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"Trends in Medical Fundraising"

June 6, 2011 - Program Summary

On June 6th, 2011, the timely topic "Trends in Medical Fundraising" was addressed in front of a packed room at City Year in Boston by David Woodruff, Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer for Development at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Shelley Brown, Vice President of Operations at Children's Hospital Trust, in what was the last program of WID's 2010-11 season.

David remarked upon the changing business model of fundraising within the healthcare industry. Development departments can no longer afford the luxury of operating within a silo. Ways to effectively engage senior leadership across an institution must be found and nurtured. New paradigms for partnerships – both with donors and with other external parties, such as university research institutes – must be explored. Even job requirements are changing. In today's fundraising landscape, major gifts officer jobs are becoming more like business manager jobs.

Children's Hospital is known for its web savvy. Shelley remarked that Children's has found that the web works best as a tool for engagement and communication, but not as an instrument of pure fundraising. In other words, it's not enough to just "put up a page" and wait for the dollars to roll in. Facebook pages are great at driving people to your events and web page, but they don't tend to raise much money in and of themselves, and they require a great deal of staff attention.

Interestingly, as much as the field is changing, Shelley summed it up best when she said: "At the end of the day, fundraising is still all about building relationships."