Sanders, An information-centric energy infrastructure: The berkeley view, Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems, vol. 1, pp. 722, 2011. 16. N. Ben-Aissa, Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (hvac) controls: Variable air volume (vav) systems, Johnson Controls, Inc.
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coordinating Efforts By voluntEErs and tEchnical coMMunitiEs for disastEr PrEParEdnEss, rEsPonsE and rEliEf
Erin Boehmer
Volunteer and Technical Communities (V&TCs) are global networks composed of technical professionals and volunteers with expertise in social media, geographic information systems (GIS), database management, and/or online campaigns. These communities are quickly redefining disaster preparedness, response, and relief, but face organizational, technical, social, and political challenges (detailed in this paper). For example, many V&tCs have distributed internal structures that support open source software development and prevent against slow-moving bureaucracy. This design challenges the status quo of humanitarian aid organizations and government agencies and makes interactions among parties challenging as V&TCs work to gain trust and acceptance and adhere to established protocols and procedures. The coordination of future endeavors among V&TCs would assist in addressing such issues. It is unclear, however, what coordinated step would most effectively mitigate or eliminate the effects of current challenges within the disaster response community. In this analysis, I propose four alternative strategies. The first calls for the discussion and establishment of protocols to which relevant V&TCs must adhere. The second establishes a coordination board, composed of leaders in modern disaster relief, to develop standard systems that V&tCs are encouraged to implement. The third develops V&TCs presence in academia. The final option suggests that V&TCs continue developing separately and informally interact when necessary. After rating the alternatives based on efficacy, cost, time, and political feasibility, I conclude that establishing protocols and standards specific to the different types of V&TCs, developing a standard plug-in for after-action data collection, and branding the term V&TC, will best bolster V&tCs efforts to enhance data collection and communication during disasters and crises.
n the past, officials and volunteers responding to disasters reported a sense of chaos and desperation resulting from devastated communications infrastructures on the ground. A 2006 committee commissioned by the Executive Office of the President to report on lessons learned from the federal response to Hurricane Katrina describes the scene: Erin Boehmer is a third-year from Chatham, NJ, double majoring in Systems Engineering and Computer Science (BS). As the Vice President of Engineering Students Without Borders (ESWB) and as an avid web and mobile developer, Erin seizes every opportunity to nurture her passions for community development, mobile technology, and public policy. She crafted this policy analysis after conducting interviews with leading members of the technical disaster response community during her summer internship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars through the Policy Internship Program. Erin would like to thank Michael Rodemeyer, Jim Turner, David Rejeski, and Lea Shanley for providing her with the opportunity to grow her passions during her time at the Wilson Center. She would also like to thank Patrick Meier, Kirk Morris, and Nigel McNie for their suggestions to the content of this paper.
IntroductIon
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Figure 1: Ushahidi-Haiti map. Red circles show the number of reports within that area. When clicked, a user may choose to view the contents of the reports. On the right side panel, users may choose to display only certain categories of messages and requests (taken from http://haiti.ushahidi.com).
On the day of landfall, authoritative reporting from the field was extremely difficult to obtain because of the widespread destruction of communications infrastructure. [L]ocal, State, and Federal officials were forced to depend on a variety of conflicting reports from a combination of media, government and private sources, many of which continued to provide inaccurate or incomplete information throughout the day, further clouding the understanding of what was occurring in New Orleans. The New Orleans Mayors Office operated out of a Hyatt Hotel for several days after Hurricane Katrinas landfall, unable to establish reliable communications with anyone outside the hotel for nearly forty-eight hours. This meant that the Mayor was neither able to effectively command the local efforts, nor was he able to guide the State and Federal support for two days following the storm. Louisiana State Senator Robert Barham, chairman of the State Senates homeland security committee, summed up the situation in Louisiana by stating, People could not communicate. It got to the point that people were literally writing messages on paper, putting them in bottles and dropping them from helicopters to other people on the ground. (Executive Office of the President, 2006, pp. 42-43) Since Hurricane Katrina, the world has seen cellphones transform from simple voice devices to digital devices as people send text messages, browse and post content online, and explore the functionalities of applications. The norm for most people is no longer a landline home phone, but rather personal, high-bandwidth cell phones running on a 3G or
4G network. Therefore, in response to communication failures during crises and the new standards of communication technologies, the disaster relief community has seen the rise of Volunteer and Technical Communities (V&TCs)1. V&TCs are networks of technical professionals with deep expertise in social media, geographic information systems (GIS), database management, [and] online campaigns [who apply] their skills to some of the hardest elements of the disaster risk management process (GFDRR Labs, 2010). These volunteers are able to harness the growing power of applications like Twitter and Facebook, devices such as Androids and iPads, skills like database design and computer hacking, and methodologies such as Scrum development or Extreme Programming (XP) in order to improve on-ground communication and organization practices.
1 The term V&TC is used in this paper as the official terminology for a network of volunteer and professional technical workers. Both VTC and V&TC are commonly used to describe the organizations (due to the different brandings in the Volunteer and Technical Communities: Open Development report and the Disaster 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies report). To some, the title Volunteer Technology Community only credits volunteer positions, disregarding the dedicated workers within the field who are paid (M. Prutsalis, personal communication, July 17, 2011). Therefore, only the term V&TC should be used in the future in order to credit all those who give their time within the community and to avoiding wasting valuable volunteer time on a relatively unproductive debate. In order for the nascent network to establish a professional reputation, the community must agree on how to officially refer to itself.
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During the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, V&TCs worked with a noticeable presence. Remotely located technical volunteers developed Mission 4636, which established a free phone number (4636) in order to allow people on the ground to text their requests for medical care, food, water, security and shelter from any Digicel / Comcel-Voila device and receive aid (Mission 4636, n.d.). This service garnered about 80,000 messages, predominantly in Haitian Kreyol, which workers and volunteers translated, geolocated, and categorized via online crowdsourcing which sorted the information by need and priority, and distributed it to various emergency responders and aid organizations. [T]he service scaled up about one week after the earthquake to include serious injuries, requests for fresh drinking water, security, unaccompanied children and clusters of requests for food, and even childbirths (Mission 4636, n.d.). Often these technologists mapped the Mission 4636 messages and other crowdsourced data using open source platforms such as Ushahidi or OpenStreetMap (see the Ushahidi-Haiti map below in Figure 1). Others created applications such as We Have, We Need, which could be accessed via smart phone or computer. It worked as a sort of Craigslist, pairing victims in need of resources and aid organizations navigating to where help was most needed. The application helped officials by routing information out of the disaster, where communication systems were devastated, into information systems in Washington, DC or New Zealand where volunteers could quickly, calmly, and intelligently coordinate response efforts (HaitiVoiceNeeds, 2010). V&TCs also were able to provide reachback support to the United Nations (UN), the European Union, United States and across the globe, making their supercomputers and large storage arrays available for processing imagery, managing translation workflows, and serving large data sets (GFDRR Labs, 2010). The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (2011) also recognized V&TCs as a powerful tool for community empowerment: When crisis responders ask for (or themselves build) new features, they are also asking the community to change the range of possible behaviors that users perform in the software which is roughly analogous to asking for a change to law of policy in a real-world town or city (p. 40). In this way, the applications and tools that V&TCs develop may play a growing role in disaster preparedness and planning, as crowdsourced data can be gathered from local residents to inform authorities of failing infrastructure or, in reverse, preparedness lessons can be disseminated to at risk communities. Many of the prevalent V&TCs today have brought forth beneficial changes within the realm of disaster response; their formulation, however, has led to a new set of challenges and complexities within and among the V&TCs, humanitarian relief organizations, and Federal, State, and local governments.
current ISSueS wItHIn tHe V&tc communIty
Volunteers and professionals working in the nascent field of volunteer-based technology development for disaster preparedness, response, and relief have expressed various problems that V&TCs must address in order to improve their effectiveness. While some of these issues deal with the organizational and technical aspects of software development, others are social and political in nature and surface when the groups interact. Disaster-affected communities are often a diverse group of people as crises affect individuals differing in age, culture, and economic background. Therefore, one of the fundamental considerations when building applications and technologies for modern disaster relief is to understand the needs of people of different backgrounds in divergent contexts especially if developers intend to deploy the project during more than one event. Yet the challenge of creating a universal design is inherent in consumer technology and has been described as the need to balance ideals and the pragmatics of incorporating those ideals within a context of multiple voices, cultural differences, material constraints, localized needs, and as ironic as it may sound other ideals. (Coleman, 2004). Strategic design, however, has proven to be especially challenging for V&TC developers due to the unpredictable nature of disasters and the limited availability of volunteers involved in V&TCs. Many organizations have only a few regularly active members during static times, but witness an influx of interest when a disaster strikes (A. Turner, personal communication, June 8, 2011). A lack of activity during times of non-disaster leads to a lack of planning and preventative measures and results in volunteers having to catch-up to the influx of pleas from victims after a crisis takes place (M. Prutsalis, personal communication, July 18, 2011). Some organizations, such as Random Hacks of Kindness, the Standby Task Force, and Geeks Without Bounds, have notably risen to the challenge of inspiring volunteerism and development during static times by engaging in tasks such as creating custom Ushahidi instances ready for deployment and hosting mobile disaster app hackathons. Yet there still exists a need to devise a robust post-crisis system to regularly and methodically collect user feedback and to gather statistical and qualitative data regarding the technologies. One reason for the lack of post-crisis analysis of projects effectiveness and usability is that volunteers feel burntout, [feel] no responsibility, [are] not receiving pay, and [do not want to] deal with paperwork (N. McNie, personal communication, June 3, 2011). Some V&TCs have devised ways to collect feedback on applications and response systems, but focus mainly on feedback from volunteers rather than victims. Feedback, in these circumstances, is often collected through Skype chats and forums after the
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disaster has taken place. Nigel McNie, a volunteer during the Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand, emphasizes the importance of collecting information from crisis victims by interviewing people face-toface (personal communication, August 23, 2011). Personal surveying would mitigate the possibility of data suffering from user bias. If information is only collected digitally or through secondary sources (such as the volunteers who interacted with victims), the feedback will fail to incorporate the opinions of people who looked at an app and got confused/ frustrated [and left the app] without giving any feedback (Nigel McNie, personal communication, August 23, 2011). Collecting information on the ground also would allow V&TCs to gauge how far knowledge of the map percolated throughout the community. [If information is collected through other means, it is likely that] only people who have heard of the [apps] will be giving feedback (Nigel McNie, personal communication, August 23, 2011). Despite the potential for personal surveying on the ground to reveal critical information about how an application was used, few V&TCs have established protocols for promptly interviewing victims and collecting information on applications after a disaster. Another issue for V&TCs with dwindling volunteer bases during static times is raising awareness of their groups existence within the general public. Even within the disaster response and relief community some field staff members [during the earthquake in Haiti] were [only] tangentially aware of the resources that were available, [and] were too busy to take advantage of the resources or to consider the changes to workflows and methods that these new information resources would entail (Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, 2011). While some groups, such as Ushahidi (a non-profit organization that develops free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping) have enjoyed publicity in widely viewed sources such as The Washington Post and The New York Times (Turner, 2009) (Giridharadas, 2010), others have yet to gain recognition beyond their direct circles despite significant contributions to the field. Some V&TCs find, however, that they gain significant recognition from government, humanitarian organizations, and IT companies during disasters when authorities in the disaster afflicted regions turn to crowdsourcing technologies to mitigate the effects of the crises and stimulate communication (McManus, 2011). Including more volunteers in the V&TCs operations highlights the importance of cultivating trust with partnering organizations and with victims and volunteers working on the ground. As John Hagel III of McKinsey & Co. and John Seely Brown of the University of Southern California (2006) explain, knowledge does not flow it tends to be, in fact, very sticky. Unlike information which can be more readily codified and disseminated, knowledge tends
to reside in individuals and it is very context specific. For this reason, knowledge sharing typically requires trust-based relationships and a sharing of practice (p. 11). A feasible way to increase trust among V&TCs, established disaster aid organizations, and victims is to work in coordination with established humanitarian communities and governments; yet many of the technologists that are building new platforms for imagery, mapping, and information sharing have [or are perceived as having] limited field experience and [supposedly] an engineers approach of just do it (GFDRR Labs, 2010). This stereotype of the V&TC hacker community clashes with national and international systems established within the context of government to government or government to international institution interactions (GFDRR Labs, 2010). This issue, however, is less about the engineering/ hacker mentality among V&TC members (as many of the members also have experience in humanitarian aid), and more addressing the often inaccurate perception of what type of person a V&TC represents. Governments and formal organizations in the past have also struggled in partnering with certain V&TCs (especially if the V&TC requires funding) due to a loosely defined internal structure or lack of an officially established organization. Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery Labs (GFDRR Labs) at the World Bank describes the difficulty of funding open development groups with loosely defined structures, as GFDRR Labs can only provide projects with resources through a formal, internationally competitive process (S. Gill, personal communication, July 20, 2011). In short, there is no easy way to push money to [those] organizations that do not formally exist [on paper] (S. Gill, personal communication, July 20, 2011). Another issue to consider is the increased potential for security threats and liability issues if a given V&TC does not plan for the distant future. The V&TC movement is largely based on open source software and cloud-computing, which aim to harness the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process (Open Source Initiative, n.d.). The open source nature of this data means that, if a V&TC does not prioritize security and data verification, the projects and data could be accessible to terrorists, corrupt leaders seeking to shut-down or punish activists, and individuals lacking the knowledge and skill necessary to organize disaster relief efforts (K. Morris, personal communication, June 3, 2011). Data, such as volunteered geographic information (VGI), generates specific concerns regarding abuse as it is usergenerated content, with very little moderation or control by the sites owners and very little restriction on the nature of content. In some cases users [can] even edit the content created by others (Goodchild, 2007). However, many groups have demonstrated strategies that can be used to reduce the possibility of encountering unforeseen vulnerabilities and se-
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curity threats (Chameles, 2011), such as through the development of a new Ushahidi instance that specifically addresses vulnerabilities or by gathering all volunteers after a crisis to discuss lessons learned (K. Morris, personal communication, August 21, 2011). Furthermore, a recent report conducted by Yahoo researchers shows that, during the earthquake in Chile, 95.5% of tweets related to confirmed-truths validate the information. Yet in the case of a false-rumor, 50% of related tweets will deny that information (much of the remaining population will tweet related questions)(Mendoza, Poblete, Castillo, 2011). This study demonstrates the often undermined power of a community to correct itself. Sharing data amongst V&TCs and other open source initiatives has raised the possibility of licensing issues. For example, an application may scrape data from multiple websites and display the data within the context of its own site. If the sources all have licenses for redistribution or commercial purposes, the user must ensure that he abides by the rules of each license or face legal penalties. This could be seen with Googles missing persons data2, which could include user-specified dates for when their data should be destroyed. Developers could pull data into their applications using the Person Finder API, but could easily violate the contract if they did not remove the data from their application by the specified date (M. Prutsalis, personal communication, July 18, 2011). Some groups within the V&TC community have also experienced internal challenges. One instance of this was described in the 2011 Disaster Relief 2.0 report, Communities that need each others strengths are being forced to compete for money in the donor pool, and some are finding the need to compete in areas of overlap or are being asked to tackle issues where other V&TCs are already working (Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, 2011, p. 51). Individuals within the community have also begun to differentiate between paid versus unpaid workers, praising volunteers for their altruistic efforts, implicitly suggesting that paid volunteers are less selfless and less valuable within the community. These relationships are at times detrimental to the overall effort and must be controlled in order to sustain a benevolent partnership amongst and within divergent entities.
each others work, learning from it, building on top of it, and then watching and learning from what others do with their own creations. They often work in parallel and then fight and learn from each other when the time comes to try to integrate their work into a broader offering. (p. 10) This has led some leaders within humanitarian organizations and V&TCs to suggest coordinating efforts among the many different groups in order to mitigate the current problems within the field (Crowley, 2011)(Verity, 2011)3. Others, however, see competition as a positive force and are comfortable with the present situation. Therefore, the remainder of this paper will seek to answer the question: what coordinated step should Volunteer and Technical Communities take in order to reduce the effects of or eliminate the issues currently experienced during technical disaster preparedness, response, and relief? Proposed Alternatives 1: Establish a set of Protocols and standards Many V&TCs were founded within the last few years and are relatively new entities in the world of international humanitarian response, although they represent a set of skills much needed in disaster relief (refer to Appendix A). Inare technically adept. Therefore, in order to partner with and gain the respect of governments and established humanitarian organizations, V&TCs at the 2010 International Crisis Mappers conference discussed an API for the UN with the core notion being that the UN should partner with the V&TCs to establish a common set of protocols to connect their people, workflows, and data flows. (Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, 2011, p.44). The discussion should be mediated by a neutral party. The discussion should include pertinent groups such as the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) at the World Bank and the Red Cross as well as all known V&TCs. Among the goals of such an effort will be to establish standard accountability controls to ensure compliance with a range of international agreements and internal processes and policies (Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, 2011, p. 41). Such protocols will also establish a means to deal with the accidental release of data that puts vulnerable populations at risk as well as protocols to address licensing discrepancies and to establish a baseline of trust among organizations. Some V&TCs do have methods for dealing with these issues, especially those that work in human rights (Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, 2011, p. 41).
3 The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) has been working closely with V&TCs and recently supported an effort to propose a possible interface design for V&TC coordination. See http://www.unfoundation.org/assets/pdf/disaster2ch6thrucover.pdf
StrategIzIng future relatIonSHIpS among V&tcS

