A Cure for an Ailing Charity

Leprosy group wins a top honor for reviving its financial health

Christopher J. Doyle knew American Leprosy Missions was in trouble when he

was hired six years ago to turn around the nearly century-old Christian charity.

Annual contributions had plummeted 61 percent over the previous decade to $3.3-million, the number of donors had shrunk by a third, and diseases like AIDS and cancer were capturing far more donor attention than an affliction whose recorded history dates back to biblical times.

“We had to stem the hemorrhaging,” says Mr. Doyle, who is chief executive officer of the Greenville, S.C., organization, which was founded in 1906.

With the help of a top fund-raising executive whom Mr. Doyle recruited, a new development staff they built together, and fund-raising appeals by Art Linkletter, a television personality who is popular with the charity’s core group of religiously conservative, older donors, American Leprosy Missions stopped the bleeding — and healed itself. Since 1994, it has almost doubled its private donations to nearly $6-million, and last year it added 8,000 new donors.

Winning Top Honors

The charity’s Lazarus-like recovery helped the organization win a 2001 Award for Excellence in Fund Raising from the Association of Fundraising Professionals, the highest honor bestowed by the association, formerly known as the National Society of Fund Raising Executives. Also receiving an award was the Hebrew Home of Greater Washington, a nursing and rehabilitation center in Rockville, Md., that was cited for helping its development-staff members and volunteers become more efficient in recruiting donors to attend special fund-raising events.

What makes American Leprosy’s award so compelling is that it recognizes the tough work of nursing a troubled charity back to health.

“They had the wisdom and the courage to say: ‘We are going in the wrong direction. What do we have to do to change?’” says Lane Brooks, a fund raiser at Public Citizen, a Washington charity, and chairman of the awards committee. “You’d be surprised at how few organizations are able to do that when they are headed in the wrong direction.”

American Leprosy’s decline and recovery offer powerful lessons on the importance of staying focused on such fund-raising fundamentals as marketing, donor retention, and the pursuit of major gifts.

The organization’s fund raising began slipping in the late 1980’s, and the situation worsened in 1990 when the charity’s prior administration moved its office from New Jersey to South Carolina, partly to cut costs. Twenty of American Leprosy’s 30 staff members declined to move, costing American Leprosy much of its institutional memory and fund-raising expertise.

Other decisions compounded the charity’s woes. Mr. Doyle says his predecessor sought to redefine the group’s focus to include people not just with leprosy but with any kind of disability. The result, he says: “Our board was confused, our staff was confused, and our donors were confused.”

In addition, instead of pouring more effort into fund raising for overseas programs to help cure patients, American Leprosy organized two international medical conferences in the early 1990’s that Mr. Doyle says sapped valuable resources but did little to directly benefit leprosy patients. The conferences, he says, “disrupted the staff and took a lot of energy away from fund raising.”

Perhaps most damaging of all, American Leprosy failed to work at building its relationships with new and existing donors, Mr. Doyle says. While the charity acquired thousands of contributors through direct mail and television appeals, he says, it didn’t do a good job of retaining them.

The result: By 1994, the group was raising only 47 cents for every dollar it spent to acquire new donors, the number of donors had declined to 22,500 from 35,000 in 1991, and the charity was scrambling to regain its footing.

“Every other month, people were changing job titles and job descriptions and frantically trying to get the numbers going in the right direction,” he says. “In a desperate attempt to try and turn things around, there were a lot of attempts to change things, but with no comprehensive or long-range view in mind.”

Traditional Message

Arriving on the scene in 1995, Mr. Doyle, a former bank trust officer and director of a family-services charity in South Carolina, set about trying to steer American Leprosy back on course.

His first move was to refocus the charity on its traditional mission: finding and treating leprosy patients, training doctors, running education programs, and helping patients with permanent disabilities learn a trade and receive health care. He put special emphasis on helping children with leprosy.

The charity has no shortage of demand for its services. In 1999, more than 1 of every 10,000 people, or 740,000 worldwide, were diagnosed with leprosy, according to the World Health Organization. The disease, which is contracted through frequent casual contact with someone carrying the bacteria, is not fatal, but it can cause blindness and other deformities if left untreated. Leprosy can be cured in six to 18 months with medicine. It costs the charity about $240 to find and cure each patient.

‘Not on the Front Page’

Despite its prevalence in poor nations such as India and Ethiopia, leprosy gets little attention these days, making it a challenge for groups like American Leprosy to find new donors.

“It is not on the front page of the paper every day, it’s not even on the tenth page,” Mr. Doyle says of the disease. “It’s out of sight, out of mind. Our whole thing is to build share of mind, which will equal share of pocketbook over time.”

After clarifying the charity’s mission, Mr. Doyle set out to do just that. He and the charity’s fund raisers directed their full attention to acquiring more donors and increasing current gifts.

The first step was to improve American Leprosy’s direct-mail campaign.

In 1994, Mr. Doyle hired the Domain Group, in Seattle, to spark up the charity’s text-heavy direct-mail pieces and its newsletter and to save on postal and printing costs by making sure each donor did not receive every one of the group’s 15 annual mailings. Since then, American Leprosy’s average direct-mail gift has doubled to about $54, and the frequency of direct-mail gifts has increased from 1.5 to three times per year

To further build the charity’s revenue and visibility, Mr. Doyle changed the way the organization uses television to reach potential donors. Jettisoning the group’s documentary-style approach, he produced an appeal in 1996 that used a more aggressive marketing style to win donor support. The effort paid off. Since 1997, American Leprosy has attracted about 5,000 new donors a year through its televised appeals.

