Chapter 12: Marketing and Fund-Raising
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Description
In this Chapter, Dr. Mendelsohn talks about change in business strategy that enabled MD Anderson to grow at an unprecedented rate. First he discusses shifts in how MD Anderson was described to the public –and to faculty-- as a cancer center that will treat individuals at any stage in their disease. He points out that two thirds of patients will not be research subjects, but faculty had to provide services to such patients to ensure the institution’s viability. He describes the changes in services this requires and then shifts in the marketing of the institution to the public. The original marketing budget was ‘miniscule.’ More money was directed to marketing and a firm hired to create the log, theme-line, and also to develop a strategy to put MD Anderson in people’s minds before they are diagnoses, so they already know that MD Anderson offers them hope. Next, Dr. Mendelsohn talks about the importance of private money for supporting institutional growth. He points out that patient care generates a small margin of income that helps support research, but funds for large growth initiatives in the physical plant and research must come from capital campaigns. Dr. Mendelsohn explains that the director of Development, Patrick Mulvey, raised the goals for fundraising every year until they reached 200 million per year. He praises the development team and tells an anecdote about Mr. Red McCombs’ gift to the institution.
Identifier
MendelsohnJ_02_20120928_C12
Publication Date
9-28-2012
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
John Mendelsohn, MD, Oral History Interview, September 28, 2012
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - The Business of MD AndersonThe AdministratorThe LeaderProfessional PracticeThe Professional at WorkUnderstanding the InstitutionLeadershipGrowth and/or ChangeMD Anderson CultureThe Business of MD AndersonInstitutional ProcessesInstitutional Mission and ValuesBuilding/Transforming the Institution Growth and/or ChangeBusiness of ResearchThe Healthcare IndustryFunny Stories
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
John Mendelsohn, MD:
Yes. When I began my own research in 1970, it was a 40% chance of being funded. If it didn’t happen the first time, you’re up to 80% if you tried again. If you were good, you got funded. Now some very good people are reapplying and reapplying. It’s hard to find money to do new things. It’s hard to find money to build buildings, and to buy expensive equipment that’s shared rather than part of one particular project or another. Philanthropy is incredibly important for starting up new things. A new faculty member comes. You want to give them a startup package. They finished all their training; they’re ready to set up their own lab. They’re not going to get a grant for 3 or 4 years. They need to know they have a million dollars, or sometimes more, that they can draw on to get their lab program going. Then you need the money for the infrastructure, for the animals, for the sequencing equipment, for all kinds of research resources that are hard to get grants for, and then you need funds to build new buildings in which to place them. So you can’t grow and expand a research program without philanthropy. You can grow a clinical program without philanthropy because clinical programs do generate positive balances, but you can do a lot more with the clinical program with philanthropy to support clinical research.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
As I understand it, donations to MD Anderson increased 500% during your presidency.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
It’s complicated. I think the average amount of money raised around 1992 was $25,000 a year. Then they conducted a major capital campaign, and they raised $150,000 in that capital campaign over a period of three years. Then they were ready to settle back, and we decided we’re not going to settle back. Pat Mulvey, who is a terrific development officer, the board, and I agreed that we would just try to ramp up the standard year-by-year philanthropy. Working together, we pushed it up together to well over $100 million a year. Then we developed our next campaign, which was to raise $1 billion over about 6 years, and which was going to be pushing toward an average of $200 million a year. We actually achieved more than that in 5 years. We ended up reaching a point where we were raising about $200 million a year, which is more than a huge increase over what it was 20 years ago. But this was not a sudden jump. This was the accumulated hard work and determination of a talented development team and a Board of Visitors that had a lot of contacts. And I had the fun of meeting a whole lot of interesting people. Of the very wealthy people in Texas, I probably met half of them during my 15 years. They’re all wonderful people, and some of them ended up giving us great gifts. For some some of them it took a decade before they did, and that’s all right.
Red McCombs was chairman of our Board of Visitors when I came. He has told me he said publicly that he was upset. He wanted somebody else to be president. He thought bringing in this outsider didn’t make sense, but evidently I won him over. I used to go visit him about once a year and ask him for a big gift. He’s a great big teddy bear of a man. He’d always put his hand on my shoulder and say, “John, I’m going to give you a big gift, but this isn’t the right time.” And the next year, the same thing. We announced our south campus, and I get a cold telephone call from him. “John, I want my name on that.” He tells the story, so I can say it. “I’ll give you $25 million.” Well, Pat Mulvey and I wanted more. We’d wanted $30 million.
