Behind a Hospital’s Fund-Raising Success: A Man With a Tame Ego

A DAY IN THE LIFE

By Kimberlee Roth

Most people get irritated when sirens and helicopters whir outside while they are trying to work. But for Bruce Loessin, chief fund raiser at the Cleveland Clinic, beating helicopter blades and wailing ambulances help him focus on raising money at one of the country’s top nonprofit medical institutions. Mr. Loessin’s office overlooks the hospital’s emergency room, and he can’t help hearing — and seeing — the arrival of a steady stream of new patients, many of whom receive lifesaving treatment.

“It makes me realize what I’m doing here,” he says. “If I were to forget for even a minute why I’m here, all I have to do is look out the window.”

Not that the 61-year-old Mr. Loessin (pronounced law-SEEN) has a minute to spare as he seeks to help the Cleveland Clinic become a fund-raising powerhouse. Since he was hired in 2001, donations to the hospital have more than quadrupled, from an average of $31.5-million to $127.7-million last year, an especially difficult feat during turbulent economic times.

Vital Signs

Today Mr. Loessin is in the office by 7 a.m., just minutes before Lee Hill, president of the Downtown Cleveland Partnership, an economic-development organization, arrives to accompany him to the annual State of the Clinic address. The yearly speech is given by Floyd Loop, a cardiologist who is the clinic’s chief executive officer.

It’s not uncommon for Mr. Loessin to invite guests to such events, and it’s easy to see why Ms. Hill would be interested. With a staff of 29,000, the Cleveland Clinic is the city’s largest employer and it plays a vital role in the local economy, drawing physicians and patients and considerable acclaim. For the past 10 years, its Heart Center has been rated the nation’s best cardiac-care facility in U.S. News & World Report‘s annual ranking of top U.S. hospitals. But even with its reputation for quality care, the clinic also faces challenges: The hospital is one of several dozen that have recently been sued over allegations that they have not provided enough charity care, a charge the institution denies.

To accommodate the schedules of the hospital’s physicians, the State of the Clinic address starts promptly at 7:30. Dr. Loop, who hired Mr. Loessin, has packed the state-of-the-art medical-conference facility, where live surgeries are often broadcast from the clinic’s 78 operating rooms. Assembled in the room are men and women, some dressed in white lab coats, others in dark business suits, symbolic of a strong relationship between doctors and administrators at the institution. The collaboration has become especially noticeable in fund raising since Mr. Loessin took over. Nearly 200 doctors meet with donors, provide presentations and guided tours, join development officers on committees that help raise money for key medical specialties at the hospital, and engage in other activities that support the clinic’s development staff.

Dr. Loop begins his speech by citing several indicators of progress. From 1989, when he arrived at the clinic, to 2003, the institution created 14 medical centers in the Cleveland suburbs, where it hadn’t previously operated. At the same time, patient visits increased fourfold, to more than two million, and research grants grew from $22-million to $110-million.

Dr. Loop then turns to fund raising. For the seven years before Mr. Loessin arrived, he notes, overall giving to the clinic was stagnant. Today, a capital campaign started 18 months ago to raise $300-million by 2007 for a new Heart Center has already raised more than half that sum. Meanwhile, the hospital now raises about $39-million in planned gifts annually — bequests and other donations that provide significant financial benefits to donors — even though it only started to actively seek such gifts in 2002. Stepped-up efforts to encourage annual gifts, which also just started a year ago, brought in $6.3-million last year, up from $1-million in 2002.

Those returns are all the more striking because much of the fund raising was done when the economic recovery was still shaky. Fund raisers at other medical institutions have started calling to find out how the clinic is achieving such growth. Many are surprised to learn that Mr. Loessin’s staff is not as large as those at other comparable medical institutions and the clinic’s fund-raising costs — at 6 cents on the dollar — are significantly less than what some peer organizations spend.

Getting Doctors Involved

But low fund-raising costs and a lean staff are not the key reasons behind the clinic’s fund-raising prowess. The critical factor, Mr. Loessin says, is doctors’ involvement. Shortly after taking the job, he held numerous meetings with physicians and the 65 members of his staff before hiring a fund-raising consulting firm to help draft the clinic’s first institutional-development plan — a plan that called for doctors to step up their involvement in attracting donors.

When the Board of Trustees approved the plan in early 2002, only about 30 physicians were involved in fund raising. By the end of the following year, 130 of the clinic’s 1,470 staff physicians were, and that number has grown to nearly 200. “Doctors don’t ask for money,” explains Mr. Loessin. “We do, but donors feel doctors’ intensity and sincerity. It’s the doctors they admire.”

This morning, as Dr. Loop finishes up his remarks and adjourns the meeting, Mr. Loessin receives kudos on his fund-raising achievements from several colleagues. He thanks them — politely enough that it’s clear he’s appreciative but so quickly that it is obvious he’s uncomfortable with much praise. In fact, over the course of a single day, Mr. Loessin repeatedly gives the credit coming his way to others. For example, in describing the creation of his development plan, he insists that it wasn’t him, but the doctors themselves, who wanted to get more involved in fund raising.

