An Interview with the American Brain Foundation

Jeff Schreifels 

When our clients have a big win, we like to shout it from the mountaintops. Today we’re celebrating the work of our client, the American Brain Foundation. And in this interview, we’ll be discussing one of their largest gifts ever, a $4.6 million gift from an anonymous donor. For a play by play on how to inspire larger gifts like this one, listen in for their key takeaways.

 

Recorded 

Welcome to the Nothing But Major Gifts podcast from Veritus Group featuring Richard Perry and Jeff Schreifels. Twice a month, we bring you the latest and best thinking about major gift fundraising so you can develop authentic relationships with your major donors. Here are your hosts, Richard and Jeff.

 

Jeff Schreifels 

Welcome to the podcast. I’m Jeff Schreifels. And I’ve got Diana Frazier, our Senior Client Experience Leader with me today, plus two very special guests will introduce in just a moment. You know, something we hear from fundraisers and fundraising leaders all the time, especially those at smaller non-profits, is that they don’t believe they have the ability to secure a transformational gift. They love their mission and are passionate about it. But there’s a story that’s holding them back from dreaming big, and partnering with their donors in a life-changing way. The story we’re going to share with you today is one of incredible partnership with donors, a collaboration across the organization and key funders, and how an organization that may have once felt they were too small, was able to secure a multimillion dollar commitment to support life saving research. And with that, I’d love to introduce our guests Jane Ransom, Executive Director of American Brain Foundation, and Lisa Dahlberg, Philanthropic Advisor at American Brain Foundation. Welcome you two.

 

Jane Ransom 

Thank you.

 

Diana Frazier 

Jane, why don’t you start by sharing a quick introduction about yourself?

 

Jane Ransom 

Sure. I’m Jane Ransom, Executive Director of the American Brain Foundation, and I call myself a serial Executive Director. This is my seventh CEO position in a non-profit, mostly at women’s and social justice type organizations. But in the last part of my career, I’ve veered happily into trying to fight back against brain disease.

 

Jeff Schreifels 

That’s awesome.

 

Jane Ransom 

And I wanted to introduce my colleague, Lisa Dahlberg. Lisa, tell us about yourself.

 

Lisa Dahlberg 

Yeah, so I’ve been working in the non-profit sector in development for just over a decade, and have been doing major gifts here at the American Brain Foundation for about four and a half years.

 

Jeff Schreifels 

Awesome. Okay, Jane, can you start us off by sharing a little bit more about the American Brain Foundation?

 

Jane Ransom 

Sure. We’re a small organization, we have 10 staff right now. And we are attached to a much larger organization, the American Academy of Neurology, which founded us, and with whom we partner on research. And our mission is to accelerate breakthrough research to prevent, treat, and cure brain disease, fostering brain health for everyone. So we have just two main areas of research I’ll tell you about very quickly. One is to invest in young researchers, early career researchers, to get their careers going with early projects that can then be, you know, parlayed into NIH and government funding. And the other is what we call our “Cure One, Cure Many” initiatives, which are where we invest in research on mechanisms that are common to multiple brain diseases, so that getting a breakthrough in that mechanism, such as neuroinflammation that we’ll be talking about today, will mean a breakthrough for many, many brain diseases.

 

 

Very

 

Jeff Schreifels 

Very cool. Love that. Lisa, I’d love for you to share the beginning of the story, where you received an initial $100,000 gift from a new donor.

 

Lisa Dahlberg 

Yeah, I’d love to share that. So it was one of those things where, you know, it’s like a Tuesday in August, it’s a slow day, it’s a slow time of the year for major gifts, and we get notified that we’ve received $100,000 check. And that’s not a normal occurrence, you know, in our organization, and probably at most organizations. And so, the check was from a trust that had the name of the trust, and that was it, it had no information about the donors. And so, right away, of course, you know, we did the Googling and we tried to determine you know, who is this person, and where, what is the what? The how, and the why. And so we found the person’s name, and found an address that we were pretty sure was associated with the person, and then immediately sent a letter. Since that was the only contact information we could find, you know, just as the falling all over ourselves, thank you, this is incredible, and it was unrestricted, and how amazing that is. And, you know, and we want to get to know you, and we want to understand your motivations for giving this amazing gift. And, you know, please call us. We put our business cards in there and hand signed it and gushed and just sent it off with a wish and a prayer. And, of course, you know, didn’t hear back. So it was several months until we were able to kind of connect the dots a little bit more and do more to proactively to find the person.

