TURNING HEADS

Robert Devonshire Jr.

Kathleen Ruddy’s corner office in this Los Angeles suburb boasts a panoramic view of the nearby San Gabriel Mountains. “Sometimes when I’m on the phone and it’s tough, I just look out at them,” Ruddy says. “It’s peaceful.”

She might need the distraction this afternoon. The executive director of the St. Baldrick’s Foundation, which raises money for pediatric cancer research, is phoning some of her best fundraisers: longtime volunteers who organize the events the charity is known for. To demonstrate solidarity with young chemotherapy patients, volunteers shave their heads at St. Baldrick’s events in exchange for pledges from friends, relatives, and others.

These volunteers are chiefly responsible for the $39 million the organization raises each year, a stunning sum for a nonprofit that has existed for a little more than a dozen years. It is substantial enough to make it the second-largest supporter of pediatric cancer research, ranking just behind the federal government. Ruddy has great news for the volunteers: The charity is announcing its latest round of grants, totaling $19 million. Announcing grants should be akin to a victory lap, but it’s emotionally draining. “The hardest days are when we lose kids,” she says. “But the other hardest days are when we make grants. Because we have to say no as much as, if not more than, we say yes.”

Over two hours, she talks to four volunteers. One of them is Linda Swackhamer, from New Jersey, who’s raised $252,000 to date for the charity through the head-shaving events she’s organized in honor of her granddaughter, who was lost to cancer.

Ruddy asks Swackhamer how she can help her this year.

The volunteer asks, “Could you wave a magic wand and send me more shavees?”

‘They Blew the World Away’

St. Baldrick’s, an innovator in its field, finds itself at a crossroads. With its signature fundraising method beginning to plateau, the organization is trying to increase other revenue streams, in part by giving its volunteers freer rein. It’s seeking closer relationships with its donors to get more value out of its events and to try to tap major gifts.

The group grew faster in its early years than its organizational structure could keep up with. Ruddy has recently made some changes to rectify that situation, to further professionalize the nonprofit and free her up for more mission-related work, like this afternoon’s round of phone calls.

St. Baldrick’s Foundation, which became a charity in 2005, has raised more than $250 million for its cause, helping to speed advances like immunotherapy. In June, its shoe-leather advocacy, under the direction of Danielle Leach, resulted in a new federal law that, if fully funded by Congress, will guarantee an additional $30 million for childhood-cancer research and treatment over each of the next five years.

Unorthodox Approach

St. Baldrick’s has made a mark with its volunteer-driven fundraising and its unorthodox approach to enlisting people to raise money from friends and family. Before St. Baldrick’s, marathons, walkathons, bike-athons, and other athletic events were the key ways charities could ignite supporters to raise money from others. St. Baldrick’s events were far cheaper to produce: They didn’t require a financial outlay for road closures, police protection, or parade permits.

“They blew the world away,” says David Hessekiel, president of the Peer-to-Peer Professional Forum, which tracks the fundraising performance of charity events and releases an annual ranking of the top 30. “It has been a standout in terms of its rapid rise.”

But St. Baldrick’s signature head-shaving events have plateaued as money makers. The charity hit a high of nearly $39 million in 2014 and has raised only that amount or less in the years since; in 2017, it raised just under $34 million.

“That is reflective of a lot of what’s been going on,” Hessekiel says. His organization’s latest ranking of the top 30 walkathons and other similar efforts saw those events’ total revenue drop 7 percent in 2017 from 2016, continuing a five-year trend of declines. St. Baldrick’s head-shaving events, No. 17 on the list, raised $33.6 million last year, down 3.6 percent from 2016.

Nevertheless, among the 20 groups in the top 30 that saw drops in revenue, St. Baldrick’s has the smallest decline.

“It’s not like they’ve gone from being brilliant to not being smart,” he says. “But we’re finding the half-life of a great number of [peer-to-peer] events. A lot of them are facing headwinds.”

The First Cut

The St. Baldrick’s story begins like a joke: Three Irish guys walk into a bar on St. Patrick’s Day.

John Bender, Tim Kenny, and Enda McDonnell, Irish-Americans all and colleagues in the reinsurance business (companies that insure other insurance companies), had begun talking in the summer of 1999 about how to give back to society in return for their success.

Kenny posed a challenge to do something for charity. McDonnell had a thick head of hair. Bender had an idea: What if they asked for pledges for children’s cancer research in return for shaving their heads? (Each knew someone who had died of cancer as a child.)

