Brother, can you spare $1,000,000?

Arow of shiny new vehicles ranging from camper vans to sports cars sits in front of the Vancouver General Hospital, beneath a billboard advertising them as prizes in the hospital’s latest lottery campaign. Downtown, St. Paul’s Hospital has just raffled off a $350 000 condominium. This highly successful venture, now in it’s eighth year, involves the annual sale of 10 000 tickets for $100 each, making it one of the hospital’s major fund-raising efforts. The condominium and car raffles are examples of the well-staked ground surrounding health care fund-raising. In British Columbia, UBC and a proliferation of hospital foundations in the Lower Mainland are now using increasingly sophisticated methods to “source dollars.” In layperson terms, they are targeting well-informed donors. Separating potential donors from their donations involves intensive communication and networking. Today’s donors demand facts and options. Some want brochures or information sessions, while others want to know about bequeathing part of their estate or about supporting a specific medical condition. Clearly, the days of hospital auxiliary rumble sales have disappeared. Don Livingston, president of the 17-year-old Vancouver Hospital Foundation, says the organization stepped up its activities about 5 years ago in response to the competitive environment. He says there is more aggressive competition for donors, who in turn are “asking better questions about how their money will be used.” Miro Kinch, medical faculty development officer at UBC, adds that more donors are arriving “with a good idea of what they want to do.” Promoting awareness that 50% of its patients are from outside Vancouver and that it is a provincial and not just a Vancouver facility is an important starting point for the Vancouver Hospital. Direct-mail material sent to potential contributors emphasizes the hospital’s links with the entire province and provincial statistics for patient care. New donation programs are also emerging, with “bequest giving” leading the list; Livingston is already predicting that it will become the biggest source of donations within the next 20 years. Anticipating support from aging baby boomers, the foundation arranges free estate-planning seminars to encourage donations. A brochure outlines 11 ways of contributing while retired or after death. The foundation has also started to solicit funds for specific medical conditions, giving individual donors control over where their money will be spent; brochures are already being developed about prostate cancer. The hospital is also using this information-intensive approach in a partnership with the UBC Development Office in an attempt to raise $28 million for the province’s new Brain and Spinal Cord Research Centre. Features