 

Diana Frazier 

And what happened next? So I know that that was like the fall, right, late fall, and then you finally made some contact with them. Tell us a little bit about that.  Yeah,

 

Lisa Dahlberg 

Yeah, so it was, it was many hours of internet sleuthing. You know, we had found, the person had a somewhat unique name, although I did find, I ended up messaging several people on LinkedIn, and I ended up at messaging the wrong guy, the first time. But I did find a LinkedIn profile. That was the only contact information that I found. And I did find two people with the same name that lived in the same metropolitan area. So the first guy that I messaged was like, nope, not me. And then the second person, I had the right person, and I just, you know, was like, There’s no way this guy’s even going to see this. He’s not going to reply. This is a shot in the dark. And like, an hour after I sent the message, he got back to me and said, Thank you so much for getting in touch. I would love to meet with you.

 

Jeff Schreifels 

Wow.

 

Diana Frazier 

Yeah, that’s fantastic. And then tell us more about that meeting, when you finally did get to connect with him.

 

Lisa Dahlberg 

Yeah, so I went to visit him then. And, you know, just such a lovely person. And we just had a nice, a really nice conversation. We met for lunch at a restaurant, and we ended up sitting there for two and a half hours. And just having a really like wide ranging conversation, everything from, you know, him kind of giving me an understanding of his experience as a philanthropist to talking about family too, of course, discussing the American Brain Foundation and learning about kind of what his interests were. But, you know, he was so engaged from the beginning, and really made it clear that he wanted to make a meaningful difference when it came to brain disease.

 

Diana Frazier 

You know, I remember in our coaching call after that meeting, we were just talking and you were, you were just so excited. And one of the key things that came out is when he talked about he really likes collaboration, on a lot of levels. Can you talk a little bit more about what you learned and how that particular thing played into the specific initiatives you wanted to explore with him?

 

Lisa Dahlberg 

Yeah, so one of the things that he that we talked about at that lunch was he he said something about, you know, he had done some funding at different institutions, funding different labs, at the university level, or with single disease organizations, but he said he was constantly frustrated by how all of these scientists, he’s like, I don’t know if it’s because they’re competing for funding, or if they just kind of have tunnel vision, but they’re in their silos. They don’t talk to each other. They’re not sharing information. And it’s so detrimental. Like there’s so much more we could be learning if they weren’t siloed. And right away, my ears perked up, because one of the things that the ABF is working on is a neuroinflammation initiative, where we’re bringing together cross-disciplinary scientists from many different disease areas, many different research institutions and bringing them together to collaborate for that exact reason. And so, you know, that just seemed like such a match in terms of what he cared about and what we were doing.

 

Diana Frazier 

I know in that conversation you had just about a year ago that one of the things he said was, I have sent other organizations back to the drawing board for not thinking big enough. Where did that leave you guys?

 

Lisa Dahlberg 

Yeah, I mean, that was a definite signifier to us that he wanted to do something really big. He wanted to move the needle in a significant way and he was serious about doing it. I mean, so that, that told us that we really needed to kind of bring our A-game, you know, and make sure that we were presenting him with the right opportunities that would allow him to do that.

 

Diana Frazier 

And how did you hone in on the ones that you did choose?

 

Lisa Dahlberg 

Yeah, well, what we just talked about with collaboration, you know, as soon as he said that right away, I said, Well, that’s interesting that you should say that, because we’re working on this neuroinflammation initiative, where we’re researching, we’re putting together this giant research award to investigate neuroinflammation, inflammation in the brain, which is one of the underlying mechanisms in just about every neurological disease and condition. And bringing together a really diverse set of funders and researchers, and scientists from all over to work on this problem together. And one of the requirements with this research award is that they are sharing information and that they are collaborating. And so that was a really obvious one to me of this feels like a slam dunk for what he’s interested in. So there was that one, and then, you know, I reviewed many of the other programs or opportunities that we have. And the other one that I presented to him was this LBD initiative that we were working on where we’re trying to find a biomarker for a particular type of dementia. And so, you know, he seems to really resonate with both of those things. I mean, it was a little bit of it was kind of a wide-ranging conversation. And it was like, you know, here’s the ABF. And here are all the things we do and you know, like, stop me when you hear something that is interesting to you. And so, you know, if he would pause, or if he would ask a question, then I would kind of say, okay, it sounds like what you’re interested in, is this LBD. Do you want to learn more about that? He would say yes. And so we kind of just got there through kind of, we started very broad, you know, and kind of narrowed it down.