John Hagel III and John Seely Brown (2006) accurately describe the V&TC movement: Individuals and organizations come together and collaborate in evolving networks of creation. They play off each other, appropriating
2 Visit http://code.google.com/p/googlepersonfinder for more information about Googles missing persons data or http:// code.google.com/p/googlepersonfinder/wiki/DataAPI for the applications API.
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As David Aylward explains in the Disaster Relief 2.0 report, the end product of this effort will be agreed upon V&TC architectures, standards, and protocols: It [should be] possible to say to organizations when they arrive, you are not playing unless you are playing according to this architecture, standards, and protocols. Use any software you want, as long as it conforms to these standards. The UN could use its bully pulpit role to enforce that. Otherwise you get the same wonderful people who do the best they can with the electronic equivalent of duct tape. Its absurd to keep doing it over and over. (as cited in Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, 2011, p. 42) 2: Establish a V&tC Coordination Board John Hagel and John Seely Brown (2006) describe a global practice network which connects participants with similar sensibilities and practices through a centralized practice orchestrator who defines a system for participation within the network and for integrated activity (p. 9). The practice orchestrators can successfully play a less active role in terms of recruitment and management of specific creation initiatives because participants share similar mentalities and practices (Hagel & Brown, 2006, p. 8). Therefore, this alternative suggests V&TCs should focus their efforts on forming a global practice network in the form of a coordination board rather than developing standardized systems and protocols without the establishment of a higher level entity. This board would be nominated by members of V&TCs based on skill, reputation, and ability to lead and would consist of unbiased individuals (who are not associated with any particular V&TC). Assembling members who have a deep and diverse knowledge of the crisis community, but are not volunteering all of their time to V&TCs, will assist in ensuring that the board members have time to convene when necessary. The individual members would not be paid and would only convene when a defined proportion of V&TCs within the community solicits their attention. The board would be approached with problem statements by the V&TCs and their humanitarian or government partners and would work, with feedback from the V&TC community, to define systematic workflows that V&TCs could then be encouraged to adopt. An example of one of the boards primary foci will be to implement strategies to support risk reduction and prevention among V&TCs during static periods as a more effective way to save lives when crises do strike (GFDRR Labs, 2010). The board would leave the establishment of specific protocols and standards to individual V&TCs.
3: Develop a Presence in Academia The V&TC effort is in need of a neutral venue where problems faced both by the international humanitarian relief communities and the V&TCs can be discussed by individuals with different belief structures without fear of harsh confrontation (Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, 2011, p. 55). Schools and academia are recognized by those involved in development work as a means to bypass the complications that arise through politics (Boehmer, Smith, Schoppa, 2010) and students have historically made major contributions to V&TC efforts (such as those at Tufts Fletcher School who ran Ushahidi-Haiti). By involving academia more prominently in the V&TCs development and deployment efforts, an iterative process of design, development, evaluation of successes and failures, and redesign may be supported. Furthermore, academia will both serve as a form of advertisement and a means to provide V&TCs with a dedicated source of trusted labor. Students will be mentored by experienced faculty within related departments and will work together on teams. Students from many different academic, ethnic, economic, and racial backgrounds should also be encouraged in this endeavor in order to continue and further V&TCs diverse support. This will be achieved in part by emphasizing the international aspects of projects (which will attract students who speak other languages or have experience living in other countries). This will also be achieved by forming partnerships not only with universities in the United States, but also in atrisk locations such as Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. This model has already been adopted by the crisis mapping NGO, Ushahidi, through their Universities for Ushahidi program (see http://u4u.ushahidi. com/ for more information) (Himelfarb, 2011). This example will serve as a preliminary case study on which other V&TCs can develop their future academic partnerships. 4: Continue Developing Separately with Informal Interactions The possibility remains that V&TCs may not need to embark on a coordinated effort to reform their developing disaster response and relief strategies. Some experts argue that the ability to provide reliable information depends upon motivated citizens, the accessibility and usability of data collection tools and techniques, and the infrastructures used to store, validate, and share contributed data (Elwood, 2008). Currently, each V&TC is designing an internal system that best suits its needs given its mission and is forming a competitive architecture that can accelerate capability building (Hagel & Brown, 2006, p. 13), within the V&TC community. While some will experience success, others will fail in their attempts due to the natural competition among competitors engaged in similar pursuits. This form of natural selection among V&TCs will eliminate the need to establish
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table 1: Ability of Alternatives to Address V&tCs Challenges.
protocols, invest in academia, or devise a coordination board as systems ill-designed to handle liability, trust, and other issues will become obsolete. Criteria The four stated alternatives will be evaluated based on the follow set of criteria: efficacy, cost, time, and political feasibility. Efficacy refers to the ability of each alternative to bring about significant and desired change within V&TCs, among multiple V&TCs, and within the disaster response community as a whole. Cost refers to
the monetary cost of the endeavor, which is a necessary consideration given the non-profit or completely volunteer status of the organizations. The time required to complete the task demands attention given the limited time that volunteers are able to dedicate. Political feasibility will assess the likelihood that V&TCs and humanitarian organizations adopt the alternative given the potential existing positions and tensions within the community. This criterion will also take into account the possibility of local, federal, and state government involvement.
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table 2: Evaluation Matrix. The proposed alternatives are evaluated on a scale of 1 to 3. A score of 3, in this analysis, represents an effective, inexpensive, and politically feasible option with minimal time requirements. The rationale for these ratings is described below.
Analysis The four alternatives are compared in Table 1 above based on their ability to address the problem statements discussed earlier in this paper. This evaluation highlights the potential successes and inadequacies of each of the four alternatives. The results from Table 1 indicate the first alternatives success in addressing a majority of the problems many V&TCs face, especially in relation to the other three alternatives outcomes. Using the information from Table 1, each alternative is assessed on a numerical scale using the proposed criteria. The results of this comparison are shown in Table 2.. Alternative 1 would be extremely effective due to the large span of protocols that could be implemented. Although this alternative does not immediately address the lack of volunteers during static periods, protocols could be established to demand the collection of after-action data. Establishment of protocols would facilitate collaboration of V&TCs with existing humanitarian organizations and governments. V&TCs would therefore gain recognition and trust from disaster-stricken communities. Similarly, determining how similar organizations should deal with issues such as liability, licensing, and security (such as through the use of a disclaimer notice or a data filtering script) would set a standard on which V&TCs could collaborate and build. Clear, official protocols would also aid with intra-V&TC problems; for example, a mandate to make V&TC the official term (instead of VTC) would highlight the participation of both volunteers and professionals in the move-
ment. Furthermore, the protocols would be made publicly available, staying consistent with the open source nature of V&TCs. Though it may require more than a year to discuss and establish the protocols throughout the network of V&TCs, it would be politically feasible since few groups are opposed to the establishment of protocols within the network (Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, 2011, p. 44). The primary costs of the endeavor would be travel expenses and coordination of meetings, (assuming members meet in person, rather than via Skype or Google+). However, those costs may be covered by a significant grant or several individual grants to V&TCs. If the United Nations becomes involved in the endeavor, it may also shoulder certain aspects of the financial burden. The second alternative has the capacity to produce similar results to the first alternative, as the board would be able to establish some standards with the added ability to develop standardized systems (i.e., designs for disaster preparedness programs) that V&TCs would be encouraged to implement. These systems would provide a baseline from which V&TCs would build. However, there are several concerns that must be considered. The first is the political feasibility of this alternative given the many different personalities and opinions involved in the V&TC movement. It is likely that the groups may have a difficult time selecting individuals to serve of the board without contentious, which could lead to a complex set of political boundaries among V&TCs. This would restrict collaboration amongst the groups, damage
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the open source nature of the groups, and possibly lead to the boards rejection within certain crowds. In order to ensure that this does not occur, a significant amount of time must be allotted for discussion and debate among relevant organizations, from FEMA to the Red Cross to CrisisCommons. The fact that membership on the board is an honorary, versus professional, position increases the likelihood that those involved would not be able to prioritize their positions when in conflict with their professional schedules. This would delay efforts and render the board less effective, as organizations often need to quickly decide on internal structures and policies especially during a crisis. The boards determinations would therefore be recommended rather than mandatory and would mainly be adopted during static periods. The alternative would also be critiqued by V&TCs who would view the board as an added layer of bureaucracy in a system that is intentionally designed to function from a grassroots level. Investing in an advertising campaign within academia and coordinating the development of student groups and research projects in support of V&TCs would engage a reliable and large group of diverse volunteers before, during, and after a crisis. The diversity of the group, in terms of academic, economic, and cultural backgrounds, would help to facilitate discussions of how to best design projects for similarly diverse user populations. V&TCs will establish a level of trust with student groups as they work with the groups to discuss problems and possible project designs. The involvement of student groups, however, could erode major organizations trust of V&TCs application designs, as it is unclear what skill level a given student represents. Allotting tasks to students may save organizations valuable time in the long run, yet it will also demand time and patience as V&TC mentors answer questions and review students efforts (M. Prutsalis, personal communication, July 17, 2011). Although the advertising campaign within universities may be costly if groups decide to invest in marking strategies such as online advertisements or publicity events at universities, the option is one of the most politically feasible. A loose coordination among V&TCs would increase the efficacy of the effort, and would be welcomed by students and universities seeking to get involved in the nascent and exciting field. Furthermore, academia provides a safe space where those with different belief structures around [their] work can safely raise issues and explore alternative mindsets. [The academic forum is] open to everyone from donors and beneficiaries to technologists at operational organizations and the agencies that contract with them (Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, 2011, p. 55). This politically neutral forum would also promote future discussions and changes within the community. The final alternative, which suggests no changes to the current system, would require no additional
costs or volunteered time. It is also likely that, even if V&TCs do not take action to coordinate their efforts more closely, innovation within organizations will solve some of the problems that the community currently faces, such as developing a plug-in to be used in all platforms for after-action data collection. Yet, the current networks are advised against continuing without further coordination of interactions. Many V&TCs were formed in times of rapid change such as during the Indian Ocean Earthquake (Sahana Software Foundation) or post-election violence in Kenya (Ushahidi). While this caused V&TCs to adopt a bootstrapping mindset and potentially act as catalysts to re-shape institutions, knowledge sharing and shared understanding become even more effective when participants come together on a regular basis to undertake new collaborative creation efforts (Hagel & Brown, 2006, p. 11). Therefore, separate development is possible, but not recommended.
recommendatIonS and concluSIon
Leaders from within humanitarian organizations, governmental agencies, and V&TCs agree that coordinating efforts among the many different players is critical to resolving problems surrounding current disaster relief efforts (Crowley, 2011). The quantitative results from the evaluation matrix and supporting rationale show that the best coordination alternative to pursue (among those proposed) is Alternative 1: Establishing a set of Protocols and standards. This will help organizations systematically deal with difficult issues such as liability and licensing, while leaving strategic operations (such as recruiting and retaining volunteers during static periods) to the individual groups. This will allow natural competition among organizations while establishing a standard level of trust that results in the routine incorporation of V&TC efforts in the larger framework of governmental and humanitarian relief. Volunteer and Technical Communities should establish protocols and develop internal systems by studying reports from the open source, education, healthcare, and other relevant communities (S. Gill, personal communication, July 20, 2011). Through this lateral learning, the leaders of technology-driven crisis response will understand which processes and methodologies succeeded in the field and why. Stuart Gill, leader of the new GFDRR Labs initiative at the World Bank, explains that people are benefitting from well-designed systems that Volunteer and Technical Communities havent heard about because of the small scale of the successful ventures; yet I know for a fact it would be of value to these communities to understand [how and] why the systems are successful (S. Gill, personal communication, July 20, 2011). Additionally, it is critical that groups work to collect data on projects that have already been deployed so as to understand the successes and failures of the applications. Nigel McNie (2011), a programmer for
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CrisisCommons, Crisis Mappers, and the SBTF, says it is crucial that V&TCs make a point of returning to the location post-crisis and asking the community questions like, Did you see the map?, Was it useful?, Was it easy to use?, Were your needs met?, and What could we do to improve the service? This should be done by sending volunteers to the location after the disaster to gather first-hand data on how applications were used. It would also be beneficial for V&TCs to use a plug-in or use existing software (such as GetSatisfaction) that can be deployed through applications on any platform. The data-collection system will ask questions such as Was this app useful? How? and will only record personal information if the user gives permission. This will provide V&TCs a standardized means to collect data from many different types of users. This information should then be filtered into an open source repository where V&TCs can observe what applications exist and how they can be improved based upon user feedback. By discussing and establishing protocols and standards, conducting post-crisis surveys with application users, and developing a standard plug-in for after-action data collection, the newly established creation net of groups like Geeks Without Bounds, the Standby Task Force, CrisisCommons, and Sahana will revolutionize data collection and communication during disasters and crises.
referenceS
1. Boehmer, E., Smith, R., Schoppa, M. (2010). Bypassing Politics: Education as a Powerful yet Neutral Development Solution. Virginia Policy Review, 4, 20-23. 2. Chameles, G. (2011, August 3). Lives on the line: Defending crisis maps in Libya, Sudan, and Pakistan. Address at the Black Hat Conference, Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, NV. 3. Coleman, B. (2004, July). Indymedias independence: From activist media to free software. PlaNetwork Journal. Retrieved from http://journal.planetwork.net/ 4. Crowley, J. (2011, June 14). Crowd and Crown: Policy Issues in Social Media for International Crisis Response [Presentation slides]. 5. Elwood, S. (2008). Volunteered geographic information: key questions, concepts and methods to guide emerging research and practice. GeoJournal, 72, 133-135. doi: 10.1007/s10708-008-9187-z 6. Giridharadas, A. (2010, March 13). Africas gift to Silicon Valley: How to track a crisis. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes. com/2010/03/14/weekinreview/14giridharadas. html 7. GFDRR Labs. (2010). Volunteer and technical communities: Open Development. Retrieved from http://www.gfdrr.org/gfdrr/volunteertechnology-communities-open-development
8. Goodchild, M. (2007). Citizens as sensors: The world of volunteered geography. GeoJournal, 67, 211-221. 9. Hagel, J., Brown, J.S. (2006). Creation Nets: Harnessing the Potential of Open Innovation. Retrieved from http://www.johnhagel.com/creationnets.pdf 10. HaitiVoiceNeeds. (2010, February 13). Retrieved July 17, 2011, from http://wiki.crisiscommons. org/wiki/HaitiVoiceNeeds 11. Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies. Washington, D.C. and Berkshire, UK: UN Foundation & Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, 2011. 12. Himelfarb, S. (Ed.). (2011, June 17). From Crisis to Communitiy: Mapping as a Peacebuilding Tool. Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace. 13. McManus, E. (2011, July 13). Watching Ushahidis Mumbai response unfold, with co-founder Erik Hersman [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://blog.ted.com/2011/07/13/watching-ushahidis-mumbai-response-unfold-with-co-founder-erik-hersman/ 14. Mendoza, M., Poblete, B., Castillo, C. (2011, July 25). Twitter under crisis: Can we trust what we RT? Paper presented at the Workshop on Social Media Analytics (SOMA 10), Washington, DC. 15. Mission 4636. (n.d.). Mission 4636. Retrieved from http://www.mission4636.org/ 16. Open Source Initiative. (n.d.). Open Source Initiative: Mission. Retrieved from http://www.opensource.org/ 17. Standby Task Force (n.d.a). The Standby Task Force: About. Retrieved from http://blog.standbytaskforce.com/about/ 18. Standby Task Force. (n.d.b). Welcome to the Standby Task Force. Retrieved from http://members.standbytaskforce.com/ 19. Turner, K. (2009, May 11). Harnessing the power of mobile devices. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/ content/article/2009/05/11/AR2009051100719. html 20. United States. Executive Office of the President. (2006). The Federal response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons learned. (PREX 1.2:K 15). Washington: GPO. 21. Verity, Andrej. (2011, June 29). Communities of Interest. Retrieved from https://docs.google. com/a/virginia.edu/document/d/168-e1VHj9xf8xDyWV8F12ONY6dbNFctYUkR69Ld46o/ edit?authkey=CNz75LgO&hl=en_US&pli=1
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solicitation EffEctivEnEss in thE univErsity of virginia class of 2011 class giving caMPaign
Ruika Lin
the Class Giving Campaign at the University of Virginia is an annual fundraising effort that targets graduating students/soon-to-be alumni. Aiming to engage all class members, the 20102011 Campaign was led by the Alumni Association, and the Class of 2011 Trustees, a group of class members similar to a fourth year undergraduate class council. solicitation strategies, implemented by class trustees over class members last year at U.Va., ranged from customized emails and personal solicitation in Fall 2010, to Cap and Gown-Week solicitation and yearend Phonathon in Spring 2011. Among all strategies, face-to-face conversation was stressed by the campaign committee chairs as the most effective way of solicitation. This thesis collects solicitation data from an anonymous survey distributed among trustee solicitors. Using time fixed effect in an OLS regression model, I study the impact of personal solicitation on the propensity of giving among three groups of class members, distinguished by their relationships with each trustee solicitor. Results show that personal contact creates higher giving rate among those who share a closer relationship with the solicitors. Furthermore, giving rates are also sensitive to the solicitor characteristics such as race, gender, school of enrollment and Greek involvement. Finally, the face-to-face interactions associated with the Cap and Gown-Week solicitation generate even higher giving rates among all class members.
I. IntroductIon
haritable giving to colleges and universities is one of the most significant financial sources for most educational institutions in the US. According to Council for Aid to Education (Historical drop), in 2009, individual alumni contributed $7.13 billion in total, the second greatest amount of voluntary support ($8.24 billion of the contribution came from foundations). The ubiquitous budget cuts and resource decline on campus have raised the importance of voluntary support (Leslie & Remy, 1988). To cultivate relationships with future donors as early as possible, many universities alumni associations start outreach programs before students become alumni through student membership and promotional events. Such cultivation is essentially based on fundraisers belief that contribution patterns are developed early in life and past giving is related to current and future giving
(Marr, Mullin & Siegfried, 2005; Lindahl & Winship, 1992; Okunade & Justice, 1991). In addition, once alumni become donors, regardless of the size of their initial gifts, they are likely to continue their support through the years (Eldridge, 1964). Therefore, development strategies that focus on current students are important to study. Class Giving Campaign at the University of Virginia (the Campaign) is an annual fundraising effort that targets graduating students. Aiming at a large percentage of participation from the graduating class
Ruika Lin is a recent U.Va. graduate (CLAS 11) from Sichuan, China, who majored in Economics with a minor in Mathematics. Interested in the nonprofit sector, Ruika researched on various fundraising strategies and their effects on donation rate for the 2010-2011 Class Giving Campaign. This thesis was produced through the Economics Distinguished Majors Program. Ruika would like to express her sincere gratitude to Professor John Pepper, Mary Elizabeth Luzar, Bessie Bucholz, Nikhil Panda, and the Class of 2011 Trustees for their guidance and support during research. Continuing her interest in nonprofit and voluntary leadership, Ruika is currently involved in UVa Young Alumni Council, Class Trustees, and a number of volunteering activities through her employer at Ernst & Young.
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(rather than a large donation amount), the Campaign is led by the Alumni Association and Fourth Year Class Trustees throughout students fourth year. Class members are informed through several types and rounds of solicitations by their fellow class trustees, and then decide whether to seize the last chance to give something back to the University and [the] first opportunity to continue a tradition of strong support as alumni (CLASS GIVING 2011). Conceptual frameworks of charitable giving have been proposed by a number of economists and sociologists. The standard neoclassical microeconomics theories suggest that subject to resource constraints, economic agents maximize individual well-being based on relevant information. The microeconomic approach involves recasting the notion of altruism: a seemingly one-sided grant is essentially an exchange in which donors gain utility (psychological satisfaction or warm glow) through their giving (Halfpenny, 1999). Potential donors make donating decisions based on information received about certain causes, subject to budget constraints. Except for perhaps providing information, the solicitation method should have no influence on donating decisions. However, fundraisers understand the importance of asking because a large majority of all donation acts occurs in response to a solicitation (Bekkers & Wiepking, 2010). Furthermore, the strategies of solicitations matter: increasing the number of solicitations may lead to a defensive mechanism that lowers the average contribution (Van Diepen, Donkers, & Franses, 2009; Wiepking, 2008b; Diamond & Noble, 2001); face-to-face solicitations can be more effective than impersonal forms of solicitations such as advertisements or mails, due to increasing social pressure (Long, 1976; DellaVigna, List, & Malmendier, 2009); the relationship of the solicitor to the donor is also critical for effectiveness (Long, 1976; Meer, 2009). For the Class Giving Campaign, personal solicitation and face-to-face conversation are emphasized by campaign committee co-chair as the most effective way of solicitation (Bucholz, 2011). Moreover, the prospective donor selection process provides each class trustee with the opportunity to claim and solicit his or her friends and acquaintances (class trustees, as main solicitors for the Campaign, are also class members). Therefore, peer-to-peer solicitation is an essential method used throughout the Campaign. Centered on this solicitation method, this thesis explores topics of the following: a). The impact of personal and face-to-face peer solicitations on donations; b). How relationships between prospective donors and solicitors influence solicitation effectiveness; c). Different effectiveness of personal solicitation by a known person and by an unknown person (random solicitors);
