Red Cross Shores Up Its Caribbean Operations With U.S. Fund Raisers

By NICOLE LEWIS

A few years ago, Luke Greeves, a fund raiser at the American Red Cross’s Washington headquarters, got an offer he couldn’t refuse: a two-year post in the Caribbean.

Mr. Greeves moved to Kingston, Jamaica, and later Santo Domingo, in the Dominican

Republic. He returned to Washington a year ago and another American took his place, stationed in Grenada.

The post Mr. Greeves filled was part of a new program to aid 24 Red Cross Societies in the Caribbean. After two devastating hurricane seasons in a row, Mr. Greeves was sent to the islands in January 1997 to help the local Red Crosses strengthen their efforts to raise local funds to deal with disasters. The program recently expanded to the South Pacific, where destructive tidal waves are common.

As in the Caribbean, Red Crosses in the South Pacific rely heavily on foreign donations to cope with natural disasters and other emergencies. The Red Cross has long shuffled personnel among countries so experts can provide training in refugee operations and other relief efforts, but it has only recently started doing the same to support fund raising.

Maurice Levite, vice president for development at the American Red Cross, says that although Mr. Greeves’s assignment was a cooperation between the American Red Cross and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, sending an American delegate to the region was a natural choice.

“America has the strongest and most sophisticated Red Cross,” he says. “Fund raising is one of the areas where we are head and shoulders above any society.”

Mr. Greeves, who possesses an M.B.A. in international marketing, functioned as a jack-of-all-trades: raising money, developing corporate alliances, and recruiting volunteers, as well as running marketing and public-relations efforts. Instead of learning to scuba dive or dance merengue, he hopped from one island to the next, watching how decisions were made and offering suggestions.

Mr. Greeves, 31, quickly discovered that some successful strategies in the United States, such as direct mail, don’t export well to the Caribbean because most people there use cash instead of credit cards or checks. And the Red Cross’s basic approach of raising small amounts of money from many individuals was not feasible because earnings in the region can be very low. Average annual income in Jamaica, for example, is $2,200.

Even approaching those who could afford to give raises potential problems on some of the small islands. Volunteers were reluctant to ask for gifts on behalf of the Red Cross because “everyone knows each other,” says Mr. Greeves. “You felt you owed them personally if they gave to the organization.”

Before Mr. Greeves arrived, the main sources of income were membership dues paid by people who mainly just wanted to take a free first-aid course, and special fund-raising events such as barbecues. But the events produced too little revenue to justify the efforts of the already overburdened staff members.

Mr. Greeves tried to steer the Caribbean chapters away from their diet of special events and toward developing fee-for-service programs, such as offering first-aid classes for hotel employees. In Grenada, the society’s new health and safety program, through which employers can hire the Red Cross to train employees in how to avoid workplace hazards, is expected to increase the society’s revenue this year by 400 percent over what was raised in 1998.

Because Mr. Greeves found overfishing for corporate donations to be a problem in the Caribbean — the Red Cross competes with the Salvation Army and the Boy and Girl Scouts, among others — the Red Cross turned to forming long-term strategic alliances with corporations.

Instead of just cash, such partnerships provide the Red Cross with visibility through free marketing, such as a company-sponsored “Red Cross hurricane tip of the day” on the radio. In turn, the corporation gets to polish its image by being associated with the Red Cross name.

“Most people know the Red Cross name but very few know what it does,” explains Mr. Greeves.

Royal & SunAlliance, a United Kingdom insurance company, approached the Federation in Geneva about a global strategic alliance. It decided to pilot the program in the Caribbean in part because Mr. Greeves and the local Red Cross country managers helped market the societies not as individual entities representing small islands but as one group that served 33 million people. The company has branches on several of the islands.

The sunny island weather wasn’t always in synchrony with his outlook, as Mr. Greeves cites frustration over many things, including the region’s slow pace.

“You can’t expect changes overnight,” he says he learned. “We are fighting organizations that don’t have an understanding of philanthropy and a culture that isn’t familiar with it, with the sole exception of churches.”

He says he advised his successor to “identify quick hits, small achievements and successes. They provide motivation to the society and credibility to you.”

Long-range planning has also proved challenging. While the Caribbean Red Cross societies often pooled resources in the aftermath of a disaster, no general emergency fund existed. Mr. Greeves tried to start one with a goal of $10-million, but no corporation wanted to be the first donor.

He attributed their reluctance to the introduction of a “relatively unknown concept” and to general skepticism about what the money would be used for, if not for an immediate need.

The disaster fund was scaled back into a much less ambitious annual fund, which amounted to $10,000 when he left last August. The money was raised mostly through regional fee-for-service programs.

Although he regrets that he didn’t take enough recreational advantage of his tropical locale, Mr. Greeves, who is now manager for institutional development at the Red Cross’s national headquarters, felt he received an unusual opportunity “to learn about the diverse cultures of the Caribbean not as a tourist, but directly from the people,” he says.

The only drawback of his sojourn, he says, is relearning how to drive on the right side of the road — a skill that, according to his friends, still needs some work.