DURHAM, N.H. — The William Rosenberg Family Foundation, which honors the founder of Dunkin' Donuts, has given a $40,000 grant to the University of New Hampshire Rosenberg International Center of Franchising.
The gift was made by Ann Rosenberg, the widow of William Rosenberg. The Rosenberg International Center of Franchising was created according to the vision of the franchising pioneer and founder of Dunkin' Donuts.
The grant will support the center's research in the area of risk and opportunity assessment in international franchising for U.S.-based franchisors. The Rosenberg Center undertook this research in response to business leaders engaged in franchising who identified it as a topic of key concern in their ability to formulate international expansion strategies.
The grant also will support the center's franchise financial database, which is now recognized as the most comprehensive database of its kind in the world. The database is the foundation for much of the center's research and for the Franchise 50 Index, a quarterly index that tracks a representative set of 50 publicly traded U.S. companies engaged in business-format franchising.
Finally, the funding will support the center's online franchise bibliography and database, which is the first of its kind in the world, and the William Rosenberg Collection, an archive that contains clippings, correspondence, photographs, documents, ephemera and various Dunkin' Donuts publications such as their annual reports ranging from the 1940s to 2002. The highlight of the collection is the original 1960 bylaws for the International Franchise Association, which includes Rosenberg's handwritten notes in the margins.