d). How other aspects of the Campaign affect solicitation effectiveness, such as school/community-specific sub-campaigns and trustees claimee selection process. Solicitation data are collected through an anonymous survey distributed among all trustees. The survey allows me to investigate the impacts of peer effects on three groups of class members, which are classified as trustees good/close friends, acquaintances and strangers and their probability of giving. The reason to categorize class members into three groups is to evaluate the strength of peer effects based on different relationship levels between prospective donors and solicitors. Using a time fixed effect model, I analyze the impact of trustees personal approach and solicitor characteristics on the change of giving rates. A comparison is made among the three groups of class members before and after being personally solicited by class trustees. Potential confounding factors that are controlled for in the regression model include joint experience (close relationship that creates similar affinity for the University, rather than peer effect), informational factors (it is the information provided about the Campaign, not the personal peer effect, that influences giving decision), and whether trustees mention their own donations. In addition, data on Cap and Gown Week solicitation allow me to compare the differences between personal solicitation by a known person and by a random trustee solicitor. Cap and Gown Week was the first week of February 2011 when all classmates picked up their cap and gown for Graduation Weekend at the University Bookstore. In order to do so, each classmate had to stop by a Class Giving table hosted by trustees to hear about the Campaign and decide whether to give/pledge. All trustees signed up for at least two 1-hour shifts during the week to solicit donations at the table. I assume that classmates randomly chose a time to stop by the table, which was independent from the time signed up by their corresponding class agents/trustee solicitors. Therefore, the week of solicitation efforts is considered as personal face-to-face approach by a random solicitor, compared to personal face-to-face approach by a known person in November 2010. Finally, other aspects of the campaign are likely to have an impact on solicitation effectiveness and are included in the model. Firstly, the Campaign contained specific solicitation efforts across different schools, colleges and student groups, such as the Commerce School campaign and Architecture School campaign, Greek Giving Competition and Student Athletes campaign. They leveraged students affinity for their academic communities, and created a smooth transition to decentralized development practices after graduation. Secondly, trustees were provided the opportunity to select class members to claim and solicit at the beginning of the Cam-
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paign, although first come, first choose, request for transfer of claimees was possible. The transfer request function, if utilized carefully, could overcome the potential drawback of first come, first choose, in which trustees who selected claimees relatively late in the selection period might have fewer chances to select people they knew. 46 out of 60 trustees responded to the survey, along which a list of every trustees claimees and their donor/non-donor status before and after Cap and Gown Week was provided. With enough information provided, trustees are able to answer questions such as how many of their claimees are friends/ acquaintances/strangers, and how many of each of these three groups give or pledge after the first-round email solicitation, second-round personal solicitation, and third-round Cap and Gown-Week solicitation. Demographic information is also collected. Certain adjustments are made to the initial data, such as deleting the incomplete responses and reconciling contradicting entries by adjusting numbers. Overall, 34 trustees responses are used in the regression analysis.
II. lIterature reVIew
Solicitation strategies and their impact on donor behaviors have been studied by numerous social scientists. Bekkers and Wiepking (2010) identify solicitation as one of the eight most important forces that drive charitable giving. Solicitations may be tangible (e.g., a fundraising letter/email) or intangible (a personal request). In the context of the Class Giving Campaign, the two types of commonly used solicitations are direct email and personal solicitation. Diamond & Noble (2001) examine consumer behavior and determine that people defend themselves against repeated catalog or direct mail solicitations. As a result, it is not surprising that small modifications of direct mail appeals do not easily affect giving (Katzev, 1995 in Bekkers & Wiepking, 2010), which shows the potential disadvantages of email solicitations. On the other hand, a voluminous research has shown significant impact of tangible solicitation such as personal requests (Yoruk 2009; Bekkers & Wiepking 2010; DellaVigna, List & Malmendier 2009). Compared to other types of solicitation, such as those made over telephone (Brockner, Buzzi, Kane, Levine, & Shaplen, 1984) or general mailing (Long, 1976; Schervish & Havens, 1997), face-to-face request generates a greater rate of compliance or higher participation rate. One of the primary reasons for the effectiveness of personal solicitation is the social consequence of donations for the donor (Bekkers & Wiepking, 2010). Giving is usually viewed as a positive deed (Charities Aid Foundation, 2005; Muehleman, Brucker, & Ingram, 1976), and people who give to charitable causes are held in high regard by their peers (Muehleman et al. 1976; Wiepking, 2008a). Therefore, when given the choice, people generally
prefer their donations to be known by others (Andreoni & Petrie, 2004). The needs for being recognized indicate that reputation (Bekkers & Wiepking, 2010) or prestige (Harbaugh, 1998) are important driving forces of giving, and apparent charitable behavior can also be motivated by a desire to avoid the scorn of others or to receive social acclaim (Becker, 1974). This desire to be recognized by ones peers creates the advantages of face-to-face request because of the social pressure that personal solicitor may impose on potential donor, regardless of whether the solicitor is known or unknown to the donor (Long, 1976). Arguably, therefore, the social pressure imposed by a known solicitor may be greater for prospective donors because a refusal to contribute will endanger the relationship with the solicitor (Bekkers 2004). A number of studies conclude that higher levels of contribution involve a personal contact by a previously known individual (Schervish & Havens, 1997; Long 1976; Meer & Rosen 2010). In reality, charitable organizations often design their campaigns to leverage the power of social influences (Carman, 2003). For instance, universities can rely on alumni volunteers to solicit their friends (Meer, 2009). Moreover, closer personal relationships between donors and solicitors can result in greater contributions (Long, 1976; Bekkers, 2004). In the context of Class Giving Campaign, trustees successfully solicit more close friends than acquaintances and strangers. In a similar vein to Meer & Rosens marginal personal solicitation study (2010), this thesis studies whether a personal approach from a peer has any effect on three groups of individuals (distinguished by their relationships with the peer solicitor) who have ignored prior non-personal requests via emails.
III. tHe campaIgn
The Class Giving Campaign has been an annual fundraising event among undergraduate students during their last year at U.Va. since the early 1980s. The Campaign is coordinated by the Class Trustees with assistance from the Alumni Association. The idea is for graduating students to learn from their peer solicitors about the tradition of giving (Luzar, 2011). Because U.Va. is a public university and continues to face decreasing state support, the Campaign is a cornerstone program that educates students about the Universitys need for private support and inculcates a habit of giving back (Luzar, 2011). The Campaign is used to establish a class gift, which trustees vote on to decide where the students donation will go (for example, a tree or an academic building). The giving options changed in the late 1990s. The goal is to achieve a high participation rate among students, rather than a large donation amount, so students are now encouraged to give any amount. Their donations can be directed towards anything related to the University, be it student organizations, academic departments, in honor of professors, etc. Moreover,
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students can elect to give a gift via cash, check or credit card, or to make a pledge that has to be paid by June 30, 2011 by filing out a pledge card. Since 2010, students can give or pledge on the Campaigns website. Giving flexibility is a crucial factor that results in U.Va.s growing participation rate over time. Established in 1983 (Luzar, 2011), the Class Trustees program has always been the main peer coordinator of the Campaign. The trustee group consists of 45-60 fourth year undergraduate students selected from an application process (Luzar, 2011). A diverse representation in terms of undergraduate schools, academic programs, gender, ethnicity/culture and social communities is the goal of the trustee selection process (Application for Class of 2012 Trustees). These trustees are committed to serve their class for six years in total, one year as graduating students, and five years after graduation as young alumni. The main mission of the Trustees program is to bring together the graduating class and [create] a lasting and permanent affection for the University and the Alumni Association (Application for Class of 2012 Trustees). Therefore, trustees assist in planning social events, graduation activities, career and alumni relations events for the class (Application for Class of 2012 Trustees). The Campaign is a central way that the Trustees seek to build class cohesion and cultivate loyalty to the University (Luzar, 2011). Trustees act as fundraisers throughout the Campaign, educating their peers about giving back and soliciting donations from them. Although all trustees are responsible for assisting with the campaign, they are divided into committees with different missions. There is a Class Giving Committee that organizes solicitation events and outreach programs of the Campaign. The reason that the Campaign is student-run is two-fold: first, student self-governance is a long-time tradition at U.Va.; second, the campaign recognizes the importance of peer-to-peer solicitation (Luzar, 2011), which will be studied in detail in this thesis. The Class of 2011 Campaign was launched on September 1, 2010. With a goal of 71% participation among members of the class (CLASS GIVING 2011), the 2011 campaign was scheduled to last until June 30, 2011. Among the 60 Class of 2011 Trustees, 9 of them joined the 2010-2011 Class Giving Committee, with 2 co-chairs in charge of overall solicitation efforts throughout the year. Starting August 19, 2010, every trustee signed up to be the Class Agent for a group of 66 or more classmates. They selected these classmates using a centralized database designed to be a core managing system for the Campaign. Trustees were required to select/claim their 66 or more claimees from the database master list of all class members by the absolute deadline of August 26, 2010 (email from Campaign co-chair). However, there were about 8 or 9 trustees who missed this deadline (Panda, 2011). Trustees had the opportunity
to claim the class members they are familiar with. Those who claimed earlier in the selection period had more flexibility choosing their friends/acquaintances than those who claimed later. However, if a trustee wished to claim a classmate who had been claimed by someone else, he/she could request a transfer of the claimee if he/she felt he/she had a better relationship with that classmate. The other trustee would then receive an email about the transfer request and decide to approve or reject it. Therefore, although timing in the selection process matters for claiming more friends than strangers and many trustees share similar friend groups, the diverse representation and transfer request process ensure close to equal opportunity for all trustees to claim as many classmates they know as possible. After claiming 66 or more classmates, the Campaign consisted of several rounds and different types of solicitations. Chronologically, they were a firstround email solicitation and a second-round personal solicitation in the fall semester, the Cap and GownWeek solicitation and a year-end clean-up Phonathon in the spring. First-round Email Solicitation After claiming their 66, each trustee was asked to send the first-round solicitation emails to their claimees by September 19, 2010. The main purpose of the first-round emails was to emphasize the importance of giving back and to educate class members about the Campaign (Bucholz, 2011). Although provided with an email template with educational information about the Campaign, trustees were recommended to customize each email sent to different claimees by adding personal greetings. Despite the deadline of September 19, 2010, co-chairs of the campaign committee had a lot of trouble getting trustees to claim and email their 66 (Bucholz, 2011), and there were still roughly about 20 trustees who failed to email their 66 as of October 2010 (Bucholz, 2011). Second-round Personal Solicitation On November 14, 2010, the Class President distributed 6 new pledge cards in an envelope to each trustee and assigned everyone to personally approach 6 classmates for donations/pledges. Prospective donors could either fill out the pledge cards or give/pledge online after being personally solicited. To keep track of the donations, each trustee was required to write down the names of the 6 classmates who did donate/pledge because of his/her personal solicitation on the back of the envelope. All pledge cards, either filled out or not, must be returned to the Class President on December 5, 2010 during the Trustees meeting. Trustees could write down their own names on the back of the envelope to reach their goal of 6. To guarantee the result of 6 with minimum effort, some trustees wrote down names of existing donors (those classmates who already gave af-
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ter receiving first-round emails). However, according to co-chairs of the class giving committee, the purpose of collecting 6 pledge cards from trustees was for them to go out physically and spread the word, and to get a boost in the numbers, so a majority of the trustees did approach 6 non-donors (Bucholz & Panda, 2011). The second-round personal approach marked an end of the Trustees solicitation in the fall. In January 2011, every trustee received a complete list of his/her claimees and their donor status. In this way, trustee could have a sense of how effective their individual efforts were after the fall semester. Cap and Gown-Week Solicitation The week of February 7, 2011 was Cap and Gown Week. During this week, all graduating students were able to pick up their cap and gown for graduation at the University Bookstore. Each trustee was required to sign up for at least two 1-hour shifts over the course of five days during the week. The Trustees task was to talk to every fourth year student who came through the cap and gown line to make sure they had heard about the Campaign and to ask for a pledge or gift (Luzar, 2011). Students had to pass by the Trustees table before picking up their cap and gown. Since students stopped by randomly, trustees did not necessarily know the students they talked to. But face-to-face interaction ensured that nearly every classmate was informed about the Campaign and had an opportunity to make a giving decision in a relatively short period of time. Historically, Cap and Gown Week usually generates the largest increase in participation rate (Luzar, 2011). In 2011, the overall percentage increased from 17% to 41% due to Cap and Gown Week solicitation (Bucholz & Panda, 2011). Clean-up Phonathon In late April and early May, during a year-end Phonathon, trustees called their claimees who still had not participated in the Campaign to collect donations. This year, due to the extra help from Class of 2012 Trustees, each 2011 trustee might or might not have called his/her own claimees. The 2010 Phonathon only generated about 150 gifts, but typically 350-500 gifts are received during Phonathon, which is a 10-14% increase (Luzar, 2011). This year, the participation rate started at around 43% and ended at around 51% after the Phonathon week (Bucholz, 2011). Besides group solicitation efforts, the Class Giving Committee also led committee efforts throughout the year. These more targeted efforts included the following projects. The Greek Giving Competition The competition, launched in the fall semester, was a race between the fourth years of our Greek Councils for 100% participation per chapter in the Class Giving Campaign (CLASS GIVING 2011).
From October 18 to October 23, 2010, fraternities and sororities competed to be the first chapter to reach 100% fourth year participation rate. The first fraternity and sorority were rewarded prizes (certain dollar value of restaurant tab), and other chapters reaching 100% by October 23 were entered into a raffle for a chance to win the third restaurant tab (CLASS GIVING 2011). About 8-10 chapters reached the 100% rate by October 23, 2010 (Panda, 2011). School-specific Campaigns: The committee worked with trustees, development officers and faculty members from Commerce School, Architecture School, Engineering School and Nursing School, etc., to design school-based initiatives. Commerce School trustees focused their intensive solicitation in the fall (by December 5, 2010, the Commerce School participation rate was already over 70%), while the Architecture School campaign started in the spring. The competition approach worked well, especially in the Commerce School. For example, there was a block competition among fourth years in the Commerce School, which utilized the different blocks that students were placed into during their third year. Faculty members have also been involved, according to committee co-chairs. Other Group-specific Projects The committee reached out to other student groups and specific individuals such as student athletes, Madison House volunteers, international students and certain student organizations and classes with high proportions of fourth years. Outreach efforts throughout the year included presentations, lunches, brochure distributions, translated letters to parents of international students, etc. Although the size of the gift was not emphasized as much as a high giving percentage, students were provided optional giving amounts on their pledge card, such as $10, $20.11, $100, and other amount. The idea of linking class year with giving amount ($20.11 as in Class of 2011) was initiated during the 2010 Campaign (Luzar, 2011). Recommended in solicitations, this specific amount was chosen by many class members. All student donors were recognized in the online and printed Honor Roll in the Graduation Weekend edition of the Cavalier Daily, the independent daily newspaper at the University. Furthermore, students who donated $150 or more were invited to attend a Springtime Reception in appreciation of their gift. Finally, the Class Giving Committee co-chairs presented a check with the total amount raised to the President of U.Va. during Valediction Ceremony.
IV. SurVey and deScrIptIVe reSultS
The main instrument used in this study is an anonymous survey distributed among all trustees. The survey contains two parts: trustee demographic
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information and ad solicitation data. Demographic information includes gender, race, school of enrollment, Greek involvement, and specific campaign participation. Solicitation data focus on trustees claimee selection process, three rounds of solicitation (from email/impersonal approach, to personal approach by a known person, and Cap and Gown week/personal approach by an unknown person) and their outcomes respectively. Questions include when a trustee selected his/her claimees; whether he/she requested transfer from other trustees; how many transfers he/she received; the number of friends, acquaintances and strangers he/she claimed, emailed, personally approached; and these prospective donors donation outcomes (whether they eventually gave/pledged as a result of these different forms of solicitation). To answer the survey, every trustee is provided with a hard copy of his/her individual list of claimees, their demographic information, donor/non-donor status and timing of donation. The claimee list provides enough information to answer all questions. Questions regarding solicitation methods ask trustees whether they mentioned their own donations when approaching claimees, and whether they provided specific information about the Campaign (such as only 7% of U.Va. funding comes from the state). 46 out of 60 trustees responded to the survey. 41 written responses were collected at a Trustees General Body meeting. 5 out of 14 trustees who did not attend the meeting responded through an equivalent online survey. 12 trustees responses are omitted due to either incomplete survey or invalid numbers provided. 13 responses of the remaining 34 are adjusted. With a complete survey, each trustee should have provided the information concerning characteristics, solicitation methods, and solicitation effectiveness data for three time periods: t1, t2, t3. These three time dummies correspond to three solicitation periods (first, second, and third round). Adjustments are made either by eliminating one or two time periods for certain trustees (due to incomplete surveys), or adjusting numbers based on reasonable assumptions. The dataset contains 918 observations on 34 trustees characteristics, solicitation methods and solicitation outcomes. Qualitatively, it seems sensible to assume that compared to the first-round email solicitation, a larger percentage of prospective donors would donate as a result of the second-round personal approach by a known solicitor. Possibly a larger giving rate would result from the third-round Cap and Gown-Week solicitation, also as a result of personal approach by a known or unknown solicitor (although might not be as large as the second round). To test these assumptions, I compare the average giving rates after three rounds of solicitations for all three groups of class members. Giving rates are calculated as (the number of donors)/(the number of prospective donors approached) for three groups of class members during
table 1. Average Giving Rates Comparison (three groups, three periods)
three solicitation periods. Using giving rates eliminates the answers of those trustees who did not actually solicit any non-donors during second round and only wrote down the names of previous donors on the back of their envelopes. If one trustee did not approach anyone during the second round, the givingrate denominator would be zero, which leaves the giving rate undefined. Therefore, these trustees data is omitted in the regression analysis. The third-round friends giving rate (after the Cap and Gown week) is calculated as (the number of friends donating at t3)/(the total number of friends friends donor at t1 friends donor at t2). The reason for such a denominator is that during Cap and Gown Week, almost all class members who picked up their cap and gown were personally approached by a trustee. Although students can still pick up their cap and gown during Graduation Weekend, there is no way to determine their number. Therefore, I assume that every class member picked up cap and gown during Cap and Gown Week and trustee solicitors approached all class members during the week. Omitting invalid percentages, the average and standard deviation of giving rates for three groups after each of the three rounds of solicitations are presented in Table I below: Consistent with prior assumptions, personal solicitation (t2 and t3) generates overall larger giving rates for all three groups of class members except for the strangers during t2. Furthermore, closer relationships between solicitors and prospective donors increase the effectiveness of the solicitors in all three rounds of solicitation1.
V. metHodology and regreSSIon model
The average giving rates displayed in Table I may not shed light on the peer effects of personal solicitation. Being personally approached for a solicitation might involve more specific information provided about the Campaign, or solicitor mentioning his or her own giving. Meanwhile, there were multiple periods of solicitation outcomes. An increase in the giv1 Since trustees might have tended to approach friends/ acquaintances who were more likely to give during the second round, the t2 average giving rate could be subject to selection issue. This issue does not occur in t1 and t3 since all claimees were approached during these two periods regardless of their likelihood to give. However, if trustees did not select to solicit friends/acquaintances who were more likely to give (or had no such knowledge), the selection issue would not bias the estimates, and the average giving rates over the three periods would be comparable.
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ing rate from t1 to t2 may reflect the intrinsic increase of giving from simultaneous group/school-specific sub-campaigns, class members hearing more about the campaign from all sources of information, and other time-variant unobservable factors, rather than peer effects. To address these issues, I use a multiple regression model with time fixed effect to tease out the peer effects on giving at different time periods. Shared experience and joint factors between solicitors and prospective donors are addressed by using the following model for three groups of class members: Rateit= it + 0i*Xi + 1i*Si + 2it*(Xi*Tt) + 3t*Tt+ 4*Ai + it. The unobserved random variable, it, is assumed to be mean independent of the observed regressors. Rateit refers to the giving rate at period t for trustee i. Xi is a demographic vector of trustee characteristics (race, gender, school, Greek, specific sub-campaigns). Si is a solicitation vector containing factors such as when trustees selected their claimees, whether they requested transfer during claimee selection, whether they mentioned their own giving in the personal solicitation, and whether they provided specific information about the Campaign. Xi*Tt is an interaction term of characteristics and time dummies (Tt = t1, t2, t3). Ai is the adjustment dummy (whether trustee is data were adjusted). Peer effect is conceptualized as the impact of trustees characteristics when they personally approach their friends during t2. Therefore, a key coefficient is vector 2it, which represents the different effects of trustee characteristics on giving rates of different solicitation periods. Another key coefficient is 3t, the time period fixed effects alone, which represents the effect of solicitation periods when all the dummy variables are zero (except for the omitted dummies due to collinearity). There could be comparison within the same group of class members over different periods, or among groups for same periods to study the impact of relationships between solicitors and donors.
