Presidential Debate: Impact and Cost

The New York Times has a story about the impact hosting a Presidential debate can have:

Greg Pillon, the marketing and communications director for Belmont, said the publicity value of staging the debate was estimated as of Tuesday to be $21.6 million, according to the company it hired to track mentions of Belmont in the news media, News Power Online. There were 3,920 television mentions since the end of September, he said, and the university’s web site traffic had intensified.

The cost?

...the university still needed to solicit more donations to cover the roughly $3 million it spent on the event.

"We’re not quite there, but we will be," Robert Fisher, Belmont University’s president, said in an ebullient telephone interview this morning. "It’s the easiest money I’ve ever had to raise."