March 22, 2007 | Read Time: 7 minutes
Cancer institute sets its sights on a $1-billion fund-raising goal, with the help of a few thousand cyclists
The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s drive to raise $1-billion by 2010 isn’t depending solely on a small group of wealthy donors to provide the largest donations. Instead, unlike the typical ambitious fund-raising drive, its biggest single source of money will probably be a bike-athon that draws thousands of participants each year.
The Pan-Massachusetts Challenge, which attracts more than 4,000 participants annually, raised $26-million for Dana-Farber last year alone. By the time the charity’s seven-year campaign ends, the bike-athon will have garnered about $175-million for the drive. That is far more than the largest gift made so far by individuals: a $50-million donation from Richard A. and Susan F. Smith, business owners who both sit on Dana-Farber’s board.
The organization’s billion-dollar goal is bold for an outpatient cancer center, especially considering that its last capital campaign raised $109-million less than a decade ago.
The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in New York, which has a budget more than twice the size of Dana-Farber’s and handles three times as many patients as Dana Farber — including long hospital stays — last year decided to double its campaign’s goal to $2-billion.
Dana-Farber’s fund raisers and campaign volunteers debated at length before they adopted the $1-billion goal, says Larry Lucchino, president of the Boston Red Sox and a co-chair of the drive, along with Josh Bekenstein, managing director of Bain Capital, a Boston company.
He says he favored the $1-billion goal, while others thought $900-million was more realistic.
“We said to ourselves we hoped we weren’t being tyrannized by the appeal of a big, round number,” he recalls. When the campaign was announced to the public, after four years of quietly raising money, $551-million had already been collected.
‘Mission Possible’
Every bit as ambitious as the dollar goal is the campaign’s promise to “conquer cancer,” using the money raised to turn a scourge that kills more than half a million Americans every year into a disease that is rarely fatal.
About half of the campaign money will be used to pay for research and new treatments for the disease. The goal is to identify the genetic and molecular roots of particular types of cancer so that treatment can be more effective and less harmful to the patient.
Mr. Lucchino helped choose the campaign’s formal name, “Mission Possible: the Dana-Farber Campaign to Conquer Cancer,” from options presented by an advertising agency, but he says he wasn’t wild about those first two words initially.
He quickly changed his mind, however, when he saw the emotional reaction that they evoked among Dana-Farber’s fund raisers and volunteers, many of whom have lost friends and relatives to the disease. Mr. Lucchino himself was treated for non-Hodgkins lymphoma at Dana-Farber in 1985 and 1986.
“Mission possible,” he says, conveys the idea that “there is light at the end of this miserable tunnel.”
Making such a bold statement about conquering cancer is risky, concedes Susan S. Paresky, Dana-Farber’s senior vice president for development.
“But if you don’t take those risks, then you’re not going to make it,” she says. “It shows that we are taking an aggressive approach.”
A New Organizational Chart
Ms. Paresky has done just that with Dana-Farber’s fund-raising department. After joining the institute in 1997 — six years before the capital campaign would begin its private phase — she revamped the fund-raising office’s structure and hired more people. Today, 170 people work in the fund-raising division, compared with 55 when she arrived.
The key, she says, was making sure fund raisers had enough support to do their jobs and were given opportunities to specialize in a particular type of fund raising. In the past, she says, each staff member had been trying to do a bit of everything. Fund raisers would meet with donors, write grant proposals, and even pitch in to try and solve computer problems.
“Everyone was trying really hard, and some good gifts were coming in,” Ms. Paresky says. However, she says, “fund raisers cannot do their work if they are bogged down writing stewardship letters or hassling with brochure designs.”
Ms. Paresky arranged the staff into what she calls “business units,” which concentrate on fund raising, and “service units,” which help fund raisers communicate with donors and potential donors, maintain software and other technology involved in tracking Dana-Farber’s interactions with donors, and handle personnel issues.
About 40 percent of the staff provides the support services, she says, while the rest of the employees are divided into 10 groups that reflect the methods Dana-Farber uses to raise money: the golf tournaments, annual fund, business-marketing deals, and corporate grants, among others. (The bike-athon is managed by a separate charity.)
The staff structure, just like the campaign’s strategy for relying on the bike-athon as its biggest money raiser, is unconventional. Most charities seeking $1-billion or more hire dozens of people who specialize in raising big gifts from wealthy people, but Dana-Farber has only 17.
Ms. Paresky says fewer major-gifts solicitors are needed because support-staff members take care of other tasks, such as acknowledging gifts and keeping donors informed about how their money is being used.
Solicting Staff Members
Ms. Paresky made the job of major-gifts solicitors easier in other ways. She asked the institute’s senior faculty and staff members to become “leaders in the early stages of the campaign,” by making their own donation before the drive was publicly announced. That produced gifts from 96 percent of the tenured professors and institute officials, including senior development officials, who were asked to participate.
“That’s an incredibly powerful percentage when it comes to raising money from other donors,” Ms. Paresky says. “When you say 96 percent of the senior staff have already committed, and ‘We want you to join them and join us,’ it’s really hard to turn down.”
Ms. Paresky says that figure was a key reason that the campaign has already attracted more than $120-million from foundations and wealthy donors.
Competitive Fund Raising
Aside from its employees, Dana-Farber’s campaign is benefiting from another group of unusually loyal donors: the participants in the Pan-Massachusetts bike-athon.
The event was founded in 1980 by Billy Starr, a cyclist who lost his mother, uncle, and cousin to cancer. In its first year, it had just 36 riders, who raised $10,200.
Last year, 4,270 riders participated, and nearly every penny of the $26-million they raised went to the hospital, because the cost of the event was largely covered by corporations and individuals who were billed as sponsors.
Mr. Starr says that the bike-athon has become so lucrative because he and other organizers have emphasized the importance of raising money to fight cancer among the participants, rather than focusing on publicity for the sporting event or increasing the number of people who join the race. The bike-athon arranges for advertising to be donated and spends nothing else on marketing and promotion. This year, cyclists must use a personal credit card to guarantee that they will raise — or donate — at least $3,600 to participate in the grueling 192-mile ride from Sturbridge, Mass., to the tip of Cape Cod. Smaller sums are required to register for seven shorter routes.
“If you break your leg, you still owe $3,600,” says Mr. Starr. “We don’t want anybody to sign up if they don’t mean it.”
Despite the strict requirement, registration for the next ride — in August — had almost filled up by the middle of this month.
One consequence of focusing on raising money, Mr. Starr says, is that many riders are now just as likely to compete over how much they raise as they are to vie over who finishes the ride in the shortest time. Some riders bring in more than $400,000 apiece. “It’s kind of Pavlovian,” he says, “but it works.”
