Top U.S. Fundraiser for U.N. Agency to Use Ads to Raise Profile of Refugees

Persuading Americans to get concerned about the plight of refugees in remote countries is not easy. But Anne-Marie Grey hopes to help connect people emotionally and intellectually with the challenges the world faces in dealing with more refugees than it has had since World War II.

Ms. Grey, chief of leadership giving at the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), has been named executive director of USA for UNHCR, the organization’s American fundraising arm. Her new job will involve translating those connections into donations.

She will lead a team of 50 people working to attract attention and money for the humanitarian work UNHCR does around the world, work made tougher recently by conflicts like the civil war in Syria, which has led more than 3 million people to flee the country.

No matter how big a scale a humanitarian crisis is, says Ms. Grey, it is difficult to draw people’s attention or sympathy.

“Refugees are refugees because of political situations or conflict,” she says. “It’s as if refugees are somehow less worthy of our attention, as opposed to people suffering from a natural disaster.”

She plans to court the news media to show Americans there is more to refugees than the depths of their woes. “It’s not about fundraising,” she says. “It’s about, how do we communicate relevant information in a way to Americans that’s meaningful to them?”

The ‘Daily Show’ Effect

Still, good communications can help spur donations. Last year, UNHCR seized a prime opportunity to share some of its good news and raise a lot of money in the process.

Andrew Harper, head of the UN Refugee Agency in Jordan, appeared last year on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” to discuss the 2 million Syrian refugees who had been displaced by the civil war.

Mr. Harper’s appearance highlighted the agency’s transformation of a stretch of barren desert into the bustling community of Zaatari. The appearance, coupled with phone calls to supporters and efforts to attract support online, raised almost $1-million for the group’s work.

However, USA for UNHCR still has some catching up to do when it comes to capitalizing on fundraising and media opportunities, acknowledges Charles DeSantis, head of its board and associate vice president for benefits and payroll at Georgetown University.

The organization, founded in 1989, was initially dedicated to advocacy, not raising money. As a result, it has a fainter profile and a thinner wallet than many other aid groups.

The board, which asked Ms. Grey to apply for the top position, hired her because of her strong understanding of its mission and her wealth of experience in fundraising, Mr. DeSantis says. In her previous post, she led a team that catapulted annual fundraising from $23-million to $83-million in less than three years.

“She’s poising USA for UNHCR to be the leader for fundraising worldwide in this arena,” he says. “We should be the leaders, and we’re not.”

Mr. DeSantis is not shy about expressing the charity’s ambitions for Ms. Grey and for itself. “We ended up not fulfilling our truest sense of what we could be, and now we have that opportunity with Anne-Marie,” he says. “I want more print ads, more digital. I want TV. I want us to be known.”

Boosting Revenue

USA for UNHCR wants especially to attract wealthy donors, a specialty of Ms. Grey, who established UNHCR’s major-gifts program.

Total revenue for the charity this year is an estimated $20.1-million. It receives 40 percent of its support from corporate and private grant makers, including UPS, the IKEA Foundation, and the Khaled Hosseini Foundation.

Ms. Grey hopes to boost the group’s revenue fivefold in the next decade, to $100-million a year. Other goals include building the group’s national board, social-media presence, and networks of volunteers.

Studying how Americans perceive refugees and how they get their information lies at the heart of what Ms. Grey wants to accomplish for the charity. To do that, USA for UNHCR must “start telling the real stories of these refugees,” she says, to show how small the degree of separation is between Americans and refugees, and that displaced people are more than haunted faces on a television screen.

“Many Americans have a refugee within their family tree. You only have to go back one or two generations, sometimes not even that,” Ms. Grey says. “As we accept a large number of refugees in this country, they become our neighbors. They’re just like the rest of us.”