Hi Friends, I work for a Health Foundation at a Hospital and we are currently in the middle of a Capital Campaign, raising 12.5 million dollars for a new wing. Our employees are also asked to commit to the United Way and March of Dimes, but in additional our Hospice, Alzheimers Unit, Women's and Childrens department, Caring Committee, etc. are wanting to do fundraisers and I could really use some advise. How do other hospitals handle this? This is a lot of asking? I feel our integrity is at stack. Help, please. Dinah Cason

Dinah, Please feel free to contact me offline at [Email Removed]. We just completed a VERY successful employee campaign and we are actually working with Pride Philanthropy and their model of fundraising. It really works itself out. The basic concept is to focus on your capital campaign and also give employees a choice of other areas. We basically are running a 3 year campaign and had the "project" and 2 other choices including United way. Ours was a check box to allow 15% of the pledge to go to 2 other projects. Employees were receptive because they had a choice and we exceeded our goals. It does get tough in healthcare because everyone wants you to offer payroll deduction for donations to every service line in the hospital. We scrapped our old way of handling it and this new model is working well for us. Every 3 years our focus will change and employees will be asked to re-commit. Hillary Murphy Financial Administrator Phoebe Foundation

I use to work for a regional hospital foundation. Our CEO was also chairman of the United Way drive. He made a big deal out of employees donating to United Way but didn't do much to promote giving to the hospital foundation. It was such a conflict but the VP of Development pretty much had her hands tied. In addition, there was another non-profit that one of the Executive Team members chaired and that organization was allowed to solicit gifts from employees. Needless to say, employees were getting real frustrated and consider the Foundation to be soliciting all these gifts. The only thing we were able to do, was convince the CEO that only one solicitation should go to employees BUT we had to include choices to the United Way, the other Non Profit and our Foundation. We had to track the incoming respones and I recall it being tricky, as only the money designated to the Foundation was ours and the rest had to be passed on to United Way and the other non-profit. It was a pain, when there was only one check or if it was a payroll deduction. I believe they have continued to do it this way, even after I left. It did improve relations with the employees because they were only getting hit up once but it is alot of work for Foundation staff. Denise Stengl School Sisters of St. Francis Milwaukee, WI [Email Removed]