Focus on Issues With Global Impact Pays Off for U.S. Unicef Fund

The United States Fund for Unicef has a long tradition of raising money to help some of the world’s poorest

children. But the 55-year-old organization continues to learn new ways to most effectively pitch that mission to donors.

While the organization’s fund-raising appeals from 1993 to 2000 emphasized the individual situations in a handful of countries — the Dominican Republic, Ghana, and Mozambique among them — the New York group switched to an approach centered on five problems confronting children in poor places, such as malnutrition and the lack of education provided to girls, and the change seems to be paying off.

The United States Fund for Unicef posted a 26.1-percent increase in donations in its fiscal year ending June 30, 2001, raising $190.1-million and placing it at No. 51 on the Philanthropy 400 list of charities that raise the most from private sources. Last year’s donations equal more than three times what the group brought in just five years earlier. And in the 2002 fiscal year, despite the weak economy, the group’s unaudited figures show an 11-percent increase, to $211-million — more than it has previously raised.

“Our challenge is to bring the idea of helping the poorest kids on the planet home into the living rooms or the schools or religious places of Americans, and for most people that idea is kind of an abstraction,” says Charles J. Lyons, the charity’s president. “What’s most compelling to people is to have a sense of the global impact.”

Diane M. Whitty, senior vice president for marketing and development at the fund, says the group is continually trying to strengthen its appeal in the face of stiff competition from other groups that work internationally. “You really have to focus in on your core strengths,” she says. Apparently, the group is successfully differentiating itself from others in its category: Ranked No. 12 and 14 among international groups in the Philanthropy 400 lists published by The Chronicle in 1997 and 1998, the group now places fifth among 38 organizations.

After leaving Save the Children in 1997 to come to the Unicef fund, Ms. Whitty joined Mr. Lyons in a concerted effort to study the public’s perception of the organization and to develop ways to step up awareness.

Switching Approach

While staff members at the fund do some work in the United States to promote government support for children’s programs and to educate American youngsters about the needs of their peers around the world, the group’s biggest priority is raising money and seeking donations of medicine and other products for the United Nations Children’s Fund. That organization was founded after World War II to help children in Europe and was then called the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund. Unicef, by which the group is still known, today provides clean water, education, health care, and nutrition to children in Africa, Asia, central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Government support makes up two-thirds of Unicef’s budget, while one-third comes from the 37 groups around the world that raise private money in its behalf. The United States Fund for Unicef provides more than any of the others when cash and product donations — largely from pharmaceutical companies — are combined.

The United States Fund’s mission has always been to support Unicef, and over the years it has tried a number of ways to attract contributions. Its focus on improving conditions in a number of individual countries was an effort to pool its resources for maximum effectiveness, says Mr. Lyons, and to be able to tell potential donors a positive story about all that was being accomplished with money from the United States.

But after months of study by Mr. Lyons, Ms. Whitty, and others, the fund built a new framework for the organization based on five central themes — girls’ education; HIV and AIDS; immunization; malnutrition; and emergencies, generally caused by political strife or natural disasters.

That new focus meant directing all of the group’s business units responsible for raising money — from corporations and foundations, and via the Internet, for example — to develop new strategies. And it involved designing a bevy of new promotional materials, including brochures describing the themes, direct mail touting them, and even greeting cards whose backs contained messages about them.

A Broader Campaign

The fund’s campaign to eliminate maternal and neonatal tetanus by 2005, part of its focus on immunization, has been particularly successful, attracting the group’s biggest grant ever — $26-million over three years from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — and its biggest corporate gift, more than $15-million in cash and supplies from Becton, Dickinson and Company, the medical-technology powerhouse.

Tetanus, which is often spread through soil, cutting implements, and the hands of midwives, claimed the lives of approximately 200,000 infants and 30,000 women in 2001, according to Unicef. But the disease is easily preventable: Three rounds of vaccine, which together cost slightly more than $1, is all it takes.

“We were able to pull this story line together to say, ‘Look at this: There are 100 million women who need to be immunized; it will cost $100-million to do so; it can be done over five years,’” says Mr. Lyons. “It’s just remarkable the response we have gotten to that.” The campaign, started in 2000, has already raised $67-million. The topic of immunization isn’t necessarily a big draw, says Mr. Lyons, but when potential donors were told about the results that even a small gift can make, it became compelling.

Gary M. Cohen, president of BD Medical Systems, a division of Becton, Dickinson, believes the broader approach is the most effective way to tackle problems in developing nations.

“You don’t plan your business strategies country by country,” says Mr. Cohen. “You plan them globally and then you implement them on a country-by-country basis. It avoids a lot of fragmentation.”

The immunization theme shows up in the group’s most well-known fund-raising program, Trick-or-Treat for Unicef. The orange boxes that children will bring door-to-door on Halloween this year bear a simple message: “$1 immunizes a child from polio for life.”

The message appealed to the McDonald’s Corporation, which for the first time is distributing the boxes in its restaurants. Typically, five to six million boxes get distributed by schools, community organizations, and other groups, and the program brings in close to $4-million. With McDonald’s alone handing out as many as 20 million boxes to children, proceeds from trick-or-treat could double this year, says Ms. Whitty.

Adults are also responding to the issues presented by the group, and are making more big donations than they did when the United States fund emphasized the problems in individual countries, according to Ms. Whitty. That is partially because Ms. Whitty has several new staff members who can spend time going after wealthy people, but it also reflects the popularity of the five themes.

Marian J. Arens, the owner of a real-estate company in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has given approximately $200,000 to the fund over the last 10 years, and has been increasing the size of her gifts as she becomes more involved in the group’s HIV and AIDS work.

In February she traveled with the organization to Botswana, to see firsthand what Unicef was doing to prevent the disease. Her desire to provide financial assistance was only strengthened by her sense that Unicef’s work could make a big difference around the world, she says.

“I can see,” she says, reflecting on her trip, “that something can be done at this point to prevent this terrible epidemic.”

Ms. Whitty says that focusing on some of the biggest problems in poor countries allows the organization to make appeals to donors about broad topics that are important to them and to show them that Unicef’s work has a significant impact on those issues.

“Americans take a great deal of pride in accomplishing things,” she says. “That’s why they respond so well to this.”