Hong Kong Philanthropy ‘Makes Fund Raising in the U.S. Look Boring’

By NICOLE LEWIS

Terry Alan Farris never dreamed his development career would take him to Hong Kong,

where he now raises money for the Hong Kong Adventist Hospital, one of 250 Seventh-Day Adventist Church health organizations worldwide that offer western medical care.

He cut his teeth working on special events at his alma mater, Pacific Union College, where he also snagged an award given to promising young fund raisers. He then moved back to his native Hawaii to become the director of development at the College of Health Sciences at the University of Hawaii.

Soon after he turned 30, he was recruited by an acquaintance for the top job in Hong Kong, where he now finds his advice and skills constantly in demand. Maybe that’s because since his arrival two and a half years ago, annual fund raising for the hospital has shot up from $260,000 to a projected $2.6 million or so this year. He hopes to triple that number in the next few years.

“Fund raising is dynamic here,” he says. “It makes fund raising in the U. S. look boring.”

That’s partly because in Hong Kong well-to-do people get far fewer requests for donations than their peers in America. Because there is so little competition for donations, says Mr. Farris, people are especially responsive to the hospital’s solicitations. For example, a direct-mail appeal from the hospital brought in five donations of more than $6,000.

When Mr. Farris arrived, his first order of business was to start a non-profit arm of the hospital, the Hong Kong Adventist Hospital Foundation, of which he became executive director. The foundation, which has a board of advisors separate from the hospital’s, raises money for the hospital’s community-outreach projects. Each Hong Kong board member commits to giving a minimum of $100,000.

Mr. Farris’s success has brought requests for advice from other Hong Kong fund raisers. So he started an informal roundtable that meets every other month to discuss strategies and ideas. His No. 1 piece of advice: Start a good database to keep track of donors and potential contributors — something he says few of the organizations seem to have.

Mr. Farris has been working on the hospital’s database as well. After discovering that 70 percent of annual gifts come from individuals who make relatively small donations and 30 percent come from people who contribute large sums, he started an aggressive direct-mail campaign for the hospital’s Children’s Heart Fund. He sent out 300,000 letters and raised $361,000 this year from about 5,000 new donors.

The hospital has also persuaded a local bank to tuck a solicitation letter in with the monthly credit-card bills it sends. Since many charities do the same thing — he competes with organizations such as Project Hope and UNICEF — the return was much less than from its own mailing, but still significant for an organization trying to build its pool of regular donors: 1,500 new donors responded to the 1.2 million letters sent and the hospital raised about $72,000. Twenty-eight percent of those donors responded again to a later appeal.

Major-gifts solicitation has proven more of a challenge, if only because many potential donors are out of town for as much as three weeks a month on business. But that is not the only obstacle.

“It’s not easy to walk in the door and be successful. You need connections,” says Mr. Farris, who says he found relationships and contacts to be even more important in Hong Kong than in the United States. To even be able to begin to build a relationship with a donor, he says, he needs to get help from other people whose age, job title and reputation will be impressive.

Still, donors like to be associated with successful projects, so Mr. Farris tells them about the new medical pavilion the hospital hopes to build. A capital campaign to raise $25-million to $30-million is part of the plan, as soon as the hospital has a pool of at least 10,000 regular donors (including foundations and corporations as well as individuals). Mr. Farris hopes to obtain that number of donors later this year.

The hospital’s main competition for dollars, he says, are projects elsewhere in China.

“More organizations and individuals are interested more in giving back to China now that we are one,” he says.

Despite the hospital’s swift fund-raising progress, starting up the Hong Kong Adventist Hospital Foundation was slow going because of a resistance to unfamiliar ideas.

The hospital’s major-gifts program had lapsed before Mr. Farris came on board, and donations were not being solicited in any strategic manner. Mr. Farris had to educate the hospital’s board, which mainly deals with administrative and church matters, about the importance of fund raising.

“Most people don’t understand the process of fund raising,” says Mr. Farris. “It took a full year for the administration to buy into the plan.” Now they do understand: Mr. Farris will soon be able to hire some additional staff members for the development office, which he has been running pretty much by himself. He will need the help, because in the next few months he will assume the additional responsibility of raising money to support Tseun Wan Adventist Hospital, also in Hong Kong.

But first: a quick breather. Mr. Farris and his family are returning to the United States this summer for two months. He has no immediate intention of coming back for good, however. “I love working here more than the States and dealing with different cultures,” he says.