Children’s Miracle Network (CMN) is a nonprofit that I have an intimate relationship
with. Not only have I taken part in Pitt’s Dance Marathon, a student organization that fundraises for CMN, but my brother used to work as a fundraiser in their headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah. CMN is a nonprofit that partners with and raises money for children’s hospitals around the United States. As Vice President of Programming for CMN, Elyse Meardon oversees the fundraising and the strategic growth and development of their marketing. Based in Portland, Oregon, Elyse was gracious enough to speak to me about how Covid-19 has affected CMN and nonprofits as a whole.
KV: Firstly, I want to ask how did you get into this line of work?
EM: So I went to the University of Iowa and they have a student-led program called the Dance Marathon. That's kind of where I started to learn a little bit about people doing philanthropy work for a living. Initially, I was on the path to medical school but I came across this different path and decided that [philanthropy work] was probably a bit of a better fit for me.
I started applying for work at different foundations and the guy who was running
University of Iowa’s dance marathon at the time reached out to me and said, “Hey, I could use your help running a few focus groups and doing some feedback for me.” And so I volunteered to do that for CMN. A few months later, a job opened up as a Dance Marathon Manager and I thought I might as well just throw my name out there. I ended up getting the job, moved to Utah, and I have been working at Children’s Miracle Network since.
KV: Quick turn here but to give you an overview of what I'm writing about, I am focusing on
the ways that COVID-19 has affected nonprofits. So the way that in-person services are
affected and also how fundraising goals are affected. To your knowledge, has COVID
affected CMN’s fundraising goals?
EM: We are looking at a 16% decrease from 2019 financial numbers, which doesn't sound like that much but it's nearly $75 million. In particular, that’s significant for a number of hospitals especially. So lots of different ways that COVID has impacted us.Most of our fundraising comes through corporate retail like Walmart or Costco with point of sale campaigns. Essentially this means you get to the cashier, they ask you if you want to
donate to your local children's hospital, and you answer yes or no. Obviously, with folks not
going to stores, as well as staffing limitations within those retailer offices, we had to really,
really quickly come up with some solutions. Luckily, we have really fantastic, long-standing
corporate partnerships which is very uncommon in the nonprofit place. Our partners like
Walmart, Costco, and Rite Aid have been with us for 30+ years-- basically, as long as our
organization has existed. They're incredibly committed to the cause and incredibly committed to the kids that we serve. So we've been able to recoup a lot of the losses because of the awesome corporate partnerships that we have.
Peer-to-peer campaigns, like dance marathons, have been drastically affected. I would
say nearly 75% of our programs wrapped up in that March/April time frame so it kind of hit at
just the wrong time. And with that, we quickly came together with an agile methodology. We're able to work in two-week sprints which allows for my team to be able to put together a ton of comprehensive solutions for students consisting of everything from A to B that they would need to launch a virtual dance marathon. So timeline, scripting, how to run an actual live stream, things of that nature. I mean, there's no playbook for a global pandemic so if CMN was already having difficulty, how could we ever expect our students to really step up and know exactly what to do?
So it’s been a lot of planning and a lot of pivots. Lots of research on what works and what doesn't. Lots of failing fast and making hard decisions.
KV: So dance marathons are fully virtual now. Can you explain a little bit more about that
shift? Has your fundraising goal for the overall Dance Marathon been lowered?
EM: Yeah, so our goal this year was $45 million. Now we're anticipating coming in probably
between $30 and $33 million. So that’s about $15 million of that $75 million I was referencing
earlier. I want to say that our goal didn’t change; regardless of how things were going, we never changed that goal. But we change our forecasts.
Our organization always knew that we’re probably gonna see a $10-15 million dollar hit
for Dance Marathon because a lot of our events are in person events. When people are in-person, it's easy to captivate them and hold their attention. Whereas, when people are at home, they can put their phone down or computer down and walk away from it.
KV: During COVID, how do you find it; firstly, to campaign and secondly, to get people to care about what you're campaigning for?
EM: When COVID hit initially, we kept surveying our hospitals to see how their bottom lines have been impacted. These hospitals are not necessarily these money making machines, but canceling certain surgeries and other revenue producing areas really hurt their bottom line. So fundraising became incredibly important for them. We've been able to launch a campaign called kidscantwait.org. Basically, it’s about how kids can't wait for the curve to flatten. Kids can't wait for a vaccine. These kids need our help now.
It's very interesting to see people say, “Oh, but not that many die.” Because then the
next question is: "Exactly how many kids is it okay to have passed away from any disease?" The acceptable answer is zero. So what are we doing to make sure that we're stopping that spread? How are we helping? Our children's hospitals are pillars of the community, they're there for you when you don't even know that they exist. And hopefully, you never need them, but they're always there.