 

Diana Frazier 

It’s a great example, when you you really don’t know the donor yet at all. And you’re in your first face to face conversation. And you just have to be prepared for a lot of questions and listen with your whole body, right, to see how they’re responding, what the facial expression is. Did they say anything? And being able to pivot, so a lot of preparation there. So I know, this brings you to the spring. So we’re going from August to April at this point, Jane, I know you’re engaged with this very deeply as well. Well,

 

Lisa Dahlberg 

I’m sorry to interrupt. You know, one thing that we didn’t talk about in that initial meeting that I had with him, you know, and I was thanking him for that initial $100,000 gift. And asking him kind of the reason behind it. And he said that he had made, you know, these $100,000 gifts to five or six organizations, and that he was he was waiting to see kind of who came back to him.

 

Jeff Schreifels 

Oh, that’s really interesting. And he said we were one of just a few that did, you know, make the effort to find him and engage with him and and kind of take those next steps. I think that’s important to highlight that too.

 

Diana Frazier 

Yep. So that persistence, that work that it took to actually find him was very important.

 

Jeff Schreifels 

Just briefly, do you think the donor made it difficult on purpose, to reach out to him?

 

Lisa Dahlberg 

I don’t know.

 

Jeff Schreifels 

That would be, that’s interesting. Because, you know, for those that are listening, donors want to be thanked. They want that, you know, and I’ve heard this story from other donors, too, that they’ve sent out multiple gifts of the same amount. And were waiting to see how these different organizations responded. So that’s awesome that he responded to your inquiry and that you guys were so persistent.

 

Diana Frazier 

Yeah. So at some point, he was going to be in the area, in Minneapolis, where you are all located, and what happened at that stage? How did that come together? Because it’s another level of collaboration, right? All the people from your team that were engaged?

 

Lisa Dahlberg 

Yeah, I mean, we, and Jane, feel free to pipe in here. We put together a meeting for him, you know, he was going to be in town. And so, it was myself, Jane, our Executive Director, and then our Program Director. Was anyone else in that meeting at that time?

 

Jane Ransom 

No, it was the three of us.

 

Lisa Dahlberg 

And we just kind of had an a more open-ended breakfast, just a chance for him to meet our leadership, to talk with our program director as really like the subject matter expert, and to just kind of get a better sense of us as people and as an organization. To me that was important to sort of establish that that relationship and get him introduced with more than just me, you know, right.

 

Diana Frazier 

And you had given him two different proposals right? One was for two million and one was for 2.5 million, for him to consider each of these separate proposals. And then what happened?

 

Lisa Dahlberg 

So, we thought, we kind of were hopeful that at that meeting, he would say, Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. And he really didn’t, you know, he, I think, wanted to get to know us, too. And he kind of said, you know, this is great, I have these proposals, you know, thanks for this meeting. This is really helpful. And I remember walking him out and saying, you know, when can I follow up with you, and, you know, making sure that we’re making those next plans to touch base again. So it wasn’t until several weeks later that I got the news. I was calling him to let him know, I was going to be on vacation for a week or two, and I just was gonna let them know, you know, just in case you tried to get ahold of me, I won’t be there. But here’s my cell phone number. And he was like, Well, hey, I’ve got some some great news to tell you. And he said, we’re saying yes to both. Wow. You know, Isn’t that wild?

 

 

I truly thought he was gonna choose one. I mean, I just about fell out of my chair. And I remember Jane was out of the office that day. And so I called her. You were at a

 

Recorded 

It was like the happiest funeral I’ve ever been to.

 

 

great. I called her and I was like, Are you sitting down?

 

Jane Ransom 

That was great. Great moment.

 

Diana Frazier 

Yeah. No, I know that with the proposals, you guys build in a piece about the operations, that you have a project that has restricted funding, but you also do need to pay attention to your operating budget, and that was in the proposal, but then when you went to discuss it with him, tell us a little bit about how that went and and how you work through that particular issue with him and how it resolved it?