VI. reSultS and dIScuSSIon
Table 1-5 in Appendix A present the estimates from the analysis. Three groups of prospective donors are discussed below: close/good friends, acquaintances, and strangers. Close/good Friends Table 1 presents the results of fixed effect model for the friends group. The coefficient of t2 alone shows that the impact of second round is 37.943%, significantly higher, than that of first round, for a trustee with all the dummy variables to be zero, that is, a non-Greek Asian female trustee enrolled in either College of Arts & Sciences or School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, with no specific
campaign in her community, who selected claimees early in the selection period and did not request transfer. Male solicitors are associated with an additional 47.341%higher giving rate among their friends during t2, and 25.309% higher during t3, although not statistically significant (Note that these friends might not have been solicited by their corresponding class agents during t3). Caucasian and African American trustees seem to generate lower giving rate during the second round, relative to Asian trustees, although the results are not significant. School of enrollment also influences giving rate over three periods. School variables are coded as follows: College of Arts and Sciences (CLAS) and School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) are coded as the dummy variable CLASSEAS; McIntire School of Commerce (COMM), School of Architecture (SARC) and School of Nursing (Nursing) are otherschools dummy. The rationale behind grouping CLAS and SEAS is that there are a larger number of trustees involved in solicitation and responding to the survey from CLAS and SEAS than from other schools. Assuming the number of trustees is positively associated with the number of fourth years in certain schools, COMM, SARC and Nursing indicate closer relationships between solicitors and class members in that school. Due to the close-knit environment in these schools, they tend to also have simultaneous sub-campaigns. Therefore, it is sensible to see a positive relationship between enrollment in these schools and giving rates during the second round. Indeed, the variable otherschools is associated with a 51.419% higher giving rate relative to the variable CLASSEAS, significant at the 5% level. However, the coefficient of otherschools during t1 is almost zero (0.009168), indicating that in the first period of email solicitation, there are no differences among schools. Also, this positive relationship during t2 becomes negative during t3, and not statistically significant. Since the third-round Cap and Gown is a random yet personal solicitation process, school enrollment of class agents might have had minimum influence on giving rate. Greek involvement shows significant positive impact on trustees solicitation effectiveness. Compared to the first-round mass email, second-round giving rate increases by 56.001% if the solicitor is involved in the Greek community. Specific campaigns significantly decreases giving rate by 86.102% during the second round. Note that since giving rate is defined as the number of donors/the number of prospective donors approached, this decrease in giving rate related to specific campaign is logical since these subcampaigns might be more effective soliciting a large of group of class members with similar background. This mass solicitation within communities creates more social pressure and therefore is possibly more
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table II: Estimation of the Effect of t2 and t3 on sample Combinations of trustees Characteristics
table III: the Effect of sample Combinations of trustees Characteristics on Friends and Acquaintances Giving Rates during t2
effective even during the second-round personal approach by individual trustees. Also, a few sub-campaigns were in progress during the second-round solicitation, the most intensive being Commerce School block competition. Two other confounding factors during the second-round personal approach are: trustees mentioning their own donations and providing more specific information about the campaign. Table 2 shows results after including these two confounding variables during second round only. Surprisingly they both have very minor and negative impact on giving rate, and the estimated effect is not statistically significant. During the third round Cap and Gown solicitation, giving rate rises even more than the second round. However, F test suggests that the coefficients of t2 and t3 are statistically the same (F(1, 47) = 0.03; Prob > F = 0.8583). This qualitative increase might result from more direct social pressure and time pressure relative to the second round: Class members were rushing to get their cap and gown but had to stop by trustees table first. That might have created the time pressure where students wanted to get it done with. Moreover, seeing other students filling out pledge cards and talking to trustees about the Campaign might have created more social pressure to conform besides the pressure of being personally asked to give. These direct face-to-face pressures may have exceeded peer effects during the second round, even for friends group. Among trustees characteristics, both Caucasian and African American trustees have negative impact on friends giving rate, relative to Asian trustees (Caucasian trustees effect is significant). This pattern is consistent with the effect of races during t2 (Note that these are characteristics of each claimees class agent, not the trustee who solicited them during Cap and Gown week). Table II below demonstrates a comparison among three sample combinations of trustee characteristics during t2 and t3 (Friendrate=friends giving rate; F=female; A=Asian, W=white, B=black; C=CLASSEAS). These coefficients are calculated by adding the coefficient of t2 or t3 alone on the benchmark combination of characteristics mentioned above (that is, 0.3794338 and 0.4236436, respectively) and the one character that is changed in the combinations listed below. For example, the combination of F, A, C is the benchmark combination of characteristics, therefore the effect of the second round is the coefficient of t2 alone (0.3794338); The t2 coefficient of F, W, C (0.2291821) is calculated by adding 0.3794338 and the coefficient of whiteint2 (-0.1502517), and the t3 coefficient is the whiteint3 + t3 coefficients
= 0.4236436+ (-0.3637737) = 0.0598699. These coefficients further illustrate the effect of race on friends giving rate during t2 and t3, relative to t1: Acquaintances Estimates for the acquaintances group are presented in Table 3. It is interesting to notice that many factors that are statistically significant in the friends group do not seem to influence acquaintances giving rate. During the second-round solicitation, almost all coefficients decrease in size and none of the trustee characteristics have a statistically significant impact on acquaintance giving rate. Some characteristics, such as gender, race and enrollment in other schools, even show opposite effects when compared to friends giving rate,. For example, the following table demonstrates the effect of race on friends and acquaintances giving rate during t2, relative to t1 (Acquarate=acquaintances giving rate): We see that the overall effect of trustee characteristics decreases for acquaintances and that Asian trustees have reversed influence on friends and acquaintances giving rates. It is sensible to assume that trustees did not make as much effort to solicit acquaintances. Acquaintances giving rate actually decreases by 5.535% for the benchmark group of trustees relative to t1, although not significantly. Acquaintances giving rate, however, rises significantly by 26.513% between t3 and t1 for trustees with the benchmark combination of characteristics. Table 4 presents results to account for owngiving and infoprov variables; however, these still demonstrate negative and insignificant impact on acquaintances giving rate. As pointed out before, it is impossible to track trustee efforts, which might differ drastically among the three groups. Including the two variables in this regression is merelybased on the assumption that trustees mentioned their own giving or provided more information to all three groups of prospective donors during the second round. Strangers Table 5 presents the overall results for the strangers group. None of the variables have significant impacts on giving rate. This is not surprising given that a). There is much less data collected from the survey on the strangers group, and b). Trustees efforts are likely lessened for this group of class members. Qualitatively, we still see coefficients with similar impacts on giving rate but much smaller and not significant. This is consistent with the average giving rate calculated from Section IV. For the only 5 trustees who
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did approach strangers during the second-round solicitation (154 strangers were approached in total, but judging from trustees answers, around 100 of these strangers were approached impersonally/through emails), they all generated zero giving rate. However, strangers giving rate seems to rise during Cap and Gown week. Again, direct social and time pressures may generate this increased giving rate. Overall, it seems more effective to solicit strangers or class members that are not claimed by any trustees during Cap and Gown week, when social and time pressures exceed the peer effects of an unknown solicitor. Two other variables that share similar effects on three groups of giving rates are claimee selection timing and transfer request. Claimee selection timing is coded as three dummy variables: early, middle and late. Trustees who selected claimees earlier would have more flexibility as well as tendency to choose friends/people they know than trustees who selected claimees later. The negative coefficients of middle and late for both friends (middle: -0.1573668 and late: -0.0801443 in Table 3) and acquaintances group (middle: -0.1409169 and late: -0.0657091 in Table 5) justify this assumption, and both coefficients of middle are statistically significant. The selection process allowed trustees to request transfers of claimees from one another to balance the number of friends, acquaintances, and strangers for each trustee. It was assumed that trustees who made a transfer request tended to request a transfer of their friends from other trustees because they knew them better. Looking at the coefficient of transreq on friends giving rate, the qualitative impact is slightly negative, but not significant. Inefficient usage of the transfer function could have resulted in this insignificant impact: among the 15 trustees who did request transfers, only 6 received everyone they requested, and 3 did not receive anyone they requested. Overall, the results above show the importance of trustee characteristics such as gender, school of enrollment, Greek involvement, and specific campaign on giving of trustees close and good friends. The effects of these factors diminish for prospective donors who are acquaintances and strangers to solicitors. Comparison of the second- and third-round personal solicitation demonstrates that the third round generated higher giving rates for all three groups. Friend solicitation is crucial during the second round, while Cap and Gown effort is more effective for acquaintances and strangers. These results indicate that relationship does matter in personal solicitation, and that creating group pressure may even have a greater influence on giving rates across the board. The large increase from 17% to 41% of overall class participation after Cap and Gown week also reinforces this conclusion.
VII. concluSIon
The University of Virginia Class Giving Campaign is a critical effort to foster a tradition of giving back to U.Va. among soon-to-be alumni. Peer solicitation is one of the core solicitation strategies for the Campaign. Class Trustees functions as the main peer solicitor for the Campaign. Efficiently leveraging this diverse group of class members and their broad connection within the Class is vital for achieving a high campaign participation rate. For the Class of 2011 Campaign, trustees were required to claim at least 66 of their classmates and to become their corresponding class agents. Each trustee was given the opportunity to be flexible when selecting claimees in order for them to claim their friends or acquaintances for an easier solicitation process. Class agents encouraged their peers to participate in the Campaign through various solicitations over the course of one academic year. Among these solicitation strategies, personal peer solicitation is of particular interest to this thesis. Prior researchhas provided evidence that the personal solicitation effectiveness increases when conducted by a solicitor who shares certain relationships with the prospective donor (Long 1976 etc). This thesis not only examines and confirms the importance of this relationship, but also points out the necessity of creating group pressure to solicit random potential donors that do not necessarily share personal relationships with solicitors. I collected data using an anonymous survey distributed to all trustees to look at giving rates among three groups of class members (good/close friends, acquaintances, strangers) during three periods of solicitation: first-round emails, second-round personal approach, and third-round Cap and Gown Week. Each trustees characteristics, such as gender, race and school of enrollment and his/her solicitation methods,including whether he/she provided specific information or mentioned own giving when personally approaching class members, were paired with these giving rates. To control for the three different solicitation periods, I use a time fixed effect regression model. The results demonstrate that the thirdround Cap and Gown solicitation has a significantly positive impact on giving rates for all three groups of class members, and that the second-round personal solicitation increased overall giving rates when compared to the first-round emails. Among the five key trustee characteristics, the following four seemed to increase trustees solicitation effectiveness among the friends group during the second round: male gender, enrollment in School of Commerce, School of Architecture or School of Nursing (other schools), involvement in the Greek community, and no specific campaigns in trustees communities/schools. The effects of these characteristics diminish and become insignificant for the acquaintances group. Since none of the 5 trustees who approached strangers in the second round successfully generated any donation,
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none of the trustees characteristics have any significant impact on strangers giving rate. However, Cap and Gown solicitation increased strangers giving rate overall. This could be explained by the solicitation setting, and grouppressure generated by this setting. Another factor that also seems to increase giving rate among friends and acquaintances is early claimee selection. The obvious advantage of choosing claimees early in the selection process is greater flexibility, more options choosing friends/acquaintances, and therefore less difficulty approaching them personally. A somewhat counter-intuitive result is that providing specific information about the campaign and mentioning trustees own giving slightly decreased giving rates among the three groups. One caveat of the analysis comes from the selection issue mentioned in Section IV. If we assume that trustees tend to personally approach students who they know are more likely to give, some results in this thesis might change due to selection bias. Observations from the data may not reflect this selection issue. Therefore, since we observed the effectiveness of the second round (especially on friends), it might be worth personally approaching more than 6 students during t2 and examining the marginal impact. Another potential caveat of analyzing the giving rates in separate time periods is the influence of many other simultaneous outreach programs, such as school-specific sub-campaigns. Since all the giving rates are calculated based on the assumption of no increase between the three periods, it is beneficial to track the increase of giving rate after each major outreach and solicitation effort. Identifying the actual effect of these specific programs and efforts is critical in determining their impacts on giving rates. To benefit future campaigns with similar solicitation process over the year (first-round email, second-round personal approach, third-round Cap and Gown Week, fourth-round Phonathon), this thesis provides the following suggestions on increasing solicitation effectiveness: 1) Encourage trustees to select their claimees early in the selection process, and use the transfer request function more effectively to balance the number of friends, acquaintances and strangers in their claimee list; 2) During the second-round personal solicitation, emphasize the importance for male trustees to approach close/good friends in the same student organizations, fraternities or sororities who are previous non-donors; 3) Encourage trustees in the School of Commerce, Architecture and Nursing to involve in specific sub-campaigns within these schools; 4) Create a norm of giving by creating group pressure and time pressure through solicitation events like Cap and Gown to target
people who are not approached during the second-round personal solicitation (acquaintances and strangers); 5) Establish a data collection system to track trustees efforts through surveys and descriptive research.
referenceS
1. Andreoni, J., & Petrie, R. (2004), Public Goods Experiments without Confidentiality: A Glimpse into Fund-raising. Journal of Public Economics, 88: 1605-1623. 2. Application for Class of 2012 Trustees. Application for Class of 2012 Trustees - U.Va. Alumni Association. U.Va. Alumni Association, n.d. Web. 17 Apr 2011. <http://www.alumni.virginia.edu/ student/trustees/trustee_app.aspx>. 3. Becker, Gary (1974), A Theory of Social Interactions. Journal of Political Economy. 82(6): 10631093. 4. Bekkers, R. (2004), Giving and Volunteering in the Netherlands: Sociological and Psychological Perspectives. PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands. 5. Bekkers, R. & Wiepking, P. (2010b), A Literature Review of Empirical Studies of Philanthropy: Eight Mechanisms That Drive Charitable Giving. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. 6. Brockner, Joel, Beth Guzzie, Julie Kane, Ellen Levine, & Kate Shaplen (1984), Organizational Fundraising: Further Evidence on the Effect of Legitimizing Small Donations. Journal of Consumer Research, 11:611-614. 7. Bucholz, Bessie & Panda, Nikhil. Intervew by Ruika Lin. 02/25/2011. 14 Apr 2011. 8. Bucholz, Bessie. Re: Giving rate after each solicitation? Message to Ruika Lin. 26 Apr 2011. E-mail. 9. Carman, K. G. (2003), Social Influences and the Private Provision of Public Goods: Evidence from Charitable Contributions in the Workplace. SIEPR Discussion Paper No.02-13. 10. Charities Aid Foundation. (2005). UK Giving 2004/05. Kent, UK: Author. 11. DellaVigna, S., List, J. and MalmenDdier, U. (2009). Testing for Altruism and Social Pressure in Charitable Giving. Mimeo, University of Chicago. 12. Diamond, W. D., & Noble, S. M. (2001). Defensive Responses to Charitable Direct Mail Solicitations. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 15(3): 2-12 Eldridge, Donald A. (1964), Developing Financial Resources. Junior College Journal, 5(2): 28-31. 13. CLASS GIVING 2011, Greek Competition. Class of 2011 Trustees Class Giving Committee, n.d. Web. 17 Apr 2011. <http://www.uva2011. com/giving>.
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14. Halfpenny, Peter (1999), Economic and Sociological Theories of Individual Charitable Giving: Complementary or Contradictory. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 10: 197 215. 15. Harbaugh, W. T. (1998), What do donations buy? A model of philanthropy Based on Prestige and Warm Glow. Journal of Public Economics, 67: 269-284. 16. Historic Drop in Giving to Higher Education. NonProfit Times 03 Feb 2010: n. pag. Web. 10 Dec 2010. <http://www.nptimes.com/10Feb/breakingnews-100203-1.html>. 17. CLASS GIVING 2011, How We Compare?. Class of 2011 Trustees Class Giving Committee, n.d. Web. 17 Apr 2011. <http://www.uva2011. com/giving>. 18. Katzev, Richard D. (1995), Applying Social Psychology to Charitable Donations: Three Experiments on Nonprofit Fundraising. Final Report submitted to the Aspen Institute Nonprofit Sector Research Fund, December 15, 1995. 19. Leslie, L. and Ramey, G. (1988), Donor Behavior and Voluntary Support for Higher Education Institutions. Journal of Higher Education, 59(2): 115-132. 20. Lindahl , W. E. and Winship , C. (1992), Predictive Models for Annual Fundraising and Major Gift Fundraising. Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 3: 3-64. 21. Long, Stephen (1976), Social Pressure and Contributions to Health Charities, Public Choice, 31: 55-66. 22. Luzar, Mary Elizabeth. Intervew by Ruika Lin. 03/02/2011. 14 Apr 2011 23. Marr, K. A., Mullin, C. H., & Siegfried, J. J. (2005), Undergraduate Financial Aid and Subsequent Alumni Giving Behavior. Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 45: 123-145. 24. Meer, J., (2009), Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? Peer Effects in Charitable Solicitation. Stanford University. 25. Meer, Jonathan & Harvey S. Rosen (2010), The ABCs of Charitable Solicitation, Forthcoming Journal of Public Economics. 26. Muehleman, J., Bruker, C., & Ingram, C. (1976), The Generosity Shift. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34: 344-351. 27. Okunade, A., & Justice, S. (1991), Micropanel Estimates of the Life-Cycle Hypothesis with Respect to Alumni Donations. In Proceedings of the Business and Economics Statistical Section of the American Statistical Association (298305). USA: American Statistical Association. 28. Panda, Nikhil. Claim, Claim, Claim .Message to Class of 2011 Trustees. 22 Aug 2010. E-mail. 29. Schervish, Paul G. and John J. Havens (1997), Social Participation and Charitable Giving: A Multivariate Analysis. Voluntas, 8(3): 235-260.
30. Van Diepen, M., Donkers, B., & Franses, P. H. (2009), Does Irritation Induced by Charitable Direct Mailings Reduce Donations? International Journal of Research in Marketing, 26: 180-188. 31. Wiepking, P. (2008a). For the Love of Mankind. A Sociological Study on Charitable Giving. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Department of Philanthropic Studies, VU University Amsterdam: Amsterdam, Netherlands. 32. Wiepking, P. (2008b), Picturing Generosity: National Campaigns for Charitable Causes in the Netherlands. For the love of mankind. A sociological study on charitable giving (73-94). Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Department of Philanthropic Studies, VU University Amsterdam: Amsterdam, Netherlands. 33. Yoruk, Baris (2009), How Responsive are Charitable Donors to Requests to Give? Journal of Public Economics 93(1-2): 1111-1117
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appendIx a
Table 2. Friends giving rate, adding owngiving and infoprov dummy variables (t2 only) Number of observations = 20 R2 = 0.5309 Adj R2 = -0.2732 Coefficients that are statistically significant at the 1% level are marked with ***; those significant at the 5% level are marked with **, and * for those significant at the 10% level. Dummy variables owngiving and infoprov represent whether trustees mentioned their own giving during the second- round personal solicitation, and whether trustees provided specific information about the campaign during the second round, respectively. Variables that are omitted due to collinearity are: black, otherschools, and early.
table 1. Friends giving rate overall. Number of observations = 72, R2 = 0.3950 Adj R2 = 0.0861 Coefficients that are statistically significant at the 1% level are marked with ***; those significant at the 5% level are marked with **, and * for those significant at the 10% level. Dummy variable speccamp stands for specific campaign of trustees communities or schools; early, middle, and late are three dummies for claimee selection timing; transreq is a dummy variable that represents whether a trustee requested transfer of claimees. Characteristics and time interaction terms are indicated as characteristics + int + 2 or 3. For example, genderint2 represents gender and t2 interaction term. Omitted variables due to collinearity are: asian, CLASSEAS, middle, asianint2, CLASSEASint2, CLASSEASint3.
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table 4. Acquaintances giving rate, adding owngiving and infoprov dummy variables (t2 only) Number of observations = 16 R2 = 0.6749 Adj R2 = -0.6255 Coefficients that are statistically significant at the 1% level are marked with ***; those significant at the 10% level are marked with **, and * for those significant at the 10% level. Omitted variables due to collinearity are: asian, otherschools, and early. table 3. Acquaintances giving rate overall Number of observations = 72 R2 = 0.4296 Adj R2 = 0.1383 Coefficients that are statistically significant at the 1% level are marked with ***; those significant at the 10% level are marked with **, and * for those significant at the 10% level. Omitted variables due to collinearity are: asian, CLASSEAS, late, CLASSEASint3, otherschoolsint2.
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table 5. strangers giving rate overall Number of observation = 53 R2 = 0.2082 Adj R2 = -0.3725 Coefficients that are statistically significant at the 1% level are marked with ***; those significant at the 10% level are marked with **, and * for those significant at the 10% level. Omitted variables due to collinearity are: asian, otherschools, and early, blackint2, asianint2, asianint3, CLASSEASint2, otherschoolsint3, and t2. The reason t2 is omitted is that during the second round, the giving rate among strangers for those trustees who did personally approach strangers was zero.
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British invEstMEnt in thE unitEd statEs cattlE industry, 1870-1890

