Apparently, in the last couple of years our fundraising efforts have been almost completely fruitless, and as we are a not-for profit institution, we are in deep shit. We had a target of 100 million dollars for a new child psych inpatient facility, we raised less than 5 million. We want to refurbish our special care nursery for preemies, and after setting a 20 million dollar goal more than a year ago we have raised $0. Our own department is doing a special event in November with some high-profile New York artists, and we offered to arrange a reception and special showing of the art to our major donors, but our fundraising office claims it is “too busy” to invite them. Their work would involve designing an invitation, and addressing envelops – but they just don’t seem to have the time.
And still more incredibly, just last month the office declined to develop a request to the richest family in town, after a specific approach and offer from the family to make a donation. A woman in that family had a prenatal emergency and was successfully treated by our staff. The family offered to purchase new diagnostic equipment (I believe it was an MRI and an ultrasound machine) because ours “looked old”. They also suggested that if we had higher priorities, we should make them a proposal, and that money “is not an object”. Just a few months ago they gave a gift of $100 million dollars to the city, and have gifted more than $250 million dollars to area non-profits in the past decade. Seriously, these people are a fundraiser’s wet dream.
Our fundraising department felt that “now is not the right time” to ask the family for a donation. That’s when the head of neo-natal medicine went to the CEO, and the fundraising director was fired last week. This all was discussed in the monthly management meeting, which my boss attends.
I just hope we survive it. We have committed to an ambitious growth plan for both our facilities and services, and we are eating into out endowment principal because our funding had lain completely dormant.