 

Lisa Dahlberg 

Yeah, so I, you know, we had this wonderful conversation where we celebrated with the donor, and we were just, you know, everybody was over the moon, of course, and then on a follow-up call, I was talking about, you know, putting together gift agreements, and what is that gonna look like? And I said, you know, and I just want to check in and make sure that you feel good about this 10% for operating, you know, and he kind of paused and I could just tell, we were on a Zoom call, and I could even tell by his body language on the Zoom call that he just was a little bit like, oh, I don’t know if I love that, you know. And so then I, you know, took the moment to kind of say, okay, like, I’m seeing that, it, maybe it looks like you weren’t expecting this, or do you feel kind of icky about it, like, let’s talk about it. Right? And because I want everything about this process to feel really, really good for you. And so if there’s anything that feels weird, we should talk about it. So I’m getting a sense that you are uncomfortable, like, tell me what’s up. And he just, he kind of said, you know, I wasn’t expecting that. And I wasn’t sure, you know, especially for this LBD proposal, you said you needed two million. So if you truly need two million to finish this, then are you going to still need to raise an additional $200,000 if you take 10% out for operations? And, you know, so it was kind of this back and forth of like, you know, he was okay with operating for some of it. And he was, you know, he wanted to keep some of it restricted. And, you know, I think it was a good conversation for us to have. I think it showed both of us that we were willing to listen to each other and have harder conversations. And you know, not everything is always easy when we’re having conversations, especially at this level with this amount of a gift, you know. So what happened was he initially was taken aback by it. But after we had this conversation, he decided he wanted to keep the $2 million restricted for LBD. But that he also wanted to make an additional gift of $200,000 to support operating.

 

Jeff Schreifels 

Fantastic.

 

Jane Ransom 

Which was like, that’s a great solution, from our perspective. We’ll go with that.

 

Diana Frazier 

But it started with, Lisa, you saying what was true, right? You could tell he felt uncomfortable. And I think our instinct often is, oh, let’s get past this awkward moment. But you embraced it and really honored him by engaging him on it and look at the result. Fantastic.

 

Jeff Schreifels 

I love that. I love how you stayed focused on learning the donor’s passions and interests, and then how you collaborated internally to make it all happened because that’s not easy. You have to bring everyone to the table. And Jane, I want to ask you, did you have, did you all have this kind of culture already in your organization?

 

Jane Ransom 

Yes, I mean, it’s always something you have to work on, to have that kind of culture. But it’s intentional, we have created our own team values. I think we did them during COVID on a Zoom call. But anyway, one of them is we work better together. And then it says, we know we cannot do this work alone. Collaboration between diverse individuals and organizations is key to finding cures for all brain diseases. And so that’s a real mindset in the organization. And it’s also, to be fair, it’s easier I think, in a small organization, because everybody does more than their own job description, there’s a lot of overlapping going on, and just talking all the time. But we have certain mechanisms, like there’s a regular meeting, a bi-weekly meeting between the program director and the major gifts officer. And I’m also often there as well, to really talk about what are the gaps? What are the needs, what are the needs the program of director who also is a grant writer, is seeing, and then either swapping out boilerplates and, you know, putting together many proposals for certain donors that happens as a result of that. And you know, then that’s great, Lisa’s being successful, and the program is being successful. I mean, it’s a win-win for everybody to do things that way. I know that once you were in these discussions with the donor, about a gift agreement, we were using our program director a lot because she writes grant agreements a lot with institutional donors. So you know, she gave us that boilerplate because we’re not used to having individual grants of this size, but turned that into gift agreements for these two grants that he made. And, you know, and then we started talking immediately with our person who’s in charge of marketing too like, how are we going to talk to other donors about this? How are going to talk to other institutional donors, you know, how are we going to talk to the public? And started planning right away about how we would use this, to build excitement about the organization and build traction and be able to raise other money.  And just one more thing I want to say is that, while we celebrated all this, and Lisa is clearly the most amazing quarterback in the world, we also celebrated the fact that she couldn’t have gotten on the plane to go visit this guy, without the annual fund that we have in our organization, you know, that the program person was integral to the whole thing, that the marketing person is integral, you know, just really to show the team, that this is everybody’s work, you know? And there’s always a quarterback in every project, but this was a whole team thing. And, you know, it was important to make that point to our board of directors as well.

