How a Medical School Reinvented Its Fund-Raising Appeal to Its Employees

BRAINSTORMS

By Heather Joslyn

When Barbara L. Walker became development director at Baylor College of Medicine six years ago, she began raising money for the Houston college’s capital campaign. But this drive, dubbed Investment in Discovery, would differ greatly from previous efforts.

Ms. Walker, who had come to her new job from what is now called the John P. McGovern Museum of Health & Medical Science, also in Houston, saw untapped donor potential in the physicians and researchers who make up Baylor’s faculty. And she felt that a traditional campaign aimed at faculty and staff members would not be sufficient.

“I didn’t really have a foot to stand on,” she says, “except that when I was at this previous organization, I realized that there was this potential group of donors who don’t think of themselves that way.”

Armed with this knowledge, she set up remaking the way Baylor raised funds from among its employees. With the drive’s deadline extended and a new approach to soliciting donors in place, Baylor employees gave an unprecedented $31-million by the time the campaign ended last year, exceeding a goal of $20-million (out of a $500-million goal for the capital campaign overall). This total marked a steep increase from the more than $440,000 given by Baylor’s employees during its previous capital campaign in 1988-92. The effort won Baylor an Award for Excellence in Fundraising, a prize sponsored by the consultants Donald A. Campbell and Company, in Chicago, and presented at the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ annual meeting in April.

A traditional staff campaign, Ms. Walker says, is a hurried affair — usually no more than 90 days — with organizations distributing pledge cards to their workers and prizing universal employee involvement over the sizes of individual donations. Such campaigns, she says, are viewed by those who conduct them as a chance to “get in, get a lot of balloons, get a lot of participation, and then get out and raise some real money.”

At a medical institution like Baylor, she says, staff campaigns can be run on faulty assumptions, which can prevent them from obtaining large donations from workers. “It’s almost like faculty and staff are a commodity, rather than a constituency,” she says. Fund raisers tend to assume that doctors aren’t interested in making major gifts to their employers. “You can build a case that the employees are making their contributions in other ways,” says John J. Scales, Baylor’s vice president for development. Charities may also incorrectly assume that employees’ ability to give is defined by their salary or job title, Mr. Scales says, not considering that some may have inherited wealth or, as in the case of medical researchers like those at Baylor, income from patents.

And when workers do make big donations, Ms. Walker says, “We also assume that faculty and staff want to be anonymous — that they’d be embarrassed to have their name on a donor wall.” Also, she says, organizations like Baylor may refuse to allow doctors and researchers to earmark their giving: “The assumption is, if we dared to allow them to designate their donations, they’d all give them to their own personal special-interest funds and not really further the mission of the organization.”

In turn, she notes, doctors and researchers do not necessarily think of themselves as potential givers of major donations. “I think it’s because they’ve spent years and years and years in an academic medical environment, and they’ve never been cultivated as a donor prospect,” she says. “Whereas when we’re out in the community, a lot of the folks we deal with as major-donor prospects, they know they’re being catered to.” Doctors and researchers, she says, “look at themselves as, well, a little bit smarter than the average, but still as average working people.”

Rethinking the Campaign

To allow time to obtain major gifts of $25,000 or more from Baylor’s doctors and researchers, Ms. Walker requested that the staff campaign’s duration be stretched from 90 days to nearly three years. She began compiling a list of potential big contributors from Baylor’s current and retired employee rolls, and from its emeritus faculty. The list numbered 70 but grew to more than 300 prospects with suggestions from volunteers serving on the campaign’s steering committee, who also helped rank the prospects’ ability to give, regardless of their job titles.

While preparing a list of prospective benefactors, Ms. Walker also prepared a list of prospective beneficiaries. Each department was asked to name its most vital financial needs. This “shopping list,” as she calls it, gave donors ideas for giving opportunities, and the process of compiling it gave each department at Baylor a sense of its stake in the fund-raising efforts.