Mark Goldberg
Diving headfirst into the mythos of the American West, this paper showcases the major significance of foreigners in shaping the Wests most iconic and enduring image: the cowboy. British investors in the 1870s and 1880s came from English noble families or scottish banking concerns and played an essential role in creating the open range ranching industry. Using period travel journals, corporate records, legal documents, and diaries along with secondary sources, this paper reveals the profound and often ignored footprint left in the old West by British citizens. Part adventurer, part businessman, each investor sought to tap into the United states seemingly endless grass oceans to raise beef for the exploding industrial working population of late 19th-century Britain. They altered the physical landscape of the oft-romanticized open range, leading the drive to fence in the upper Great Plains in order to protect their superior, European-bred herds. Coming from a litigious background in Europe, British investors sought legal remedies to their problems rather than using the violence that frequently characterized the Western experience. In so doing, they legitimized territorial courts and took advantage of preexisting trends to secure their business investments. Each one of the populations- English and scottish- pursued distinct corporate strategies, eventually leading to almost universal failure in the English case and widespread success in the Scottish. Scots left the most lasting impression, as their banking corporations were able to leverage ranching success into land mortgage, injecting the West with overseas capital. The loans Scottish bankers provided accelerated the Wests development by decades. All across the High Plains country in the 1870s and 1880s, yee-haw was pronounced with a decidedly British accent.
In the summer of 1877 I found myself, like many a better man in England, out of a job1 -Reginald Aldridge o image in Americas symbolic library has persisted for as long and as vividly as the cowboy. Lone adventurers, equipped with six-shooters and steeds against hostile men and cruel Nature traveling the vast open spaces of the American West, cowboys speak to the American characters innermost yearnings for freedom, independence, and hard work. They traveled dusty alkali trails searching for where they could kick up their spurs and pay for a drink. They paid for their drinks, their bullets, and their saddles from a wage, given to them in exchange for their labor and expertise driving cattle from pastures to railroad depots. To a greater degree than the common cowboy myth acknowledges, those wages often came from foreign bank accounts- and a great
1 Reginald Aldridge, Life on a Ranch (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1884), page 1.
BrEd froM noBlEr stock
Mark Goldberg is a fourth-year History and Foreign Affairs major from Fairfax, Virginia, attending the University of Virginia. He wrote Bred from Nobler Stock for James Allisons United States history seminar, Americas Many Wests in the Spring 2011 semester. Mark would like to thank James Allison for his advice and guidance in writing this paper.
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number of those dusty, tired cowboys spoke the Kings English. British investors made a tremendous impact on open range cattle ranching between 1870 and 1890, especially in the unfenced prairie country around the Missouri and Powder Rivers on the northern Great Plains. The transplanted Britons who came West brought prodigious capital reserves, Old World management styles, and an alien corporate culture to the open range. They came to a nascent - if underdeveloped - industry and wreaked massive changes to its physical, legal, and corporate landscapes before flaring out by 1890. They cemented the Wests role in an emerging global economy by linking their ranches to the British imperial trade system, importing meat to England in astronomical quantities. They accelerated already existing business trends like consolidation, legal protections for business, and fencing in the range. They also provided the credit and capital the range needed to kick-start its development. Their failures and successes, traceable to English or Scottish experiences, tell a valuable, frequently overlooked story about the relation of corporate structure to profitability in foreign countries, the development of industry in the American West, its place in a worldwide economy, and the forces propelling those iconic cowboys along cattle trails. The wide-open spaces in the prairie country amazed the regions earliest British visitors. Reginald Aldridge, a young Englishman, traveled to the region in the early 1870s to try his fortune in the cattle industry. He recorded his experiences in a memoir, Life on a Ranch. As one of the first Englishmen to visit the region as a potential investor, he referred to the states of the far West as a terra incognita.2 Coming from the crowded spaces of industrial Britain, he was shocked by Kansas, where no sign of life would be visible,3 where there was nothing but brown prairie on every side.4 Life on a Ranch presented more than an interesting travelogue; Aldridge wrote it to provide investment advice and guidance to readers back in the British Isles hoping to follow his tracks into Big Sky Country. Throughout his book, Aldridge peppers his adventures with businesslike facts and summaries, including recommendations regarding where to start a good company. Aldridge advocated ranching on the open range, a massive unfenced territory stretching through parts of modern-day Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and the Dakotas. Existing as public domain land, which the federal government never sold, the open range beckoned herders into countless acres filled with free grass ready to be grazed. A businessman only needed to buy the cattle and ship them down a railroad in the spring; nature would fatten them for free on selfgrowing hay. Aldridge compared the Southern range in Kansas and the Indian Territory to the Northern
2 3 4 Ibid., 3 Ibid., 6 Ibid.
one in Montana in terms of cattle, not merely based on a travelers appreciation for scenery and native customs. Simply, cows calved more frequently in the south and herds survived the milder winters better- but the in the north, steers grew bigger on richer pasture, which translated to more beef on the hoof.5 More beef on the hoof meant more money, and better advertised the West as a financial opportunity to Aldridges readers back home in Great Britain. Aldridge portrayed more than just big steer and bigger profits. He wrote frankly and informatively about the ranching industrys development, its hardships, and its challenges to growth. The state and practices of the industry provided valuable context for his readers because American open-range ranching was so different from British cattle-raising on small, enclosed farms. For example, the institution of the roundup existed only in America. Twice a year, all the cattle in the unfenced public-domain land that supported grazing were herded together for branding newborn calves and shipping cattle eastward.6 Unfortunately, any number of factors- cattle thieves, Indians, or particularly harsh winters - could shrink the herds size between roundups.7 In Reginald Aldridges earliest years on the range, even simple carelessness resulted in massive losses. After riding away to dine at a nearby farmhouse, Aldridge returned to the creek where he left his herd, only to find a shocking absence of cattle.8 The herd had simply wandered away, and required days of effort to recover. For British businessmen who were used to investing their capital in physical plants like factories or railroads, herds represented an alien challenge: a capital pool that could vanish without warning. Accounts like Aldridges helped educate subsequent investors about how to cope with such deceivingly obvious challenges, which required different business plans to manage. In fact, herds mobility evolved into a critically appealing characteristic. An English owner could not dig up a Cornwall mine and move it to Manchester when the miners exhausted the coal seam. Ranchers did precisely that; Aldridge was no exception. When his cattle had grazed all the best grass, he learned how easily ranching adapted to change by driving his cash-on-the-hoof to better pastures.9 Overgrazing was only one environmental pressure that herd mobility effectively outran. Aldridge admits that his departure was hastened by a prairie fire.10 He attributes most prairie fires on the open range to human carelessness,11 including one episode when a
5 Ibid., 211 6 Lawrence M. Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West (New York: The Free Press, 1989), page 5. 7 Ibid., 69 8 Aldridge, Life on A Ranch, 43 9 Ibid., 53 10 Ibid., 53 11 Ibid., 54
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rival rancher intentionally set a swath of prairie on fire to drive Aldridges herd away from his prime grazing land.12 Fires killed cattle, but also caused stampedes, a problem utterly unknown in England. English cattle farmers, with limited space and limited land on which to raise their cattle, never experienced the mortal danger of a thousand rampaging animals. They had no idea about the tricks of the open range trade, like singing to the herd at night to prevent a stampede,13 giving Native American chiefs a few free steers to prevent raiding parties from stealing more,14 or looking out for muddy water holes in which cattle could drown.15 The cowboys who investors needed to hire for their knowledge to solve these uniquely Western problems were paid $20-$40 a month, depending on seniority, experience, and age.16 Cowboys were a more finicky breed of employee than British proletarians. Seasonal ranching work empowered cowboys to migrate all over the range living off the land when they felt their demands were not met, even keeping the herds to themselves as collateral for unpaid wages (although British litigants would eventually end this practice). For all these reasons, open range ranching was radically different from that which any potential British investor might conceive of the industry. More conventional business concerns, like accounting, also changed with the Atlantic crossing. Herd sizes were tracked in the famously inaccurate book count which noted how many calves were branded after each roundup.17 Book counts resulted from cowboys visually sizing up the steers that walked passed them bearing their employers brandand those were only the animals that they had been able to find roaming the open range after months. Usually, only about half of the herd could be found near where they had been released.18 Such practices were wildly inefficient. The book count became a major bone of contention between the on-site British managers in the West and their strict, profit-hungry boards of directors in Europe. Nevertheless, the book counts inefficiency barely disturbed the soaring profits beef companies experienced once the cattlemen discovered a way to transport meat across the Atlantic Ocean. Refrigeration technology aboard the steamers, which shipped the first large-scale commercial fresh meat cargo from the USA to England in the mid1870s,19 catalyzed the explosion in British home market demand for American beef. The high demand resulting from refrigerated shipping technology
12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 Ibid., 80 Ibid., 62 Ibid., 132 Ibid., 78 Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West, 74 Ibid., 68 Aldridge, Life on a Ranch, 65. Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West, 28
combined with the low operational costs of sustaining a herd on open range grass generated the massive profits that British investors experienced throughout the decade. Outside of shipping, English investors experimented with American20 frozen storage techniques in London, using underground tunnels along the River Thamess banks as funnels to blow across blocks of ice and meat. Indeed, Acklons refrigerating waggon [sic]21 could move four tons of meat straight from the ship to these tunnels. The wagons felt walls managed evaporation to keep the internal temperature at around forty-five degrees.22 Technological advancements in refrigeration like Acklons wagon helped importers handle the quantity of American meat arriving in port before it thawed. Refrigeration also streamlined the process of cutting costs enough to make selling American meat commercially viable. Experiments with refrigerated meat presaged the commercial revolution that followed. An Edinburgh newspaper dispatched reporter James MacDonald to research the meat industry in the American West. He was to determine whether American meat would be suitable for British consumption, and what effect, if any, American ranching would have on British beefraising. Uncovering an approaching sea of change, he published his findings in the book Food from the Far West. In that book, MacDonald refers to the late 1870s as the most important time for British agriculture since the repeal of the Corn Laws23 because refrigeration technology meant that Americans could now ship meat like they shipped their vast supplies of surplus grain. By 1878, one thousand tons of beef and mutton (both cured and frozen) arrived weekly in Great Britain,24 emerging from seven registered New York City export firms specializing in US-grown beef.25 These firms handled a massive business: each week, they shipped a combined 10,500 quarters26 of beef (each weighing two hundred pounds), a 600% increase over shipments in 1876.27 This uptick in demand manifested in unheardof profits for businessmen in London. In 1883, the British-owned Prairie Cattle Company had a 20.5% dividend, followed by a 10% dividend in 1884 and 1885;28 expected returns generally ranged from thirty to fifty percent annually.29 In 1882, a Royal Commission led by the Duke of Richmond, Lennox and Gordon revealed that capital investment in American ranching in the previous decade averaged 33% each
20 American Meat, London Times, February 20, 1877. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 James MacDonald, Food From the Far West. (Edinburgh: J. & J. Gray, 1878), Page xi. 24 Ibid., xii 25 Ibid., 4 26 Ibid., 6 27 Ibid., xii 28 Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West, 7. 29 Ibid., 3
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year.30 Aldridges account supports their results; he broke even after a year of being in business.31 He even predicted more growth because the human population of the United States was increasing faster than the population of cattle.32 The profits upheld such optimism, especially with the scale on which foreign capitalists invested. Moreton Frewen, the English founder and operator of the Powder River Cattle Company in Montana, compared his range to the size of Ireland;33 the Scottish Prairie Company controlled more than five million acres.34 American beef looked like a godsend to industrializing Britain, which direly needed a protein source to feed its industrial armies. Open range herding had inherent economies of scale with which small-scale traditional ranches could not compete. Ranchers from the United States undersold English and Scottish cowmen in their own domestic market, as price decreased due to the massive supply of frozen imports; lower prices increased consumption, creating a self-sustaining loop. In fact, American meat greatly benefited lower classes. Refrigeration technology equalized prices throughout the seasons, keeping lower winter costs year-round,35 since meat distributors could now retain inventory through the summer without concern over spoilage. This phenomenon caused so much distress that MacDonald predicted: Should the American beef importations bring down the price of British beef to the extent of 15 or 20 per centin all probability, large numbers of Scotch, English and Irish farmers, especially the former, will emigrate to America36 With respect to capital investment, MacDonalds prediction came true. As the 1870s progressed, British citizens watched Americans outcompete their own companies and decided to liquidate their holdings in the Kingdom and to re-invest that money in the West. Between 1879 and 1900, thirty-seven cattle companies with a total capitalization of $34 million were organized in London to operate abroad.37 They would be successful in feeding Britains growing working class: by 1900, 85% of the beef eaten in Britain originated in America.38 Cementing the Wests place in the global economy, British investment, which excited much more interest among the farmers of the
30 Ibid., 53 31 Aldridge, Life on a Ranch, 102. 32 Ibid., 209. 33 Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West, 3. 34 Ibid., 103 35 American Meat, London Times. 36 Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West, 4. 37 Herbert O. Brayer. The Influence of British Capital on the Western Range Cattle Industry. The Journal of Economic History 9 (1949): 85-98. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/2113049. Page 92. 38 Ibid., 93
Union than in its large cities and towns,39 linked the Wests tremendous resource base with in-depth market knowledge about the tidal wave of demand surging through nineteenth-century Britain. After the foreigners arrived, economic fortunes in the Dakotas and Montana linked up with prices in Liverpool and London. Personal relationships between ranchers and importers reassured each party and shored up business deals. Without the inroads provided by British investors, American cattle companies never would have been able to crack into the British market to the extent that they did. The men who formed these relationships were English and Scottish businessmen who play the leading role in the narrative about British investment in the American cattle industry. Their personalities, backgrounds, management styles, and corporate visions explain a great deal of their corporations subsequent successes and failures. Capitalists and managers are not, after all, faceless historical actors, but individuals with vibrantly colorful personal histories that illustrate the trials and tribulations faced by foreign investors. In the end, these personal histories partially highlight why English open range ranches normally folded, while Scottish companies thrived to the present day. The Englishmen, almost universally, issued from noble stock. Many were second sons of aristocratic families, deprived by traditions of primogeniture from a decent patrimony the family title. Aldridges account reveals the demographic base for investment emanating from Britain. Hoping to attract more money to the region and industry in which he had already blazed a path, Aldridge wrote to the upper class. Even though he was not an enormously wealthy capitalist or a nobleman, Aldridge routinely described his adventures on the range in British terms and habits, familiarizing the alien lifestyle enough so that others with more money felt comfortable trying to make a start. For example, he fears Cheyenne Indians finding him poaching on their preserves,40 describing creekside cottonwood beds with a highly constricted feudal term for private property. No one in the American West, least of all Native Americans, used terms like poaching preserves. He routinely romanticized his adventures across the range, underscoring camaraderie and danger living among cowboys. He shares a paradoxical episode when he sings from Pirates of Penzance around an open range campfire with roughshod American cowboys.41 He wrote that, A revolver is by no means a necessity nowadays, but a good many cowboys still carry them,42 playing directly into the stereotypes of the West held by noble sons. These wealthy young men had access to the money that could grow the industry. After all,
39 40 41 42 MacDonald, Food From the Far West, 9 Aldridge, Life on A Ranch, 164. Ibid., 159. Ibid., 224.
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Aldridge knew ranching needed cash; he had found that having a [business] partner without capital was an unnecessary luxury.43 The most renowned English open range ranchers fit this young, disenfranchised, second son noble persona, including the adventurous Moreton Frewen.44 He and the other young men who founded ranches in Montana and Colorado attended Eton or other high-profile schools, where they were instilled with principles of ideal British leadership. Their educations highlighted admiration for discipline, restraint, and order, as well as a mandate for personal greatness.45 Later on, this affected their business style as they strove for great accomplishments, characteristically experimenting with new business ideas. In less than ten years on the range, Frewen attempted a natural refrigeration scheme to freeze meat at the source, as well as moving his Powder River Cattle Company herd to Canada to take advantage of dutyfree exportation to Britain or to Lake Michigan for easier shipping. These noble cowboys let their roots show by investing, as Moreton Frewen did, in elaborate hunting lodges for entertainment hundreds of miles from the nearest railroad spur;46 they hoped to cultivate a noble, Eton-bred atmosphere on the prairie. Their education and high-born backgrounds also explain why these capitalists nearly always chose to organize their companies in London,47 rather than in New York or Chicago, which would have been more legally convenient. They registered in London because they saw their enterprises as quintessentially British, and being traded on the London stock exchange meant that London society would acclaim them when their companies earned large profits. In comparison, Reginald Aldridge (a commoner) failed to register his corporation legally in any venue until several years after starting his ranch- and he never mentioned anything about going to London to do so! In addition to their shared educational and social backgrounds, all the major British open range ranch owners had access to tremendous pools of capital. Aldridge recommended bringing ten to twenty thousand pounds for start-up money.48 Most investors took far, far more with them to the range. Herbert Plunkett, an Irish second son, founded his Frontier Land and Cattle Company with $1.5 million.49 The original capitalization of the British-owned Swan, Frank, & Anthony Cattle Company was $3 million.50
43 Ibid., 82. 44 Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West, 2. 45 Ibid., 32. 46 Ibid., 39. 47 Mira Wilkins, The Free-Standing Company, 18701914: An Important Type of British Foreign Direct Investment. The Economic History Review 41 (1988): 259-282. Page 279. 48 Aldridge, Life on A Ranch, 217. 49 Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West, 78. 50 Ibid., 107.
The ranchers common backgrounds helped them. Their aristocratic educations provided ranch managers with large networks of wealthy and powerful former classmates once they started businesses. Significantly, they also leveraged their status into securing Members of Parliament or Lords to run their companies. For example, the Duke of Manchester chaired the Powder River Cattle Companys board of directors. The Earls of Airlie, Aylesford, and Dunmore, among dozens of other nobles, all also put money into range cattle.51 In one well-publicized story, Oliver Wallop, a prominent Wyoming cattleman with the Big Horn Cattle Company, renounced his British citizenship to purchase land in America, only to retake that citizenship to assume a new position- as the Eighth Earl of Portsmouth.52 Well-bred leaders lent their prestige to the corporations they headed, attracting investment even beyond what their noble pockets held. The joint stock companies organized in London and Edinburgh traded on public stock markets, and everyday citizens followed the nobilitys investment choice. Once taken public, the companies ran on funds from small businessmen, pensioners, widows, and other small investors.53 This trend highlights how firmly British foreign investment placed the American range cattle industry in the global economy; it was not merely the interest of a few wealthy Scottish bankers or English nobles, but of a democratized shareholder base. English ranches shared a strict management style, run by distant boards of directors who knew little about actual range conditions. English investors largely only had prior business experience running urban industrial enterprises, where factory procedures could be timed to the second for efficiency. That management philosophy translated poorly to the prairie-fire, cattle-rustler West, where uncertainty was a fact of life. For English nobles who had never seen the Missouri River, financial losses due to screwfly plagues54 or drought looked like lazy managers planning poorly, rather than inherent business risks. Strict factory style procedures, characteristic only of English ranches, like harsh inspection visits55 and fanatical attention to documentation,56 could not work on ranches that spanned thousands of acres. The ranches sheer size and geography made any conceptions the ranch directors bore about English farms irrelevant. Smaller land parcels in England historically precluded the need for distance-management techniques, a shortfall that glared more and more obviously as time progressed. Most English companies lack of industry-specific experience in
51 Brayer, The Influence of British Capital, 92. 52 Neighbors Put Out Over Losing Cowpuncher Friend, Who Is to Become Earl, Pittsburgh Press, September 9, 1925.. 53 Brayer, The Influence of British Capital, 93. 54 Aldridge, Life on A Ranch, 191. 55 Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West, 135. 56 Ibid., 129.
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ranching compounded the problem.57 Transatlantic distance prevented boards of directors from reacting quickly to crises on their ranches, so they increased the amount of power they delegated to their agents in America. With so much control, ranch foremen and managers chafed when the boards tried to force them to follow a corporate order. Tensions frequently exploded between the foremen and London when the English corporate officers mandated strict production targets or cutting costs during severe winters. The London-based boards cannot be entirely faulted with their failings in corporate culture. Their employees, British born ranch managers like Moreton Frewen, operated in an alien business environment. The American business style relied on minimally formal arrangements, especially in the freewheeling conditions on the American range. Reginald Aldridge built his herd up to six hundred head through oral contracts and social run-ins at hotel lobbies, farmhouses, and hunting trips.58 To guide potential investors, Aldridge advised not to immediately invest,59 but rather to travel the countryside making contacts, eventually forming a partnership with an American as he had done, he [the American] supplying the experience and I [Aldridge] the capital.60 Unfortunately, Britons abroad had a terrible reputation for navet and wealth. Paul De Rosiers, a French commentator traveling the open range, visited a ranch with a disintegrating house, about which the American owner remarked, I must sell it to an EnglishmanIt is an expression in this country. When we wish to get rid of some encumbrance at a high priced [sic] we cannot count on getting it from Americans, who are too practical and too primitive in their ways of working to risk it; but a young Englishman, newly landed, is inexperienced and has money in his pocket, and will easily believe in the utility of such a thing as he is used to a complicated and advanced agriculture in Europe.61 The casual deals made by ranch managers, especially when frequently cheated by shrewd Americans, understandably frustrated professional industrialists and noblemen like the Duke of Manchester, chairing boards in London. They reacted with unrealistic mandates to preserve English business protocol. Board chairmen tried to request that ranch hands actually count every animal in a herd a practice that showed how little they understood their labor constraints, since no ranch had enough cowboys to waste days counting thousands of steer.
57 Wilkins, The Free Standing Company, 278. 58 Aldridge, Life on A Ranch, 51. 59 Ibid., 219. 60 Ibid., 31. 61 Paul de Rosiers, American Life (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1892), http://www.onread.com/reader/678076/. Page 42.
Experimentation provided one way for distant English boards to make up for their failings. Foreign owners constantly searched for new and better technology and procedures. When combined with the wide powers delegated to American-based foremen, a pro-innovation atmosphere created many new management techniques. For his Powder River Cattle Company, Moreton Frewen tried driving range cattle to Lake Superior, where they could be fed easily with Iowan or Nebraskan corn and then shipped to the ocean62 and on to the United Kingdom. Only a British-owned company could do that, since the corporation needed blue-blood credentials to circumvent Parliamentary regulations on dead meat importation. Great Britains imperial economy protected her citizens abroad, and by shipping through the Dominion of Canada, Frewen would have been able to avoid high tariffs on meat coming into Liverpool. Frewen also attempted other forms of vertical integration, including farming winter feed on his ranch to minimize losses to the cold.63 He tried using mountaintop winds to create natural refrigeration facilities for freshly slaughtered meat, so he could accumulate a stockpile and release meat to market year-round to avoid railroads gouging him on the shipping rates twice a year after roundups.64 Unfortunately, the English companies experiments frequently lost money and served little positive benefit. Nearly all English range cattle companies had one final similarity: they were organized as free-standing companies. The biggest ranches, like Frewens Powder River Cattle Co., the Big Horn Cattle Co., Prairie Cattle Co., Rocking Chair Ranch, XIT Ranch, and Frontier Land & Cattle Co., all formed in London as independent companies to conduct overseas operations, without operational links to any preexisting corporation.65 By contrast, their American contemporaries usually established overseas offices for the corporations they managed in the United States. The choice to establish free-standing companies meant that British foreign investors could coordinate a great deal of economic activity in a region abroad by serving on boards of directors for companies in multiple industries.66 They formed loose connections between each free-standing joint stock company, creating a many-armed (but legally separate) company with one branch for ranching, one for shipping, and a third to provide the other two with financial services.67 Capitalist Andrew Whitton served on the boards of three Scottish mortgage companies and two ranching companies, all operating in the American West.68
62 Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West, 79. 63 Ibid., 205. 64 Ibid., 90. 65 Wilkins, The Free Standing Company, 261. 66 Ibid., 266 67 Ibid., 269 68 W.G. Kerr, Scottish Capital on the American Credit Frontier (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1976). Page 59.
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While this method facilitated industry-specific decision making, it meant if the capitalists lacked expertise in one industry (say, open range cattle ranching), there was no financial backstop to lean against if the company took a hit. Free-standing companies fostered a high-risk, high-return strategy that involved putting all the eggs in one basket. The winter of 18861887 pulled the bottom out of all those baskets. Spurred by thirty to fifty percent annual returns, the range cattle industry over-expanded in the early 1880s, leading to widespread overgrazing on the open range by 1886, when a particularly harsh winter killed tens of thousands of cattle: the Powder River Companys herd shrank from 33,000 to 12,000 head that year;69 the surviving animals roamed the streets of Cheyenne, Wyoming looking for anything green.70 Without a home office to prop them up with profits from domestic business, most of the English companies folded and the adventurous, glory seeking boys from Eton packed up and sailed home. When the English left, the Scots stayed. In fact, not one Scottish mortgage company failed during the catastrophic 1886-1887 winter.71 From the beginning, Scots approached the western ranching question from a radically different angle than the English, one more methodical than risky, and ultimately more sustainable. For almost every problem in the range cattle industry- from ownership background to management style to business strategy- Scots created solutions that sharply contrasted English ones. In 1879, a Royal Commission investigated the American range cattle industry. Surveying their results, they found that Scottish companies actually purchased open range land, moving it out of the public domain, while English investors spent all their money on cattle and let the herds roam free.72 Scottish corporate boards based in Dundee or Edinburgh were composed not of nobles and men from Eton, but wealthy merchants and bankers from diverse backgrounds,73 who decided to mortgage ranches instead of owning them outright.74 Many Scottish corporate officers had prior experience managing pastoral companies located in Australia.75 These men, like Murdo MacKenzie, John Clay, and W.K. Bell, and their companies such as the Texas Land & Mortgage Co., Ltd and the Scottish American Investment Company, grew into giants on the open range. The Scots sharp business senses and background in pastoral industry (both lacking in the English noblemen) led to a more hands-on management style. English ranches were managed sporadically,
69 Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West, 170. 70 Ibid., 168 71 Kerr, Scottish Capital on the American Credit Frontier, 195. 72 Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West, 9. 73 Kerr, Scottish Capital on the American Credit Frontier, 64. 74 Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West, 100. 75 Kerr, Scottish Capital on the American Credit Frontier, 51.
with control alternating between a broadly empowered foreman and the harsh sanctions coming from London. The corporate directors could not envision leaving London, where their fame let them live comfortably. Scottish corporations refused to let absentee ownership stand in the way of success, and many Scots in higher management positions moved to the West.76 They saw with their own eyes, in ways the English did not, the troubling onset of overgrazing and decided to pre-empt the problem by switching their strategy.77 Scots used the capital earned with ranchings windfall profits to invest in more secure sectors in the West, which were not dependent on a severe winter or other weather issues. They invested in the land itself, using their banking know-how to provide the underdeveloped West with a valuable source of credit- and it would be hard to charge interest if the companys income stream could be disrupted by a blizzard. For example, the Gordon, Pringle, Dallas & Co. barely survived the 1886 winter and wisely reorganized as a mortgage company to prevent another close call. Gordon & Pringle survived in that incarnation until 1919.78 Scottish mortgage companies also out-maneuvered their English counterparts. Instead of eking out competitive advantage through experimental methods, Scottish companies coordinated and cooperated on handling large loans that one firm lacked the capital to handle itself. Doubtlessly, these English and Scottish strangers on the open range left indelible impressions on the Wests history and institutions. Their clearest effects were visible to the naked eye in the quality of livestock they herded and the physical development on the range. In the mid-1870s, when the first Britons arrived in America looking to invest in ranching, most steers raised issued from ancient Mexican stock descended from cattle brought with the Spanish conquistadors. Small cattle that produced tough beef, Texas steers needed improvement. Britains long and proud cattle breeding tradition provided Hereford, Angus, and shorthorn strands that foreign ranchers brought with them from the Kingdom to dilute Texas stock and produce bigger, better-tasting animals.79 In Food from the Far West, James MacDonald commented that the best step to making a profit was the procuring of really good sires.80 In fact, the XIT Ranch, a British-owned operation, became one of the biggest ranches in history due to their higher quality beef resulting from breeding hardy Texas cattle with tastier British bloodlines.81 Reginald Aldridge assumed personal responsibility for introducing the first Scotch polled bulls onto the open range in a bid to give his
76 77 78 79 80 81 Ibid., 57. Ibid., 56. Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West, 106. Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West, 120. MacDonald, Food From the Far West, 97. Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West, 120.
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ranchs cattle a leg up in the meat market.82 MacDonald, after completing his Western tour, commented that the few crosses I have seenshowed a decided improvement on the native cattle;83 if ranchers wanted to sell their cattle to British customers, the meat needed to fit British tastes. Without British investment in the American range cattle industry and the trade links to Britain that they forged, the ranges stock quality probably would not have changed. The open ranges herds would have remained almost entirely Texas longhorns, since American owners had no access to finer British stock lines. When British companies liquidated, they sold their breeding stock to competitors, including prize bulls imported from their home country, and those lines continued deep into American-owned herds, manifesting in heavier, healthier steers. British companies also led the charge in physically developing the West. The managements propensity for experimentation introduced many new technologies to the region; In 1882, Moreton Frewen installed Wyomings first telephone at his ranch house, allowing communication with the railroad two hundred miles away.84 The free-standing companys structure, which enabled corporate officers to sit on many boards of directors for corporations in disparate economic sectors, encouraged other kinds of development. The earliest British investors in America, before the ranches, put their money in railroads.85 Cattle company management (although sitting on boards of non-cattle companies) kept up that strategy by leading the pack to invest in Western railroads and electricity companies, which gave their ranches better access to Eastern markets.86 Finally, and most significantly, British concerns over preserving their well-bred stocks integrity spurred the single most important development in the American ranching history: the fencing debate. British ranches needed to prevent their Angus or Hereford lines from breeding with inferior, American-owned livestock during the winter when cattle from all ranches roamed the open range freely.87 England underwent its own Enclosure of public lands into private plots decades before, and British investors happily jumped on the trend, which transformed the West into something a little more understandable to English agricultural businessmen. Although they were certainly not the only group pressing for fencing in the open range, British investors played a crucial role in fencing in the open range, especially in Montana, where they laid the first and most extensive fences.88 Moreton Frewen never sang Dont
82 83 84 85 86 87 88 Aldridge, Life on A Ranch, 200. MacDonald, Food From the Far West, 53. Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West, 5. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 79. Brayer, The Influence of British Capital, 96. Brayer, The Influence of British Capital, 96.
Fence Me In to a sinking Powder River country sun. In the same way that the British presence on the range accelerated fencing, it also facilitated many nascent legal changes. They took advantage of the 1862 Homestead Act to stake claims on public domain land. Unfortunately, the act dictates that in order to acquire land under its provisions, the settler must be a citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed his declaration of intention to become such, as required by the naturalization laws of the United States Government.89 To put teeth into the statute, thirteen states prohibited land purchases by aliens; Congress also banned them in a separate statute.90 Of course, the litigious British exploited a loophole in the law by organizing an American corporation, purchasing the land as the legal person of that corporation, and naming their foreign company as the beneficiary.91 This practice was soon outlawed; the British turned to other fraudulent methods to procure land, including making deals with their cowboys to file claims on the land, hold it for the necessary three years and then transfer ownership to their employer.92 In the meantime, they would make the legally mandated improvements to the homestead by placing barrels of water at each of the claims corners and state that they had conveyed water to the entire property.93 Moreton Frewen thought of the twenty-five cent filing fee on a homestead claim as a cheap three-year rent, to be repaid if any government official threatened the land patents sanctity (which almost no official ever did).94 In fact, Reginald Aldridge advised his readers, in a published work, to do the same thing- encourage ones American employees to stake claims and then buy up their patents.95 Many American ranchers committed the same frauds to circumvent the legal 160-acre limit on homesteads, but not on the scale that British foremen did to get around citizenship requirements. The British presence enhanced and supported the lawless atmosphere surrounding homesteading. The courtroom witnessed the greatest changes made by British cattlemen to American law. Throughout the nineteenth century, American jurisprudence consistently favored economic progress by way of legal instrumentalist doctrine. Simply put, this doctrine meant that courts preserved property rights and sanctity of contracts in ways that frequently favored the capitalist endeavor. British litigators benefited from this inviting legal environment. One of their court cases, Underwood v. Birdsell (1886), de facto abol89 Michael D. Gambone, ed., Documents of American Diplomacy (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002). Page 87. 90 Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West, 23. 91 Ibid., 24. 92 Ibid., 22. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid., 23 95 Aldridge, Life on A Ranch, 213.
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ished herders liens in Montana, creating an illimitably pro-management shelter for ranching in that territory. Herders liens, established by the territorial legislature, enabled cowboys to essentially hold a herd hostage as collateral if they felt their wages had not been paid, and sell a portion of the herd to make up for their lost wages. At issue in Underwood was a herd of cattle bought in Texas by the Anglo-American Cattle Company, driven by a group of men to Montana under contract with the companys agent, a man named Groom. Upon arrival, the men were not paid full wages, so each man claimed a herders lien under Montana law.96 The Supreme Court of Montana territory denied standing saying that the men could not sue jointly for contracts made individually,97 but did not throw the case out on this technicality. Instead, the Court went on to resolve the underlying issue in an instrumentalist decision. The Court ruled that Groom, the agent who hired the herders, never surrendered control of the herd in the eyes of the law. As an agent of the principal (the Anglo American Cattle Company), Groom lacked the ability to create or delegate to another agent of his own volition. Legally, therefore, the suing herders and Groom were the same person.98 Additionally, the contract at issue never mentioned keeping the cattle, which was legally required under Montana law (the contract had been written in Texas) to generate a right to a herders lien.99 In the Courts own words, the confidential relation of principal and agent cannot be handed around and sold and transferred by the agent to any other person.100 Underwood v. Birdsell is an important case because cattle herds did come from Montana; all the herds had been started with Texas stock and driven north. American legal instrumentalism endorsed the principal-agent distinction for determining liability and mandated that as autonomous actors, parties to a contract had equal power to delineate that contracts terms. This meant that because the herders knew they were going to be driving cattle to Montana, they should have included a contractual clause for keeping the cattle, thus permitting them to generate a lien. Even if they had, the courts ruling on the principal-agent relationship still benefited corporations, because the officers of a corporation almost never would be present to make contracts for herding and thus generate an agency in the herders. Plainly, corporate officers did business hundreds of miles away, in New York- or London. Underwood v. Birdsell therefore effectively did away with herders liens in Montana, guaranteeing that all cattle driven into the territory would remain under corporate ownership. The
96 Underwood v. Birdsell, 6 Mont. 142, 9 P. 922, 1886 Mont. LEXIS 38 (Mont. 1886). Page 143. 97 Ibid. ,144. 98 Ibid., 145. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid., 146.
opinion created a pro-business haven where ranchers felt secure in the property rights to their cattle. The case would not have emerged had it not been for the Anglo-American Cattle Company and its British owners, educated in a culture fanatical about documentation that provided the clearly worded contract with the keeping of cattle clause omitted. Finally, aside from changes to the ranges physical and legal landscape, British investors also deeply altered its corporate landscape. They provided credit and capital to a region starved of both, and accelerated trends toward consolidation. Scottish credit infused from abroad facilitated Western development in an absolutely critical way.101 Scottish mortgage companies, with large international financial resources, eased the difficulties of starting businesses on the frontier. They provided entrepreneurs with an opportunity for a long range financial plan. Prior to Scottish credit, businesses had to hope they could grow fast enough to sustain business operations across the rampant boom and bust cycles that plagued the West thanks to natural factors. Similarly, the English injected capital into the underdeveloped region, even though they only owned the herds.102 All told, British ranchers put approximately $45 million into their Western enterprises.103 In fact, they brought so many pounds sterling into the region that it locally inflated prices, making business profits look better than they actually were.104 Even when British firms folded, disappointing their shareholders, liquidation still resulted in a net capital gain for Americans who purchased the corporations assets. British firms helped accelerate consolidation on the open range. Aldridge commented that the general tendency of the cattle business in the United States is to fall more and more into the hands of large corporations and a few wealthy individuals,105 while MacDonald plainly stated, Monopolies are the order of the day in America.106 Upon their arrival in America, English agents had great power due to the distance from their superiors in London. They had a lot of capital at their disposal and were free to invest it by experimenting (as Frewen did) or moving operations north (as did Aldridge and Groom, the foreman in Underwood.) This power accelerated ranch consolidation, since their higher control over more capital let them buy up smaller, competing ranches, especially on the informal basis Aldridge recounts in his memoir. Following the 1886 winter, larger American ranches swallowed failing English firms; these lucky Americans capitalized on hard work performed by Moreton Frewen, Horace Plunkett, and others by
101 Kerr, Scottish Capital on the American Credit Frontier, 196. 102 Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West, 8. 103 Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West, 189. 104 Ibid., 87. 105 Aldridge, Life on A Ranch, 215. 106 MacDonald, Food From the Far West, 44.
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incorporating better livestock and large land claims into their own companies. British cattle companies failure en masse spurred a feeding frenzy that ended with only the largest, most competitive American firms remaining in business. British investors in the United States range cattle industry did more than commit a few frauds and breed fancy cows. They helped start the movement to enclose the range, to protect businesses in Montana and across the Great Plains through instrumentalist jurisprudence, and grew the Western economy with Scottish credit as fertilizer. The tale of British investors in the American West is historically relevant because they transformed a national backwater into a global colossus of meat production. The beef they raised fed Britains industrial workforce, and the assets they left behind gave the West a head start on joining the rest of America in a progressive, economically integrated, industrialized twentieth century.
referenceS
Articles 1. Herbert O. Brayer. The Influence of British Capital on the Western Range Cattle Industry. The Journal of Economic History 9 (1949): 85-98. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/2113049. 2. Mira Wilkins, The Free-Standing Company, 1870-1914: An Important Type of British Foreign Direct Investment. The Economic History Review 41 (1988): 259-282. Books 3. Reginald Aldridge, Life on a Ranch (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1884). 4. Michael D. Gambone, ed., Documents of American Diplomacy (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002). 5. W.G. Kerr, Scottish Capital on the American Credit Frontier (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1976). 6. James MacDonald, Food From the Far West. (Edinburgh: J. & J. Gray, 1878). 7. Paul de Rosiers, American Life (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1892), http://www.onread.com/reader/678076/. 8. Lawrence M. Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West (New York: The Free Press, 1989). Legal Opinions: Underwood v. Birdsell, 6 Mont. 142, 9 P. 922, 1886 Mont. LEXIS 38 (Mont. 1886). Newspaper Articles: 9. American Meat, London Times, February 20, 1877. 10. Neighbors Put Out Over Losing Cowpuncher Friend, Who Is to Become Earl, Pittsburgh Press, September 9, 1925.
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a no-nonsEnsE guidE to gEtting involvEd in rEsEarch

