How Joint Fundraising Advanced a Childhood Behavioral Health Program

Joint fundraising is most likely to be successful when it targets a community health challenge that clearly requires more than one organization’s capabilities to solve. Children’s National and MedStar Georgetown shared an ambition to address childhood behavioral health challenges in Washington, D.C., but understood their endeavor demanded a collaborative effort with combined resources.

Significant improvement to childhood behavioral health care in a large city is a tall order that requires extensive co-evaluation, communication, and crosscollaboration to assemble the adequate resources for success. Neither organization was equipped with all the funding or expertise to develop a holistic solution on their own. Leaders at both hospitals sought each other’s strengths to complement their own, and the full expression of those strengths required new funding from donors.

Two clinical leaders with a shared vison
Leading the charge for the creation of ECIN were Dr. Matthew Biel, Chief of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at MedStar Georgetown, and Dr. Lee Beers, Medical Director for Community Health and Advocacy at Children’s National. While childhood behavioral health was already a focus at their respective hospitals, both leaders saw in each other an opportunity to further advance their shared personal and institutional goals.

Collaborative approaches establish credibility within the community and help organizations stand out to donors. Children’s National and MedStar Georgetown embraced the opportunity to demonstrate to potential funders that two separate organizations can combine their expertise and resources to address a significant community health concern. A combined case for support can highlight the many potential benefits of collaborative solutions, including:

• Deeper impact: Two institutions can leverage each other’s unique strengths and experience to build a more impactful solution. Put on display in a case for support, these complementary strengths showed funders that ECIN could cover a wide array of behavioral health interventions.
• Greater financial sustainability: Sharing program resources such as office space, equipment, and staff can lower overall operational costs and free up financial resources for new investments. A financially efficient program has a better prospect of sustainability, which is an attractive feature to most funders.
• Brighter halo: When collaborators bring together their respective brand identities, they often have the effect of generating media coverage and added public awareness of the importance of the cause. This exposure can serve to benefit the program through the attention of additional funders, community stakeholders, and program participants.

Children’s National and MedStar Georgetown have raised funds for ECIN through a mix of foundations, local government, and individual donors. Some funders are new to both organizations – acquired through the strength of the program and relationships introduced by network partners – while others are past funders of one or the other hospital.

Early and ongoing transparency around which funder relations they were willing to share—and which ones they were not—smoothed the process of navigating donor relations for the two partners. Children’s National and MedStar Georgetown allowed their existing relationship (or lack thereof) with potential ECIN donors to determine how the organizations would approach donors about investment opportunities.

The respective fundraising teams approach some ECIN donors jointly, assembling proposals and managing visits through a collaborative process. The teams continue to manage other donors independently, seeking funding for the hospital’s individual contributions to ECIN success. In either case, the two fundraising teams assume positive intent and understand that funds raised together, and funds raised separately, benefit the needs of the program and the communities it serves.

Having two institutions involved in one project can lead to added bureaucratic hurdles and administrative burdens. Children’s National and MedStar Georgetown set clear expectations for their partnership up front by establishing protocols around managing joint funding requests and subsequent fund distribution. Two decisions have proven particularly useful:

• Designate a point person for coordinating joint fundraising requests. Each grant application is directed by a grant-writing consultant, led by MedStar Georgetown in close collaboration with Children's National. The consultant serves as the quarterback for joint proposals submitted to ECIN funders. When writing each grant application, the consultant requested the input of the philanthropy staff member most knowledgeable on the applicable ECIN program. After completing an application, the consultant seeks approval from program-specific stakeholders, including the relevant hospital finance departments, any programmatically involved community allies, and ECIN’s two clinical leaders.
• Distribute grant funds based on program responsibilities. The two organizations split funds generated through joint requests based on their respective programmatic contributions within ECIN, at times using sub-grants to reallocate funds appropriately. Notably, this fund-distribution approach requires clear articulation of each organization’s specific contributions to a proposed initiative, including their individual budgetary requirements, be they staffing related or otherwise.