Baylor physicians were generally asked for donations by their peers, such as Michael E. DeBakey, the noted heart surgeon who is Baylor’s chancellor emeritus. He served on the staff campaign’s steering committee — and became the campaign’s top donor, pledging $17.5-million through the DeBakey Medical Foundation. Each committee member, Dr. DeBakey says, was assigned a number of Baylor colleagues to personally approach about making a donation. In turn, each person approached was asked to speak with specific members of his or her department. In this fashion, he says, “We were able to really interface with every member of the faculty.” Not only did this raise awareness of the fund-raising drive among employees, he says, but it also increased the likelihood that “they would assume responsibility for filling that need.”

The personal touch extended to the content of the fund-raising appeals, which benefited from research about each potential contributor. Donors were asked what they felt Baylor’s greatest needs were, and appeals that the development department sent them, suggesting the size of the donations they might make, made note of the number of years they had worked for the organization, Ms. Walker says. “It wasn’t about, ‘We’ve set a goal and we need you to help meet it, ‘” she says. “It wasn’t about 100-percent participation. It was about, ‘What’s meaningful to you in your own life? ‘“

One difference in the Investment in Discovery campaign from previous Baylor staff campaigns was that donors could designate a purpose for their gifts. Previously, with a few exceptions, workers had only been allowed to donate unrestricted funds. “It almost hurt me to hear [staff members] say, ‘You mean I can give money for whatever I want?, ‘” Ms. Walker says. More than $10.9-million raised for the staff campaign still went to unrestricted funds, but more than $12.6-million was allocated for specific uses (with more than $7.6-million donated to endowments). One physician and her husband made a major donation to another doctor’s department in appreciation for his care of her ailing mother, an example Ms. Walker uses to refute the notion that physicians will only donate to their own projects. “When doctors have a chance to give,” she says, “they give like anyone else.”

Faculty members were not actively discouraged, however, from contributing to their own departments, says Mr. Scales: “There are needs in every department. The point is, we gave them an option, rather than telling them what to do.”

More Giving Options

While opening up opportunities to donors, Baylor’s development department also made a renewed effort to educate them about the methods of giving beyond simply writing checks, whether helping employees set up planned gifts or reminding them that they could contribute via payroll deduction. It also allowed noncash donations, as an individual major-gift campaign often does, and received real estate and stock from staff donors. A few donors discovered less traditional means of giving, with benefits both to the institution and themselves: When Ms. Walker suggested to some donors that they put their gifts on their American Express cards in order to earn frequent-flier miles, they did exactly that.

Out of more than 6,000 Baylor employees, 1,708 participated in the Investment in Discovery staff campaign. Seventy-eight employees made donations of $25,000 or more, totaling $29.3-million. By contrast, the previous capital campaign received only eight gifts of $25,000 or more. One dollar of every $5 raised from individuals in Investment for Discovery overall came from Baylor’s own faculty and staff, Ms. Walker says.

“Probably the greatest success is that these faculty members still talk to me, that they don’t dive into broom closets when they see me coming down the hall,” she jokes. “That it really was about relationship building. That it wasn’t about give ‘til it hurts, and let the next development team deal with the aftermath.”

Despite her satisfaction with the drive’s results, Ms. Walker says, she would tweak the next employee campaign slightly. She would extend the amount of time spent on the major-gift campaign by a few months, she says, and not spend as much time on the campuswide campaign, since the pledge cards her office distributed near the campaign’s end did not yield many new donors. She is also determined to keep momentum going for future capital campaigns (Baylor has no annual fund). She says she has told departments that have benefited directly from employee gifts to maintain relationships with those staff members — to, in her words, “treat them as you would any donors.”

Ms. Walker recommends that medical institutions seeking to emulate Baylor’s successful staff campaign take a closer look at their doctors, researchers, and other staff members, with an eye toward finding major-gift donors. “You have a hidden group of potential major donors that only you really have access to,” she says. “Unlike other major-donor prospects, you’re not competing with lots of other organizations for their resources, but you have to identify them and approach them.”

Do research on employees as you would on any major-donor prospects, suggests Mr. Scales, and don’t assume that a worker’s salary represents the bulk of his or her assets.

Above all, Ms. Walker says, charities seeking to run successful staff campaigns should forgo the ideal of 100 percent participation, looking instead to the quality of their donors rather than merely the quantity. “If you set aside pressure tactics for participation and instead use persuasion and self-motivation,” she says, “that’s a better result.”

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