What boggles your mind and stimulates you to question and explore? What could you spend hours pondering and prodding the complexities of? Finding out what you are passionate about and what area of research you would enjoy pursuing is the first step to a successful research experience. Here are some tips on how to find your true calling: Attend Poster sessions and Conferences: This is a great way to sample a diverse set of research projects being conducted in your potential field of interest. Plus, you will have the opportunity to meet one-on-one with researchers and discuss common areas of interest to further explore. Attend Department seminars: Most departments organize periodic seminars or a lecture series, open to all students, where you can hear and learn more about the research that faculty and graduate students are currently pursuing. Communicate your Interests to Professors: Did you find a certain lecture particularly interesting? Go ask your professor more about the topic and share your enthusiasm with him/her. Professors will often be able to guide you to the right people who can help further develop your passion and provide research opportunities in that area. Network and Inquire: Whether it is faculty advisors, fellow student researchers, graduate students, or members of the Center for Undergraduate Excellence, do not be afraid to seek out answers to your questions and get advice from those with experience.
fInd your paSSIon
With so many scholars to choose from, it may seem like a daunting task to sift through them all and find the ones of greatest interest to you. While this is a necessary task for finding the right fit, here are some things to remember during this stage: Visit the Department Homepage: Every department website has a link to faculty research, where you can find brief summaries of the current research and questions being asked. Email Faculty Members of Interest: Make a list of at least 3 professors you would be interested in working with and send them an email introducing yourself and requesting to setup a time to meet with them in person. Often, professors are very busy and may not respond to your email, but dont let that deter you. Be polite and persistent, follow up on your emails, and even try calling the professor or showing up at his/her office. Additionally, remember that you need not have prior research experience in order to get involved everyone starts somewhere. Shadow Researchers: If possible, shadow another student researcher. Ask to watch experiments in progress (if applicable) and attend group meetings so that you can get a better feel for the research environment. For those in the sciences, shadowing in a lab may be anywhere from a few hours to multiple lab visits, depending on your level of interest. Not all experiences of this nature are equally rewarding, so sample a few labs until you find what works.
cHooSe an adVISor
Now its time to meet with the faculty advisor and perhaps even begin discussing a potential project. How do you prepare for this meeting? Here are some tips that are sure to help: Read the Professors Published Papers: Reading through at least a few of the professors recent publications will help familiarize you with some of the technical vocabulary and concepts you may hear about during the meeting. Prepare Questions: Having a set of questions in mind will help keep the conversation running smoothly. You may inquire about the nature of equipment to be used, prior knowledge and skills needed, recommended courses, flexibility in work hours, or expected time commitment. Aim high: Express your eagerness to learn. Inquire about your exact role and level of involvement. Could you get co-authorship on a publication resulting from your contribution? Either way, Professors will be delighted by your motivations and professionalism. Lastly, it is never too late to get involved in undergraduate research, but the rewards are often larger for those who begin early!
do your Homework
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suBMission guidElinEs for thE oculus