 

Lisa Dahlberg 

Absolutely.

 

Diana Frazier 

Jane, that’s a great example of the internal collaboration that really does need to happen if you want to succeed wholly as an organization. But there’s another part of this story of incredible collaboration, and that’s with some of the funders and the partners you had been engaging with, actually, for the last six months yourself. Can you tell us more about that?

 

Jane Ransom 

Yeah, the program director and I have worked with institutional donors. So we’ve been out talking with pharma companies, patient advocacy organizations, venture capitalist organizations, you know, saying you all have an interest in this and giving the reasons why, and like we should all come together and do this neuroinflammation initiative. And as Lisa was saying in the beginning, this was a lot of organizations that had never collaborated or even thought of collaborating with each other. So there was both enthusiasm and hesitancy. You know, it’s like, we’ve never done anything like this before. What will our board think? You know, we have just lots of hesitation along with the enthusiasm. So I felt, I was saying, I think to you at one point, Diana, it felt like there were a lot of people standing on the side of a cliff and no one wanted to be the first one to jump. So I was like, we need a way for them all to hold hands and jump together. And this gift from the individual that Lisa brought in was the catalyst for that. Because we were able to go back to them and say, isn’t this exciting? We just raised x, you know, for this project, that means we’re only a couple million dollars away from funding phase one of this project. And we’re going to announce it, that we got this gift, and we’d love to be able to announce it with all of the partners who are the initial donors. And that really did give us some traction. We had several of those people standing on the cliff, not all of them, but many of them joined hands and jumped. So we got, you know, Gates Ventures, a couple of patient advocacy organizations, the MS Society, and the Encephalitis Society, the National Football Players Association, which is concerned because neuroinflammation is a huge part of brain injury, and the WoodNext Foundation. So those have come in, and now we’re working on getting more, but that was a really, really wonderful opportunity that came along to get those funders to move this individual gift.

 

Jeff Schreifels 

Yeah, gosh, this is such great work. And one of my favorite parts of this story is how this experience has been transformative for both you and the organization as a whole. Lisa, why don’t you start by sharing how this has impacted you personally?

 

Lisa Dahlberg 

Yes. So I think, you know, this gift has just been such a reminder for me that these donors are out there, they want to do something transformational. It’s just a matter of presenting them with the right opportunities and developing those authentic relationships. And you know, that this kind of collaboration is such a meaningful, you know, it’s the most meaningful part of my job. Yeah, and making these connections is just so important. And it really just kind of gives me the confidence to think about what else might be possible when I think about other transformational gifts, when I think about working with other donors who care about this organization and care about this, cause, you know, these types of opportunities are out there. And it’s possible. And that’s really a lovely thing.

 

Jeff Schreifels 

I love that. Jane, how about you? How has this helped you?

 

Jane Ransom 

Well, I am getting ready to retire at the end of this year. And what a lovely way to live with this kind of momentum growing, which was, you know, in no small part, thanks to this big gift from an individual. So it’s great to be able to see the organization in a healthy and growing place. And I also think, although I have the ED search process for my successor at arm’s length, what I’m hearing is that we have a very strong candidate pool. And I think, you know, there’s no question but that the interviewers and the searchers are talking about this exact story and about how we’re starting to really get on the map and get this kind of momentum. And that’s attracting good candidates. So that’s really wonderful to see as well.

 

Jeff Schreifels 

That’s fantastic. Thank you, Jane and Lisa, for joining us today for this episode. This story continues to inspire me and I’m so grateful that we got to partner with you on this journey. Now if you’d like to learn more about working with us, so you can partner with donors in a transformational way, the best next step is to get started in our donor file assessment process. This free assessment will show you the true health of your donor file where you have clogs in your donor pipeline, and where you have the greatest opportunity for growth and impact. You can get started by heading to the link in the show notes or to our website veritusgroup.net and selecting free assessment under the Resource tab. Take care, and we’ll see you next time.

 

Recorded 

Thank you for joining us for the Nothing But Major Gifts podcast from Veritus Group. Richard and Jeff also write an ongoing blog that you can subscribe to for free at veritusgroup.net. Please join us again next time.