The telephone call came on a Thursday afternoon in January as Kelly Dolan, chief development officer at Ronald McDonald House Charities, stood outside a Las Vegas hotel. On the line was an executive from the biopharmaceutical company AbbVie with detailed questions — there might be a philanthropic opportunity and could Dolan respond within 24 hours with data on unmet needs, such as the number of families the nonprofit was turning away from its hospitality houses?
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Ronald McDonald House Charities — which provides accommodations and services for the families of children undergoing serious medical treatment — had just concluded its annual organizational leadership conference. Dolan had bid farewell to her airport-bound field-operations team, which had access to much of that data. Her colleague Janet Burton, chief field operations officer, was in Portugal meeting with European organization leaders. No matter. She ran upstairs to her hotel room and began frantically shooting off emails.
Ronald McDonald House Charities had invested in an internal reporting system that allowed it to track all of its data in real time. It had also worked to develop business plans for individual chapters based on market studies of projected needs at hospitals and medical facilities. By Friday morning, Dolan and her colleagues had assembled a preliminary case for support for AbbVie that included data on the number of people currently being served by its 180 chapters, turn-away rates, and waiting lists, as well as medical feasibility studies by market that showed key growth opportunities for the nonprofit.
“At any given time, we have five years of expansion plans that are ready to go,” Dolan says.
For Melissa Walsh, vice president for corporate responsibility and global philanthropy at AbbVie, 2018 started off with an extraordinary mandate from her chief executive: Figure out where and how to give an extra $350 million to charity within the calendar year.
The giving push, Walsh says, resulted from the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which slashed corporate tax rates from 35 percent to 21 percent.
“What was really important for us to do once the task at hand set in was recognize we are a global, researched-based biopharmaceutical company,” says Walsh, who is also vice president of the AbbVie Foundation. “Evidence-based decisions are intrinsic to the way that we operate. Our approach to philanthropy is no different.”
Walsh and her colleagues knew they wanted to make a small number of very large grants that could have significant impact within AbbVie’s three philanthropic priority areas: building strong communities, effective education programs, and sustainable health-care systems. They also knew only a select few groups might be able to absorb and quickly and effectively put to use a large amount of money they were giving away. The AbbVie staff looked at nonprofits the corporation had previously supported and others that it had never given to. The Ronald McDonald House Charities mission cut across all three philanthropic priority areas, Walsh says, and the nonprofit was soon on a short list.
“One of the things that really jumped out at me very early with RMHC was the fact that they weren’t coming to me with anything they hadn’t already thought about,” Walsh says. “The long-term strategic planning and strategic thinking that they had put together was really, really impressive and gave me as a donor an awful lot of confidence that they weren’t just following the money, they weren’t just creating programs or initiatives because they saw AbbVie as a potential donor.”
She says she was also impressed by the competency of the nonprofit’s leadership team and the charity executives’ commitment to the organization and its mission.
Through the winter and into the spring, the conversation between the biopharmaceutical company and the nonprofit continued. Ronald McDonald House Charities provided data and information on things including its volunteer program, internal training and capacity building, leadership development, and the internal IT platforms used by its chapters, Dolan says.
While she knew that a “substantial” gift could be at stake, Dolan says, she didn’t even have a potential dollar range. The nonprofit has an annual revenue of about $550 million, and most of its charitable support comes from individual donors. Initially, she thought the number might be about $25 million. Some weeks later, after her team provided an analysis to AbbVie about what a grant of $56.5 million could do to accelerate the nonprofit’s long-term expansion plan, “we were hoping that $50 million wasn’t out of reach,” Dolan says.
But it wasn’t until midspring, when during a phone call Walsh asked Dolan what Ronald McDonald House Charities could to with $100 million, that the nonprofit’s leaders fully understood what sort of gift was at play.
While a donation that size has the potential to terrify some organizations, Dolan says, “we felt great about it. We had the numbers. We knew that we could execute on this $100 million and, frankly, more because we had the plans in place. We knew what the need was.”
Publicly announced on Monday, the money will be used to build family-centered spaces and 600 guest sleeping rooms at 32 Ronald McDonald houses in 26 states, the charity said. It will provide for 230,000 additional nights’ stays for sick children and their families annually.
The entire $100 million is being given to the charity this year, Walsh says. The work begins immediately and will continue through 2020.
So what about the rest of the money AbbVie aims to give away this year? In May, the company said it was committing $100 million to support the rebuilding of Puerto Rico’s health-care system and disaster-resilient housing following the 2017 Hurricane Maria. The money was split between Direct Relief and Habitat for Humanity International.
The balance of the $350 million in giving will be announced later this year, the company says.
For Ronald McDonald House Charities, the $100 million will increase its capacity by 13 percent in the United States, Dolan says.
“At the end of the day, I think what separated us from what could have been potentially other beneficiaries is the fact that we could show such dramatic and measurable impact. That’s the big thing. You want to be able to measure everything that you can do.”
Dolan, who has been in charitable fundraising for three decades, describes working on the gift as a career highlight. She cited the adage that luck happens when preparation meets opportunity, noting that when the phone call came through from AbbVie, her nonprofit had been preparing for years for a big opportunity.
There is a strong emotional component to the mission of Ronald McDonald House Charities, she notes, but corporate donors “need the facts, and they need the measurement, and as nonprofit executives, that is what we have to be doing. We’ve got to be constantly looking at what our impact is and how we measure it.”