The men hijacked their company’s St. Patrick’s Day party in 2000 in an Irish pub in Manhattan and asked people to get shorn for cash. They expected to raise $17,000. They got $104,000.

In 2002, the first year after the September 11 terrorist attacks took the lives of hundreds of the three men’s friends and colleagues, 37 head-shaving events raised $1 million. The St. Baldrick’s events grew beyond the founders’ industry; firefighters, in particular, jumped aboard the fast-moving bandwagon early. Last year the charity’s volunteers ran nearly 1,300 events around the world.

From the start, the founders held fast to three principles: complete transparency with donors’ money, low costs, and support for only the best science.

The emphasis on transparency, Bender says, grew out of the founders’ background: Two were senior officers at publicly traded companies. Also, “We all had the experience of giving to charity and then you have to write a letter to 17 different people to get even a little bit of information” about where the gift went, says Bender, who still serves on the charity’s board. “The larger, more sophisticated donors look and say, Where are my charity dollars best spent?”

The organization’s website spells out the charity’s fundraising and spending, including what share of its revenue goes for fundraising (25 percent) and administrative costs (3 percent) and how that stacks up against other charities.

The group’s robust system of vetting grant proposals keeps with its founders’ commitment to only supporting “the best science.”

Grants are awarded based on a rigorous process overseen by the charity’s science advisory board and Becky Weaver, the organization’s chief mission officer.

More than 200 childhood-cancer researchers volunteer to help review grants. Each proposal is screened by three reviewers, who are asked to answer a series of questions pertinent to that particular project, such as: Might the treatment being tested have fewer toxic effects than what’s currently available?

Each year, the money raised determines how many researchers and projects will get St. Baldrick’s support. Rejected applications are sent back with anonymous reviewer comments. “It’s meant to be constructive, to help them get funding — either from someone else or from us the next time around,” Weaver says.

“Fortunately, as the years go by, we have more applications but also more money,” Weaver says. But, she acknowledges, “it has gotten more difficult.”

St. Baldrick’s Foundation

Tattooed Volunteers

St. Baldrick’s hands the entirety of its event planning over to its volunteers. The charity provides what it calls its “volunteer executive officers” with tools and a coach, sets parameters, and lets them invent a fundraising effort that fits with their community.

“A Long Island event is very different from an event at Tulane University in New Orleans — and both are different from one in Los Angeles,” says Bender, who has been shorn every year since 2000.

That level of autonomy has resulted in blessedly few problems over the years, says Ruddy. Volunteers routinely thank her for letting them be involved in the cause; some even have the charity’s logo, a fictional leprechaun saint, tattooed on their scalps or bodies.

After participating in the events, Ruddy says, “People say, It’s the most important thing I’ve ever done, except for having my kids. It’s obviously the opportunity to help save children’s lives. But on top of that, you’re giving them responsibility. They feel that ownership in a way that I think we rarely let volunteers feel unless they were board members of a nonprofit.”

Commitment to the cause and pride in playing a role in it, however, don’t always translate to wanting to get shaved bald every year, as the charity is finding out.

“It’s a big commitment to shave your head,” Hessekiel says. “We’re living in a world where people are working against a bucket list and doing a lot of one-and-done activities.”

The ‘Big’ vs. ‘Little’ Foundations

That’s why a major effort is underway at St. Baldrick’s to diversify sources of donations.

Within the office, St. Baldrick’s staff refers to the “big foundation” (the head-shaving events) and the “little foundation” (every other fundraising effort), says Anja Kloch, the charity’s chief development officer. The “big foundation” always accounts for “in the high 80 percents” of the group’s revenue, she says.

Kloch thinks St. Baldrick’s can get more out of its head-shaving events by targeting potential supporters who are most likely to have an interest in the charity’s mission, such as medical-school and nursing-school students. It could also pursue partnerships with regional companies and find volunteers previously not served by St. Baldrick’s events, where the charity “would be the cool new kid on the block.”

But she also sees opportunity for the organization’s “little foundation” in a number of areas. For instance, St. Baldrick’s recently hired a prospect researcher to identify potential major-gifts donors.

And a program called One Hour: One Child, aimed at building the donor pipeline, has just gotten off the ground. The charity has hosted a couple of hourlong informational events thus far, in Los Angeles and Chicago, where supporters have heard the charity’s story from a parent of a child with cancer, a researcher, and Ruddy. “And at the end, we ask them to commit to funding one child’s participation in a clinical trial,” Kloch says. Supporters are asked for a commitment of $1,000 to $5,000, potentially as multiyear pledges.