In December, the charity began using a new television appeal: a 29-minute production that airs on cable and network stations and features Mr. Linkletter as the first official spokesman in the charity’s history.

For an annual fee of $100,000, Mr. Linkletter agreed to narrate the television promotion, attend two fund-raising dinners for major donors, and sign three direct-mail pieces each year. This past December, the first mailing signed by Mr. Linkletter raised $127,000, nearly double the amount that American Leprosy raised in earlier Christmas appeals, the group says.

Mr. Linkletter, 88, says that even though many younger people may not know much about him, his age is a plus for American Leprosy. “For everybody over 50 years of age, they grew up with me, and that’s where the money is,” Mr. Linkletter declares.

Big Gifts

Besides enlisting Mr. Linkletter’s help, revamping the charity’s direct-mail program, and reworking its television appeals, American Leprosy set out to increase the amount of money that it receives from major donors.

To help do that, Mr. Doyle recruited Robert S. Hobbs, a veteran development official who spent 13 years at World Vision, a Christian relief organization in Seattle, worked for a direct-mail company in California, and, most recently, ran his own consulting firm.

Mr. Hobbs reorganized the fund-raising department and added three major-gifts officers, two of whom now work from offices in Kansas City and San Diego. A fourth will be hired this year, Mr. Hobbs says.

The major-gifts officers account for much of American Leprosy’s recent turnaround, Mr. Hobbs says.

Last year, major donors — those giving at least $1,000 in a single year — accounted for one-third of the charity’s nearly $6-million in gifts. One donor alone contributed $450,000 toward a new program to fight leprosy in India. In 1994, by contrast, major donors contributed a total of only $330,000.

Mr. Doyle says that until the major gifts officers were hired, many donors were never invited to increase their giving.

“Nobody asked them or challenged them with a bigger project or bigger vision of what we are doing,” he says.

Besides shifting the major-donor program into high gear, Mr. Hobbs also began turning to Christian musical groups to promote American Leprosy and attract younger donors.

For a fee, the groups show a video about the charity and distribute promotional literature during concerts. Since its inception in 1997, the concert-promotion program has produced more than 15,000 new donors. Last year, gifts generated from concert appeals totaled $773,000, Mr. Hobbs says.

American Leprosy spent about $400,000 in 2000 to run the concert-promotion program, and charity officials are not reluctant to lay out cash for other efforts that will increase donations. It costs the group about $90 to acquire a new donor through a television appeal and around $75 through the concert program.

Still, says Mr. Hobbs, “We wouldn’t be able to add the number of donors a year if we weren’t spending the money.”

Last year, the charity received $1.93 in donations for every dollar it spent on acquiring new donors, and $4.72 for every dollar it spent to get donors to contribute again, according to Mr. Hobbs.

Indeed, some of American Leprosy’s most productive dollars have gone to build donor loyalty, one of its former weak points.

Within a week of an initial contribution or pledge, donors now receive a welcome letter and information packet about the charity. Fund raisers call donors to thank them for gifts, and major contributors receive calendars and Christmas ornaments designed by leprosy patients.

The group also invites major donors on overseas trips to keep them connected to the people who benefit from their contributions. Two donors who visited India recently gave $25,000 and $35,000, respectively — much larger donations than they had previously given.

Even small donors get a personal visit from a charity official if time permits. Mr. Doyle recently saw a donor who gave $25 a month and noticed a cat calendar on the wall. Now Mr. Doyle sends him a cat calendar every holiday. Touched by the attention, the donor says he plans to leave his small estate to the charity.

Sustaining Attention

With American Leprosy back on solid footing, its leaders now are looking to a new set of challenges.

One of the most pressing, charity officials say, is to sustain donors’ attention as leprosy is eclipsed on the world health scene by AIDS, ebola, and other deadly diseases.

Leprosy has been eliminated in 98 countries over the past 15 years, and the World Health Organization says that by 2005 it will probably no longer be classified as a public-health threat. Mr. Hobbs says the charity will have to adjust as gains are made against the disease.

“We don’t believe that leprosy will go away in five years,” he says. “But American Leprosy Missions is also aware that it may require broadening its mission as leprosy becomes less and less of a public-health issue.”

To widen its mission without straying off course again, American Leprosy has formed partnerships with several other Christian nonprofit organizations that do international work.

Last May it began a partnership with Habitat for Humanity International, a nonprofit group in Americus, Ga., that builds homes for the poor, to raise money through direct-mail appeals to build 300 homes for leprosy patients. So far 50 homes have been built in India.

American Leprosy Missions also recently gave MAP International, a relief organization in Brunswick, Ga., a grant of $150,000 to work in the Ivory Coast fighting the Buruli ulcer, a bacterial skin infection that causes deformities. The group calls the effort its first foray into “leprosy plus” programs, because Buruli ulcers are contracted in a similar way as leprosy.

Centennial Celebration

In 2006, the charity will commemorate its centennial with a celebration that has as its centerpiece a multimillion-dollar capital campaign, Mr. Doyle says. The money will be used to expand programs overseas and to increase the group’s $5-million endowment.

In some ways, the centennial celebration will mark not only American Leprosy Missions’ long fight to give leprosy patients a future but also its successful struggle to revive its own prospects.

“One of the most difficult things is to rebuild support for an organization as effectively as they did,” says Mr. Brooks, the awards-committee chair of the Association of Fundraising Professionals. “This is an example not only for organizations that have been slipping. The things they did can certainly be applied just as easily to organizations that are doing well.”