Society officials say the organization hit its low point in 1992. More than half a dozen of the 57 chapter directors had resigned. Fund raising had stalled. Longtime strategies, such as door-to-door solicitations, were no longer producing significant donations. And some attempts to find alternative sources of income had failed miserably: An effort to sell 3-D glasses needed to view the re-released version of the John Wayne film Hondo wound up losing $160,000; a telethon brought in only minimal dollars because the charity could only afford to air it in the wee hours of an August morning.

“We were at a point of crisis,” says Jack Geoghegan, a Westchester, N.Y., lawyer and Leukemia Society board member at the time who also serves on the board today.

When a group of activists on the board insisted on drastic change, the executive director resigned and the chairman of the board walked out of the meeting and later stepped down.

To fill the top executive slot, the board hired Dwayne Howell, chief operating officer of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. In addition to bringing experience in running a health organization with many chapters, Mr. Howell has a personal connection to the cause, having lost his five-year-old daughter Joyce to leukemia in 1973. “I knew when I heard about this job that I wanted it,” he says. “It didn’t sway me that the organization was having financial problems.”

Meeting With Chapters

One of Mr. Howell’s first steps was to meet with the organization’s chapters. “Our strengths were in the field, in their special events,” Mr. Howell says. But he found that the events were an eclectic mix with no unifying theme. “There was no fund-raising event that could be called a signature event, through which you could raise awareness as well as money,” Mr. Howell says.

While searching for such an event, Mr. Howell heard about a few Leukemia chapters that had brought in money by getting marathon runners to sign up sponsors who donate money on the runners’ behalf. Many people trace the idea back to a board member who ran the New York marathon on behalf of his daughter in 1988.

Mr. Howell says he was initially inclined to dismiss the idea. After all, how many people could possibly want to run 26 miles? But then he saw that participants were averaging $3,000 in contributions. “I’d never seen any event where participants averaged that much,” he says. “It looked like a powerful way to raise money.”

It was. The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training program has trained 190,000 marathoners in all and brought in $400-million. It currently accounts for 38 percent of the society’s budget, or $61-million, and has been copied by many other health charities.

The society has since expanded Team in Training to other endurance events, such as cycling events and triathlons. And it added a Light the Night event in 1999, a fund-raising walk aimed at reaching a broader audience than its Team in Training programs. Participants, many of whom are blood-cancer survivors, raise donations through the two-mile walk, which is held at night and features illuminated red and white balloons used to symbolize blood cells.

Another fund-raising call Mr. Howell made early in his tenure was to retire the society’s door-to-door fund-raising drive, which had become increasingly expensive for the chapters to oversee and had stopped growing in income. Instead, he put the money into direct-mail and telemarketing programs overseen by the national office. These two fund-raising tactics have helped to put the society back on its feet, posting annual increases of roughly $5-million in recent years.

To keep local volunteers involved in fund raising, the organization now runs what it calls its “community campaign.” Participants receive a kit from the charity and then personalize the information before sending it out to their neighbors.

The society has retained some of its traditional fund-raising methods. For example, it still asks small businesses to display coin-collection boards. While some of the younger employees at the organization consider the technique a throwback, officials say the effort brings in some $2.5-million a year and helps keep the society’s name in front of potential donors and volunteers.

In another move, Mr. Howell has drawn from his experiences with the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, which sponsors readathons in schools, to create a national school fund-raising program for the society based on a program used by the central Florida chapter. Through the Schools and Youth program, students raise money from parents, neighbors, and friends. Last year, 12,000 schools raised $10-million.

Winning Trust

Mr. Geoghegan of the organization’s board says Mr. Howell’s leadership style gained him credibility with local leaders.

“Dwayne did not come in and clear house; he analyzed where there were successes, and encouraged those,” he says. At the same time, Mr. Howell has made chapters more accountable by setting up indexes that measure how well each one’s fund-raising efforts compare with expectations. Chapters that perform poorly do not receive additional funds from the national office unless they change leadership.

With each fund-raising success, the Leukemia Society’s leaders start looking for the next opportunity to bring in new money to help the organization achieve its mission. Such an approach has helped the society’s research grants increase from 19 percent of revenue in 1990 to 25 percent today. Research spending this year was $42-million, up from $6-million in 1990.

The organization’s expanded budget has also helped pay for support services to blood-cancer patients and their families and friends, including a phone center staffed by counselors with master’s degrees in social work, oncology nursing, and other fields. These counselors help callers make decisions about treatment, finances, and other issues. The society also offers videos about different diseases and treatments, as well as programs in which callers can talk with renowned blood-cancer specialists.

One strategy that has worked well for the society has been to offer a big grant to researchers as a challenge to move science forward. In 1993, the group asked leading blood-cancer researchers, If we could raise $10-million to support your work, what could you do with the money? The result was the organization’s “translational research” program, which applies scientific advances to potential treatments of blood cancers.

One of the first awards made under the program turned into one of the society’s biggest success stories: It helped pay for the development of Gleevec, the first nontoxic drug that is effective against certain types of leukemia. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the drug in 2001. Gleevec works by blocking the action of an enzyme that can cause cancer cells to divide furiously. Without the enzyme action, the leukemic cell can’t divide and eventually dies. “Thousands of patients are alive today because of it,” Mr. Howell says. Gleevec has also been used to treat stomach cancer, and shows some promise in treating Alzheimer’s disease.

The charity has also had its share of lucky breaks in other areas. Last year, script writers for Days of Our Lives, a popular television soap opera, approached the society for help with a story line about a character with leukemia. The discussions led to six weeks of episodes related to leukemia that culminated in the characters’ participating in a “Light the Night” walk. Many of the show’s actors also ended up participating in a real walk in San Diego.

“I don’t know how much you’d have to spend to get that kind of publicity, but it didn’t cost us a dime,” says Richard Geswell, the society’s executive vice president of revenue and marketing.

The publicity was especially valuable given the organization’s recent efforts to try to raise its profile. While the organization has always been involved in research and patient support in connection with all types of blood cancers, officials say that fact has not been widely known. In 2000, the society changed its name to include “Lymphoma” as a step toward better describing its work. “About 110,000 people will have a blood-related cancer this year,” Mr. Howell says. “About 60,000 of those will have lymphoma.”

Looking ahead, the society says a high priority will be continuing to seek large gifts from wealthy donors. The charity has hired planned-giving officers and provided training to chapters on how to build long-term relationships with donors. Among other things, it has instituted a formal program to acknowledge big donors. Donors who give more than $250 receive personal invitations to chapter special events. Chapter presidents personally contact all donors in their geographic areas who make gifts of $1,000 or more.

Efforts to win major donors have already started to pay off. Since 1999, the organization has received three gifts of $1-million each and many others in the $500,000 range, Mr. Geswell says.

To help bring in the very biggest gifts, the society formed a new subsidiary overseen by four of the organization’s largest donors to award specialized research grants. “It’s a way to keep them informed of the latest advancements, and also use their influence to raise more money,” Mr. Geswell says.

Online giving also continues to be a focus. While still a small percentage of its fund raising, online donations have been increasing 200 percent a year, Mr. Geswell says. Just as it communicates through newsletters and letters to its mail donors, Mr. Geswell says the society has e-mail newsletters and other communications for its online givers.

The charity hopes such efforts will make it possible for it to raise $225-million in 2007, a goal Mr. Howell describes as ambitious but attainable. “The new money will allow us to expand three programs that attract the very best minds in blood-cancer research,” he says. Currently “too much highly meritorious research is left on the table.”