Such direct appeals, Kloch says, are new to the organization and its supporters: “There’s always been an intermediary. It’s always been you are asking your friends to give you money, not St. Baldrick’s, because you’re going to shave your head.”

The organization is also experimenting with other events that encourage supporters to raise money from friends and family.

In 2013, St. Baldrick’s introduced the “Do What You Want” program, offering volunteers tools and a few loose guidelines to create their own fundraising event. The program, Ruddy says, acts as a sort of laboratory, letting its volunteers innovate, hoping to find something that St. Baldrick’s might later be able to expand.

The program raised $1.2 million last year, a small amount compared with the signature head-shaving events. But some efforts exceed expectations. For example: A family in a Chicago suburb brought in more than $130,000 over the Christmas holidays in honor of a young neighbor with cancer.

“We were approached like, ‘We’re going to decorate our house and we can give you the donations we raise from people who come to see it.’ And we thought, Oh, what a sweet little idea,” Kloch says. But media coverage of the extravagant light display lured thousands of visitors. “The first check came in, and I think it was for $23,000. And we went, Wait: What’s in the hot chocolate they’re selling outside this house?”

With the number of people who participate in the shaving events contracting, Ruddy and her organization are determined to make them more efficient and lucrative. Some cities have too many events, Ruddy acknowledges; the charity has encouraged some of its volunteer executive officers to merge their efforts.

And it’s an open secret in fundraising that many participants in walkathons and other similar events don’t actually raise money. “We talk so much about awareness in the nonprofit sector that people think that is the goal,” Ruddy says.

St. Baldrick’s reliance on volunteers raising money from others, along with its roots in a particular holiday, can also make donor recognition and cultivation tricky. St. Baldrick’s processes roughly a million gifts a year. Because many are still held around St. Patrick’s Day, most of those gifts arrive from the third week of February through the first week in April, Kloch says, a volume of transactions she calls “absolutely psychotic.”

“We process in excess of a $1 million a day,” the fundraiser says. “I know that compared to some of the big boys, that’s not much. But when you think that the majority of those gifts are coming in as $25 and $50, it’s an awful lot of transactions that need to be acknowledged and somehow focused on.”

Ruddy notes that, despite the organization’s encouraging people who shave their heads to thank their donors, many don’t. “It makes it harder to retain donors, and this is maybe one of the weaknesses of the peer-to-peer model: Not everybody is accustomed to and understands the importance of the thank-you the way a development professional does.”

Finding Partners

Partnerships may prove one way for St. Baldrick’s to keep growing. Through its Hero Funds, the organization has found a way to draw in the many tiny charities started by families who have been touched by childhood cancer. St. Baldrick’s has recruited more than 70 such funds over the past eight years. Donors commit to raising or donating at least $10,000 annually in honor of a child.

The program gives those donors access to St. Baldrick’s robust system for vetting potential grantees and relieves them of the bureaucracy of running a free-standing nonprofit. “It’s almost like a community-foundation model,” Ruddy says.

The organization that began in a bar on St. Patrick’s Day now has 65 employees. In 2014 and 2015, as the head-shaving events’ revenue began to plateau, the charity experienced some upheaval: Turnover grew, and complaints about management were aired on Glassdoor, the online site on which people offer reviews of their current or former workplaces.

“We did have some growing pains,” Ruddy says. The problems included some former managers who weren’t a good fit for their roles, junior employees who were frustrated by a lack of upward career momentum at the small organization, communication failures, and not being able to pursue every idea workers proposed, causing frustration among some employees.

In early 2017, at the board’s urging, Ruddy hired a chief operating officer. At the bottom of the charity’s turbulence, though, was a “big cultural reckoning,” she says, in which the organization came to grips with the notion that its mission was not to shave the maximum number of heads but to bring in the maximum amount of money to pay for research.

In December, the St. Baldrick’s board approved a five-year strategic plan. A cornerstone of the plan is a commitment to bring more money in to finance childhood cancer research — whether or not that money funnels through St. Baldrick’s coffers. The charity is proud of its process for vetting research and researchers worthy of support; it is happy to share its expertise with other foundations or other donors and match them with worthy grantees.

“If we can get more people to support research, that’s a win for us,” Ruddy says. “And most charities wouldn’t look at it that way. They would say, ‘No, you have to fund it through us. We’re not going to share our knowledge and our resources.’

“But we don’t embrace that. And that’s really putting mission first, because the kids are first, and I was really proud of our board for saying that.”