Grateful patients yield research dollars
Sarah Krumholz promotes doctors' successes to patients, who give money to propel medical advances
Some research physicians have all the luck: Sarah Krumholz helps to raise money for their work. She has a magic green touch that yields fundraising results, garnering nearly $12 million a year in donations from patients at University of California San Francisco Medical Center. The total budget for the medical center is nearly $400 million.
As associate director of development for surgical specialties, Krumholz represents research surgeons in pediatric and adult cardiac and thoracic surgery, colorectal surgery, vascular surgery, endocrine surgery, and plastic and reconstructive surgery.
Before coming to UCSF Medical Center, Krumholz spent seven years raising funds for the Jewish Community Federation. "They raise money and give it away," Krumholz says. The federation determines how donated money can benefit other charitable entities that serve the Jewish community. Unlike this model, the medical center uses all donated money to provide medical services and to push the frontiers of medical science.
"We rely on the people who come see the faculty for help," Krumholz says. Patient families also provide a source for donations.
"A toy company might be interested in giving to pediatric surgery."
Pediatric surgery, even though it serves children, is one of the toughest surgical fields for fundraising. Many parents of young children struggle financially, especially when one child is sick. Such families cannot afford to donate large amounts of money to their surgeons. "It can be challenging to find ways to engage people who do have resources to give to this area," Krumholz says. "People care a lot. They want to support pediatric surgery. They are extremely grateful. We have a lot of donors giving small gifts." Some donors give just $10.
She is working on a project to seek gifts from corporations to support research in pediatric surgery. "A toy company might be interested in giving to pediatric surgery," she says.
With outreach to individual donors and family foundations, "we try to focus on people who have the greatest potential" to make significant donations to the medical center, she says. "It's based on relationships with the faculty."
She arranges meetings between research faculty and their patients to encourage gift giving that furthers the science that can lead to life-saving medical breakthroughs. "We have a metrics-based system at the foundation," Krumholz says. "There are targets we are expected meet in a certain year. There is a science to fundraising."
She calls this the "donor commitment continuum." Usually she starts with a patient who knows little or nothing about the medical organization. "Our goal is to move them along," Krumholz says. "At the end of the continuum, they have bought into the organization. They're really committed as a donor. There is a science—what's going to move this person along toward a gift."
"Our goal is to move them along. At the end of the continuum, they're really committed as a donor."
Engaged donors have an emotional "buy-in" to the research goals: they feel personally involved in fostering science that benefits them or their family members. Such donors tend to keep on giving year after year.
After a gift is made, Krumholz shifts her attention to a form of stewardship, helping the donor understand how money is used to benefit research. "It helps people feel invested in what they have done," Krumholz says. "We show them the value their gift had."
She meets with faculty then writes reports that show how donated money was used for a specific cause. "We want donors to see that there is progress in a disease area. What we do is personalized. I'm always trying to find out what's new, what faculty are doing, what their needs are," Krumholz says. "We need to have something to sell. We need to have a story. I try to get that from the faculty and put it on paper to show donors. These are the needs. This is what philanthropy makes possible, and this is the vision for the future.
"This is what philanthropy makes possible, and this is the vision for the future."
To be effective in eliciting donations, Krumholz has to help research faculty members foster direct relationships with their patients and families of patients. With warm personal connections, donations tend to flourish.
"Faculty needs to be able to listen to those cues," Krumholz says. "Who is interested in helping?" She aims to cultivate the ability of brilliant scientists to attend to subtle human nuances: the moment when a patient first has the willingness to open his or her wallet to help with research. She chuckles at the challenge. "It's a partnership for sure," she says.
The thoracic oncology program raises huge amounts of money every year. "It's a true partnership between faculty, development officers and donors," she says.
Some faculty members have a magic charisma that allows patients to fall in love with their research then support it financially. It's mostly about clarity of vision. "If they can articulate their goals in these disease areas so that people believe in those goals, it's really helpful," Krumholz says. The doctors have similar tools in research: drug development; deciphering genetic causes of diseases and learning how to target certain genes. Using these tools, doctors "have different strategies," she says.
To market a research project effectively, she has to be excited about it, then communicate her excitement to prospective donors. "We are selling the future," the promise of progress in eradicating or curbing a particular disease. "A lot of it is built on hope and promise. We deal a lot with cancer. Patients don't want someone else to go through what they have gone through."
"We are selling the future. A lot of it is built on hope and promise. We deal a lot with cancer. Patients don't want someone else to go through what they have gone through."
The mind set of a surviving cancer patient who becomes a donor goes something like this: "I have been through this and it has been awful. If it can have some good, it's not for nothing," Krumholz says. "It is like sales but it's not. There is a lot of sensitivity to what we do."
An organ transplant in some cases can dramatically transform a patient's life, yielding months or years of precious time with loved ones. "People come out of transplants with so much energy," she says. "They feel healthy. It's like a new lease on life."
Plastic surgery following major injuries can also have a profound effect on patients. "Think of a kid with a cleft lip or palate," Krumholz says. "Surgery can be life-changing." Many donors think of plastic surgery only in connection with cosmetic surgery, but the field provides phenomenal benefits to folks who suffer from accidents or birth defects. Plastic surgery also can follow wound healing or in reconstruction, such as with breast surgery. "There is a total humanitarian bent to it," Krumholz says. "In that area, that's the story we're trying to tell."
Patients who come to UCSF for cosmetic surgery and have plenty of financial resources may become donors if they begin to understand the breadth of the field, which goes far beyond cosmetics.
The timeline for closing a patient's gift of money to the medical center can range up to a year or eighteen months. Fund development entails a complex promotion that connects a donor's emotions such as hope with a keen understanding of the human promise of a particular research project. Her job is to help faculty build their connections with former patients. Because new laws require that fund developers preserve patient confidentiality in the medical field, doctors must make the direct contacts with patients that lead to gifts. Krumholz rarely contacts patients directly unless they specifically allow it.
UCSF Medical Center, a large educational institution that supports world-class medical research, runs more like a business than many small nonprofit agencies. Krumholz notes that some of the smaller charitable organizations are what she affectionately calls "dysfunctional." She raises money for enterprise of exceptionally high quality.
"When it works, it's fun. I like it that in some small way I am helping this research move forward," Krumholz says. "I have fun with the faculty all the time. They are such fascinating people, and so impressive. It's insane. No day is the same. Time goes by really fast. There's a lot of flexibility."
—James Dunn
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