The Oculus publishes exceptional research papers from all disciplines including, but not limited to, the humanities, sciences, and engineering fields. Papers are eligible for submission if the research was conducted and written while the author was enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia. Alumni may submit work within one year of graduation.
elIgIbIlIty
Submissions must be in English, typed, double-spaced, titled, have page numbers, and include an abstract of 300 words or less. All identifying information (name, class, professor) should be removed from the document prior to submission. Papers commonly range between 7 and 30 pages double-spaced; there is no required length, however, we request authors to abridge an especially lengthy paper. The Oculus is committed to upholding the UVa honor code and expects all submissions to cite sources when appropriate. Contributors are asked to use citation standards common to their field.
format
Submissions should be sent as an e-mail attachment to oculus@virginia.edu. The subject line should read (your name) Oculus Submission. In the text of the e-mail please provide: Your name, year, and major Paper title and, if applicable, class written for When and where research was conducted Name of faculty advisor(s) and coauthor(s) (if applicable) In such cases, coauthor(s) and/or faculty advisor(s) must send a statement of publication consent to oculus@virginia.edu Name the attached paper file (Paper title).doc. All supporting media (images, charts, tables, figures) must be supplied in either .png or .tif file format. Name files (Paper title)1.png, (Paper title)2.tif, etc., in the order in which they appear in the paper. Multiple paper submissions are accepted, although only one submission per author can be published in each issue.
SubmISSIon
The Oculus does not accept previously published papers. The selected contributors, however, retain all copyright to their work and thus, may submit their paper for publication elsewhere after being published in The Oculus.
copyrIgHt and double publIcatIon
For submissions that include images or other media from external sources, it is the authors obligation to determine and satisfy copyright or other use restrictions.
Image rIgHtS
The editorial board evaluates the novelty, quality, and significance of submitted research papers. The paper must contain original research and make a reasonable contribution to the body of scholarly work in the field. Additionally, the paper must be written in a lucid, professional style and is expected to be accessible for all university educated students, whether or not they are familiar with the papers field. The Oculus is typically open for submissions during the first 3 weeks of the semester. Submissions are then read anonymously and discussed by multiple editors over the course of 8 - 10 weeks. Authors are notified via e-mail around 10 weeks after submission. Please see our website for more details at http://www.UVaURN.com
SelectIon proceSS
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tHe center for undergraduate excellence

