Philanthropy Membership
Now we are once again entering a new phase and bringing everything together in a philanthropy membership to the Kaiser Institute.
2013 Philanthropy Institute
Philanthropy creates new paths to different futures. And perhaps there has been no more important time to veer from probabilities and create preferable futures than now.
Keynote: The Abundant Future
There is no true scarcity--only disconnection of resources. We live in a sea of possible partners and allies. Yet we often engage and capture the imagination of only a tiny portion. Many of those who could bring resources, intelligence, and energy are right around us. But we must learn to engage these allies in new ways. In some health systems, philanthropy exceeds the amount of money left from operations. Novel partnerships with payers and consumer product companies provide both resources and expertise. And donors work with clinical and executive leaders to develop centers for innovation and new care models. The potential for abundance exists even in apparent scarcity.
Theater of Generosity
Every patient room, treatment area, hallway, and lobby is an opportunity for theater. Patients and families who enter these spaces create stories in their mind. They form narratives about how everything came to exist—the impressive buildings, technologies, and services.
Workshop: Design the Donor Experience
How many people walking out the doors of your hospital today have an emotional connection to your foundation?
High-Performance Foundations
In their narrowest role, foundations fundraise. In their broadest strategic role, foundations do far more-and in the process attract greater resources. Asking for gifts is not enough. It may actually be the smallest aspect of high-performance development. The greater challenge is to embed generosity into every patient experience, bring generosity to life throughout the culture, design experiences of giving that are transforming for donors, and intersect philanthropy and innovation at the highest level in the organization. When these things happen, the ability to attract resources increases profoundly. This broader strategic role requires a new understanding of development. And it requires the engagement of leaders across the entire hospital. To assist in this process this internal communications tool defines four essential and interconnected roles for the high-performance foundation of the future.
Workshop: Generosity
Although our circumstance affects our capacity for generous experience, we can develop a greater capacity for generous experience across a larger range of circumstance.
Generosity Heals
Visit the Generosity Toolbox and Innovation Circle.
Theater of Generosity
2012 Innovation Circle with Leanne Kaiser Carlson
Every patient room, treatment area, hallway, and lobby is an opportunity for theater. Patients and families who enter these spaces create stories in their mind. They form narratives about how everything came to exist—the impressive buildings, technologies, and services.
Often the story that emerges by default is about healthcare as big business. It is a story about high cost, profit, and excess. This story damages the culture and spirit of the organization. And it makes it difficult for foundations to create relationships built on generosity.
Another story is possible. It is a story of generosity, a story about how everything that exists is there because people go above and beyond to care for each other. Everything—from a person to a wall, bed stand, or meal tray—can embed this story in some way. When this happens, the entire space becomes a Theater of Generosity.
No place yet exists where the majority of patients and families moving through a hospital have an emotional connection to the foundation. Nor do they know the specific story of generosity that made their care possible. This is the reality we seek to change with a small circle of innovators.
(Original art created by Deborah Koff-Chapin.)
Purpose
The purpose of this innovation circle is to bring five organizations into creative relationship—each committed to designing their own Theater of Generosity. Each organization is participating primarily for its own local benefit. But because this initiative is so novel, it becomes a natural circle of demonstration sites for others to emulate. Part of the extended purpose is to create a path for others to follow—to show what is possible beyond transactional fundraising and the power of a foundation to become an architect of culture.
Approach
We will work with each site in the circle to:
- Define the scale of the initiative and objectives. Some organizations in the circle may design all spaces within a hospital. Others may begin with one clinical area or unit.
- Intersect the approach to the Theater of Generosity with other organizational strategies—campaigns, experience design initiatives already underway for patients or donors, new buildings, concierge services, etc.
- Create a deeper awareness and engagement among organizational leaders (board, executives, and clinical staff) who must be vested in this process for it to flourish.
- Identify opportunities to embed messaging or experiences of generosity into the flow of care processes and physical spaces.
- Create products to embed. We are designing templates for things such as generosity bedtime stories, meal tray cards, and donor story cards that can be given to patients and families by caregivers. Each organization in the circle will have access to this set of tools during the time of this engagement and may continue using it for a minimal annual fee. These tools give your marketing and communications staff a set of images, text, and print-ready templates with which to create.
- Share learning and facilitate communication across the circle. This will take place primarily through periodic conversation by phone but will begin with an in-person meeting of team leaders.
- Think through the strategy for measuring impact and design possible questions for a measurement tool.
To this partnership, we will bring thought leadership, on-site support (Leanne Kaiser Carlson will come to your organization three times during the year), facilitation of learning and communication across the circle, product templates, and linkage to additional experts and resources as needed.
You will need to allocate the time and energy to create a series of experiments and prototypes within your Theater of Generosity, have enough resource to fund these prototypes—for example the cost of printing materials, and bring a spirit of innovation and venture to the group. To the extent you measure impact and document your processes and learning, this increases the value to the group and makes national visibility easier. And it provides opportunities for extending your process maps and learning history to others should you wish to do that in the future.
Each site will have one lead person, or two when co-leadership is more natural to the organization, who participates as a core member of the innovation circle. This person assumes the role of overall orchestration, but will likely be closely supported by foundation or other staff. Support may also be retained externally (for example, a writer to help with story cards or other materials that may be developed). We have relationships with national designers, writers, and interior designers who can be brought into the equation.
Though the idea is big, the way you begin may be small. The power is in the demonstration of the idea, not the initial scale. Ideas that prove themselves take root and grow. Some of the most transforming ideas in healthcare were established with a few beds.
Potential
The 2009 Bank of America Survey found that sixty percent of high net-worth individuals who stop giving to organizations do so for one reason—they lose emotional connection. Many more never start giving because nothing sparked the spirit of generosity.
It is not enough to ask. Generosity must be awakened and evoked. And then it must be carefully nurtured. Our challenge is to create relationships and spaces that hold the energy of intrigue, imagination, excitement, and meaning. A foundation in its highest expression designs for inner alchemy. It begins the process of experience design before the first gift. And it views all the places normally thought of as outside the purview of the foundation as theater—waiting to tell a story of generosity.