So I said, “Thanks, Red.” This is the 1st time I’d ever been offered anything like that as a gift to MD Anderson. “I’ll get back to you right away. Let me talk it over with Pat.” I got back on the phone with him again within 24 hours and said, “Red, we so appreciate it.” You know, I don’t want to turn him off. I said, “Red, we were hoping to get $30 million for that.” And the way he tells the story to me is he says, “I put my hand on the phone and said to my wife, ‘Charlene, I better take it quick or he’ll go for $35 million.’ It’s a deal.” Those are the kinds of things you never forget. He was so proud to be able to do it, and I was so proud to be able to deliver it, and the call came from him.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
When he told that story, he talked about how the idea of a research institute really captured his imagination. I’m starting to understand from interviewing people on the Board of Visitors is that development is such a key piece: to find what is going to capture the imagination of a specific individual. That leads me to my next question. Because it’s about research, it’s about science, and that can be pretty complicated sometimes to get laypeople to understand. I’m wondering if you have a particular approach or communication style when you talk to people that you consciously or maybe unconsciously use to really win people over and deliver that message about research-driven patient care.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
Yes. The way I organized, with a lot of advice, the approach to that billion dollar campaign was to create the institutes that we have. The McCombs Institute had already been created, and we expanded that. So we created an institute of basic science, and that produced a lot of issues, of course. I had to make it very clear to the faculty that all space and all appointments were still going to be through the departments, and the institutes were there to gather together centers of excellence and departments of excellence to focus on topics. Dr. Kripke and I had the usual meetings, and we ended up with 5 institutes: the McCombs Institute (basically it’s for translation science, but that isn’t what it’s called); The Institute for Personalized Cancer Therapy, which I now direct; the Institute for Basic Science, which collected all our basic science; a division of Quantitative Sciences, which fed into biostatistics and informatics and computer science; and there’s an Institute for Cancer Care Excellence, which focuses on how to deliver care better. It’s the research on how to be better clinicians from the operations point of view, not from a new drug but from how you organize your care? How do you get the flow better? How do you save money? How do you increase value?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
You’re just building efficiency right into the infrastructure.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
Yes. I drew a diagram, which I spent a whole lot of time on, which built on Michael Porter’s thinking about cancer care that he called the Clinical Care Cycle. I expanded it into the Cancer Care Cycle. It involves prevention and early detection, and then intervention, diagnosis and treatment, and finally survivorship.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, did you have an intuition of this?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
It was easy. I understood how science feeds into clinical care. That’s why I came here. That’s what I’d been doing for years. I felt that it was important for this campaign to have a simple diagram that explained it. I drew a number of different versions of it. That diagram that we have in front of us, I must have put that up on the screen and presented it or put it up in an office 500 times and explained how we are organized. Our central focus is on the patient and patient care, and we’d like to prevent the disease. If you get cancer, we will treat it. We want you to be a survivor, and you need to be followed as a survivor because it could recur. Then the different research programs feed in. I’m pretty good at explaining science. I think that’s one of the reasons we were successful, and I’ve been told that. It worked for a period of nearly a decade.
Dr. DePinho has a new diagram and a new way of explaining it, the Moon Shots. People understand that. People understood my diagram. They understood how we’re focusing around patient care and building all this in. People can understand what a Moon Shot is, and they can understand he has the same goal. Take science and bring it to the patient and decrease the number of deaths from cancer. I think it’s going to help him organize the next round of philanthropy. Now we’re going to say, “Okay, next round. We’re not stopping. These institutes are here. They’re working.” His mantra is to strengthen the science and organize the research better to produce a better treatment or a better diagnostic test for cancer, using technology that’s developed during the past decade. He’s very articulate in explaining that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
You developed this diagram entitled Transforming Cancer Care Through Research. During which capital campaign did you begin using this?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
Well, it was as we were planning the $1 billion Making Cancer History campaign.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That began in September 2007.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
Yes, but the planning for the campaign began 18 months earlier, so I would say we were drawing that diagram up in 2004-2005, because I was using it also to organize the research programs here. I wanted people to break down barriers between different departments and work together and collaborate, but the topics for each of those institutes came out of discussions with faculty leaders. When you’re talking to someone who is considering giving money, the other thing you learn very quickly is they’re going to give money to something they’re excited about. As you’re talking, you’re listening and watching with eye contact. “Oh, I’m really interested in that survivor program.” You continue explaining with a little more emphasis on that program. You were hoping to get more money for the Basic Science Institute, but for that person it may turn out it will be for something else, and you have to meet their personal expectations.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
When you began to raise the bar with the capital campaigns, the goals for bringing in money every year, how did you begin to expand the base of donors outside of Houston, outside of Texas? How did that ripple effect work?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
It depended a lot on Pat Mulvey and his team, and on the Board of Visitors and its development subcommittee and executive committee. We would take leads from anywhere. I was willing to travel, and Pat Mulvey and his team were willing to travel. Board members were willing to help us. There wasn’t any one process. And actually it would be very interesting to interview Pat Mulvey. He’s probably not on your list, but you ought to interview him because he did something amazing. A public university raising money at the levels that many private institutions would give anything to do. We are a public university. People would say, “Well, you get your money from the state.” The state covers only 4% of our budget, so you explain that pretty quickly. We’re glad to get that 4%. It’s $150 million a year, which would be very hard to raise if you didn’t get it from the state. We use it well. The campaign was a process rather than something that happened overnight, and it depended on the fact that the Board of Visitors and our Development Office and the faculty all were behind this. Any faculty member here knew about this chart and could explain it to a potential donor.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
How did the faculty become part of developing these relationships with potential donors?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
We asked them, if you know of a potential donor, please give us a call. And there had to be some trust because a cynical faculty member may have felt, “Well, if I call the Development Office, they’re going to raise something for Mendelsohn’s favorite project, and I want the money to go to leukemia research.” We had a rule that Pat Mulvey and I agreed on. If the faculty member called you in to meet somebody that was interested in giving, we would not try to dissuade them from giving to the area that the faculty member had originally generated their interest in. Many of the patients who gave us money were grateful patients. For some of them it wasn’t through their physician. They just loved MD Anderson, and they wanted to go right to the top. Some of them wanted to work through their doctor, so each case was different. Each person that gave major gifts did it for a different reason.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
From the stories that I’ve heard via the Board of Visitors in particular, development is such a great word because it’s about developing relationships. As you mentioned, sometimes it can take 10 years for a gift to come through, or longer, and it’s about letting that person find their way into the institution in a way that makes sense to them and inspires their passion.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
You want to give them guidance, but you want them to know and feel, in an honest way, that they’re in the driver’s seat. It’s their money.
Recommended Citation
Mendelsohn, John MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 12: Marketing and Fund-Raising" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1428.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1428
Conditions Governing Access
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