The Center for Undergraduate Excellence advises students regarding undergraduate research opportunities and national scholarships and fellowships. Students are encouraged to visit the Center throughout their undergraduate careers. For more information about the Center, please visit its website at www.virginia.edu/cue or its office at 305 Harrison Institute/Small Special Collections Library.
tHe undergraduate reSearcH network

The Undergraduate Research Network (URN) was formed in 2001 to foster an undergraduate research community at the University of Virginia. URN encourages students to initiate research projects and also offers guidance and mentorship to those interested in research. To achieve this goal, URN presents information about current research opportunities and publicizes funding availabilities and research-related events. Each semester, URN puts on a series of workshops on topics ranging from finding funding for research to giving an effective research presentation, as well as an undergraduate research symposium where students who have completed significant research projects can present their findings. If you are interested in learning more about URN or becoming a part of the organization, please visit www.virginia.edu/cue/urn.
The Oculus is online! Visit http://www.virginia.edu/cue/urn/oculus.html to read the online version of the journal and learn more about The Oculus.
The Oculus
voluME 10, issuE 2

The Oculus: Fall 2011

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Editors Note

Jessleen Kanwal Co-Editor-in-Chief

Thomas C. Skalak Vice President for Research

Volume 10, Issue 2

Jessleen Kanwal and David Wu

Sarah Smith, Grace Segars, Jason Ya

Photographer and Cover Designer

around thE univErsity: ProfEssors and thEir studEnts

Fall 2011: Volume 10, Issue 2

The Oculus: The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research

Fall 2011: Volume 10, Issue 2

MathEMatical ModEling of Building-WidE hvac systEMs

The Oculus: The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research

II. Sutardja daI Hall teStbed

Fall 2011: Volume 10, Issue 2

III. cHaracterIStIcS of VaV SyStem

Figure 3. A Variable Air Volume (VAV) unit with reheat capabilities.

The Oculus: The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research

Fall 2011: Volume 10, Issue 2

The Oculus: The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research

Fall 2011: Volume 10, Issue 2

The Oculus: The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research

Fall 2011: Volume 10, Issue 2

The Oculus: The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research

current ISSueS wItHIn tHe V&tc communIty

Fall 2011: Volume 10, Issue 2

The Oculus: The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research

StrategIzIng future relatIonSHIpS among V&tcS

Fall 2011: Volume 10, Issue 2

The Oculus: The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research

table 1: Ability of Alternatives to Address V&tCs Challenges.

Fall 2011: Volume 10, Issue 2

The Oculus: The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research

recommendatIonS and concluSIon

Fall 2011: Volume 10, Issue 2

The Oculus: The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research

Fall 2011: Volume 10, Issue 2

The Oculus: The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research

II. lIterature reVIew

III. tHe campaIgn

Fall 2011: Volume 10, Issue 2

The Oculus: The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research

IV. SurVey and deScrIptIVe reSultS

Fall 2011: Volume 10, Issue 2

table 1. Average Giving Rates Comparison (three groups, three periods)

V. metHodology and regreSSIon model

The Oculus: The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research

VI. reSultS and dIScuSSIon

Fall 2011: Volume 10, Issue 2

The Oculus: The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research

Fall 2011: Volume 10, Issue 2

The Oculus: The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research

Fall 2011: Volume 10, Issue 2

The Oculus: The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research

Fall 2011: Volume 10, Issue 2

The Oculus: The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research

British invEstMEnt in thE unitEd statEs cattlE industry, 1870-1890

BrEd froM noBlEr stock

Fall 2011: Volume 10, Issue 2

The Oculus: The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research

Fall 2011: Volume 10, Issue 2

The Oculus: The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research

Fall 2011: Volume 10, Issue 2

The Oculus: The Virginia Journal of Undergraduate Research