The CDO New Business Committee met in San Diego on January, 21, 2020. The attendees of the meeting were: Jenine Rabin, Meg Brzyski Nelson, Ron Frieson, Grant Stirling, Dawn Wilcox, Steve Jennings.

We went around the room and shared the major challenges we face in our roles as CDO’s. We found we had much consistency between our hospitals. The main themes were:

• • Board development
  • Major gift prospect and management
  • Marketing the cause
  • Optimizing donor base and revenue streams
  • Brand challenges both locally and nationally

As a committee we challenged ourselves to explore ways in which the aforementioned challenges could be met through CMNH new business efforts. The ability of CMNH business development to solve the larger list of challenges would allow us to give it more focus in our day-to-day work. Of course, in the end, not only would we be solving our non-CMNH challenges, but we would build more revenue streams through the new regional and national CMNH partners we secured.

What would happen if we took our specific hospital’s executive volunteers and/or our major gift targets, and mapped their needs and opportunities? What if we could then call on our fellow Network hospitals and CMNH to find paths to meet those needs? As we considered this and revisited the list of challenges above, we agreed that this would be a new and innovative way to leverage the CMNH Network. As an example, we discussed of using CMNH national events, like CHW, as a place to coalesce our respective executive volunteers’ energy for the cause as well as develop them as prospects for local and national impact. Our executive volunteers and major gift prospects think globally. Seeing the impact all of our hospitals are having, we believe, would galvanize and expand local support.

This requires a more integrated sales process with Network hospitals. The committee members recognized that we are at this point in our thinking due to our 3+ year journey on the NB committee.

There was passionate discussion and energy around this topic. The biggest issue is working to bring Network alignment around this idea. We are exploring what we could do at Children’s Hospitals Week as a place to bring this discussion out into the broader CDO community.

Other topics that were discussed were around the “Change Kids Health, Change the Future” marketing work being done as well as discussing the current state of mental health care at the respective members hospitals.

If you have other thoughts or would like to join the New Business Committee in this work, please let us know.

Jenine Rabin
Executive Vice President
Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital
jenine.rabin@jhmi.edu

Steve Jennings
Foundation Executive Director and Senior Vice President
Rady Children’s Hospital of San Diego
sjennings@rchsd.org

Tags:

• New Business Development Committee