Later on, in a 9:30 meeting with the Board of Trustees’ fund-raising committee, Mr. Loessin again deflects the spotlight. When asked for an update on the $300-million Heart Center campaign, he promptly turns the floor over to August Napoli, vice chair for institutional relations. But not before he works in a compliment: Mr. Napoli, he tells the trustees by way of introduction, “lives and breathes this campaign day and night; I practically have to make him go home every day.” Mr. Loessin similarly defers to Carol Moss, another senior fund raiser, when it’s time to talk about the about the clinic’s effort to seek planned and annual gifts.

The trustees, clearly, are pleased by what both fund raisers tell them. Ms. Moss, for example, updates them on a postcard mailing to promote charitable gift annuities that cost the clinic just $2,000 and raised $621,942.

Mr. Loessin says his tendency to direct people’s focus away from himself is deliberate — part of his personal philosophy on how a fund-raising leader should operate.

“This is not a profession for egotists,” he says, adding that he often jokes with friends in other fields who are more likely to seek the limelight. “Their dream at night is to be at a podium, accepting an award for being an incredible person. In my dream, I’m making sure the people I’m working with are at a podium accepting an award.”

The real heroes, he adds, “are the philanthropists and the doctors and researchers doing breakthrough science.”

A ‘Natural Evolution’

Mr. Loessin’s eagerness to defer to colleagues appears to serve both him and the clinic well.

He wasn’t trained to be a fund raiser, but he says getting into the field was a “natural evolution.” Mr. Loessin began his career as a political-science professor at Central College in Iowa, where he also got involved in government relations and fund raising in behalf of the college. Those activities showed him firsthand the complex interplay among planning, organizational dynamics, public policy, and money, or — as he describes it more simply — “the connection between money and outcomes.” He adds: “You can have great plans, but if there are no funds, they remain on the shelf.”

But Mr. Loessin’s appreciation of money’s importance may go back further than his teaching days. Growing up on a South Dakota farm with no indoor plumbing, he says, led him to see higher education as a “way out.” It taught him another lesson he says he lives by: “no whining.”

When Central College’s president moved to Grand Valley State University, in Michigan, he took Mr. Loessin with him and made him the vice president of institutional development for the fledgling public university.

From there, Mr. Loessin worked as a full-time senior fund raiser at two other universities before he was hired by Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, where he worked for 11 years before Dr. Loop offered him the clinic’s top fund-raising job.

The university had recently completed a capital campaign, and Mr. Loessin had learned much about the clinic by serving as a liaison for the two institutions in a joint venture to create a new medical school, which began offering its first classes last month. At the clinic, he says, “I knew a lot of people and was incredibly involved. The timing just seemed right.” Mr. Loessin declines to say how much he was offered to move to the clinic or what he is paid now, saying that the hospital policy does not allow staff members to disclose their compensation.

Self-Control

Mr. Loessin’s skills in putting people at ease, even if he is not, are on display in his next meeting shortly before lunch.

He is showing a prospective donor a scale model and describing what the new 11-story, 300-bed Heart Center will look like. Then, as another fund raiser shows the visitor a laptop presentation about the new center, Mr. Loessin silently pulls an index card from inside his jacket pocket to see what’s next on his schedule. He’s running late but gives no indication to his guest and is finally able to rush off to a board meeting at the City Club of Cleveland, a nonprofit civic group that seeks to encourage debate on important policy issues and one of a handful of charities Mr. Loessin serves as a trustee. Over lunch, Mr. Loessin presents strategies the board might use to increase the organization’s revenue — raising the cost of membership dues, for example.

For Mr. Loessin, the working lunch marks the start of an afternoon punctuated by back-to-back meetings: a consultation with lawyers arranging a real-estate gift to the clinic; a development staff meeting about the Heart Center campaign, which is interrupted by a request that Mr. Loessin join an emergency conference call about arranging care for a teenager traveling to the clinic from the Turks and Caicos Islands and accommodations for his family; and a meeting with several trustees and a donor who has pledged a multimillion-dollar gift for the Heart Center.

A 16-Hour Day

After the last meeting, Mr. Loessin briefly attends a reception with the trustees before returning to his office. This is where he typically spends the hours from 6 to 8 p.m., returning calls and e-mail messages or thinking and planning. This evening, however, Mr. Loessin will attend a 7:30 meeting of a nonprofit organization that serves the elderly, where he is a volunteer and his wife is on the board. Mr. Loessin says he hopes to be home around 10 p.m., so he can pack for a morning flight to Washington, where the Heart Center’s International Leadership Commission, a volunteer advisory board, is holding an event, and former Sen. Bob Dole, a commission member, is introducing the presentation.

By the end of another 16-hour working day, Mr. Loessin has seen several million dollars donated or promised to the clinic; indeed, one gift came unexpectedly this morning in the meeting with the fund-raising committee, when a trustee announced that his family would give $1-million to the Heart Center.

With days like this, it might be easy to become complacent when big gifts arrive. But if that’s true of Mr. Loessin, he isn’t admitting it.

“When you get that $1-million donation, it’s got to sound like the first one of your life,” he says. “And it makes my day; I’m elated. I still am the next day when I come to work. You never get over it — and you shouldn’t.

“If you ever do get over it,” he adds, “it’s time to do something else.”