So I think for us, it's been about staying true to our brand and true to our mission. We're
all about children's hospitals and helping those hospitals raise more money so that they can help as many kids as possible and not have to turn families away. We look at all the great and amazing work that they do in the community. Not just from a reactionary perspective, but from a public health perspective such as teaching kids about how to wear their bike helmets properly, or how to brush their teeth. It's all about making that relevant to people right now and letting them know that “Hey, with everything is going on, you still have all these kids that still need help.” I think that that's what we've seen with several other nonprofits: they have very worthy causes that are still in need of support.
KV: I know the partnership with certain hospitals is kind of the cornerstone of your work. Have you found it difficult to strike new relationships with potential new hospitals during this
pandemic? Are there hospitals that say to you, “Hey, you guys sound great, but we just
can't handle you right now?”
EM: Actually the other way around, unfortunately. We get lots of hospitals that come to us
and say, “Hey, how do we become a part of this, we want to be a CMN hospital too!” But with the way that our fees work, our overhead costs are paid for by partly membership fees and then the rest is corporate underwriting. So it's very different from how other nonprofits are set up where their overhead-- essentially, their staff, their salaries, the bills that they have --are paid for through fundraising dollars. Our fundraising dollars get directly distributed to our hospitals and then the hospitals pay us a fee. Now, the hospital fee is generally anywhere from 200% to 1200% ROI. So they pay a small fee and the return that they get is a lot of fundraising both in the programs that we craft, as well as the partners that we're able to bring like Walmart and Costco. So when we have hospitals that come to us and say, “Hey, we want to join your network,” generally, we're not able to meet those hospitals, because it would mean that they would have to give up or forfeit part of their fundraising territory.
KV: Has COVID changed the number of staff that you have?
EM: No, we haven't had to lay anyone off due to COVID though we also haven't been hiring
even though we could probably use the extra help. We didn't increase our hospital fees because we decided not to just based on our hospitals being in kind of a tight spot to be able to pay those membership fees. So that means we have less money to spend on overhead expenses which means we have less people we can hire. So we haven't had to lay anyone off, which is fantastic, everyone's been able to keep their job. But we've also done things like suspend our 2020 bonus program, and not hire at the rate in which we would generally want to.
KV: So obviously, your primary goal is to help children and their families. Did that at all change during COVID? Were there services that you could no longer provide?
EM: At CMN, we are only tangentially related to those specific services. So we're not really
the organization or the umbrella organization that's providing those services, we are purely based on fundraising and we disperse that fundraising toward children's hospitals. Most of the money that we fundraise is unrestricted, which is really important in this day and age, because nearly every corporation or program wants to restrict funds to places like the Cancer Ward or to Cystic Fibrosis research, which are all very, very important things, but those are things that are generally easier to go out and get major donors to cover.
A lot of our fundraising covers things like uncompensated care funds, so parents can actually pay their medical bills and not go into medical debt. For some of our hospitals, they use our money to actually pay those bills for the families. We allow our hospitals to decide how they want to spend those funds. From what I can tell, they haven't needed to suspend services outside of the elective procedures initially. We've seen an uptick, as everyone has, in telehealth and telemedicine. Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago has actually been pioneering some really incredible telehealth medicine for several years now. Our money goes to providing technology and equipment to do those things.
KV: This is actually my last question! Were there any specific moments during your time at CMN that made you stop and think, “Oh, this is why I'm doing this, this is why I got into philanthropy.”
EM: The one that pops into my mind initially is when I was working with students at Boise
State University in Idaho. This was this university’s first dance marathon so they were all really
excited which made me think, “This is so cool, I get to see students so excited about something that I did as a student.”
Family patrons from St. Luke’s Hospital started to show up and there was this one mom
who was kinda standing against the wall with her kid. Then her son, Sam, started to walk out to the middle of the room and all these college students already knew who he was. They were saying, “Sam, come dance with us!” They were so excited to be able to meet him because they had just heard his story.
The mom was silently crying against the gym wall saying “They know who he is, this is
so cool!” And I told her, “This is what this program is, it's these really incredible students who want to stand up and be there for your family and be there for this cause. It doesn't matter if they've known you for 10 years or 10 minutes-- they show up.”
Sam, as a patient, is medically complex. He's in a wheelchair part of the time, he doesn't
really speak a whole lot and a lot of his communication is nonverbal. So it was a really cool
moment to witness him get to be a normal boy and hang out with people that thought he was really cool and fun instead of people looking at him for his physical disabilities. I don't think I'll ever forget that moment.