From Vision to Reality
Launching Fund Development For
Your Senior Living Community

By Jean Bacon, Partner
3B Fund Development Group, JB&A Strategic Partner

Our senior living community is in a major urban area and has a long history of stable financial leadership. During our 30 years of operation, we have maintained a strong balance sheet and overall census of 90 percent. We do not have a resource development program. The current financial climate threatens our reserves. In response, our board allocated time and money to develop a program. How should we do this?

What an exciting opportunity to develop a plan from scratch! Your plan will reflect the culture and rhythm of your senior living community. Together, your senior living community and staff will form the springboard for the plan.

As a first step, the executive staff (your management team) will need to begin discussions around how the plan administration will fit into the operations of the community. You will need to ask: Who will be in charge of the plan and will this leadership position be a new hire with responsibilities for starting a foundation for your senior living community, or with responsibilities for being the development director, and hence a member of the executive team? At this point, you can determine whether fundraising counsel should be retained to help provide structure and guidance.

Your executive team decides the priority for raising money. How will the first money be used? Will an endowment for benevolent care be the first task, or will the first money be dedicated to capital projects? All plans begin with information from your operating budget, which will be provided by the finance department. If capital needs are the highest priority, then the operations staff will determine the scope of the capital requirements. Are the most critical needs to refurbish the 30-year-old community’s interior and exterior, or is there an expansion on the horizon which will require more new additions to community life than what conventional financing will provide? For instance, although there may be bond financing to build a community center wellness area, there may be no budget for the type of equipment that residents and staff can use and enjoy to improve their quality of life. These are all important decisions, and once they are made, the first sketches of a plan are complete, with attractive colorful drawings and solicitation materials for contribution requests.

Most important, your executive team should unanimously support this plan and embrace every single detail. If an endowment is the priority, then stories should be developed which support the need for living expenses for residents who have exhausted resources. So many wonderful stories can illustrate this need and make endowment contributions attractive to stakeholders.

Once the team is on board and well versed in all details of the plan, it becomes the team’s responsibility to schedule orientation sessions with departmental staff to explain the plan and to garner buy-in from all departments of your senior living community.

The next group to get involved is community stakeholders. This group consists of board members, committee members who may be community leaders with ties to residents or to the community-at-large, and new members of a fundraising structure that can include a steering committee or foundation board for the special campaigns you will undertake. Your chief fundraising staff will be responsible for recruiting board members and others who will assume leadership roles for fundraising, taking care to include prospective donors in this group.

After you have assembled leadership and community stakeholders have embraced your plan and vision, you are ready to begin the real work of fundraising!

This is where your leadership transitions to make their own financial commitments to the project and begins to determine how and who within their “inner circle” they’d contact to join them in support of the vision. This initial donor solicitation “seeds” your fundraising effort and will put the larger community on notice for broader solicitations. Now, the resource development plan is officially in place and a “campaign” has begun.

Finally, the real “stamp of approval” for the campaign comes from the residents within your senior living community itself. Often we forget to involve this constituency when it can be the most significant and the easiest support to gain. If the staff and the board and all other stakeholders tied to the residents have endorsed a campaign, it then becomes a relatively simple task to gain resident support.

Resident campaigns can be highly exciting, not only because they can garner significant contributions, but because your residents can be your very best cheerleaders! A sophisticated, knowledgeable donor will always want to talk to an individual resident about the quality of life at your senior living community, and how quality will be further enhanced if your resource development plan is implemented. A resident often has more power to convince a donor to make a contribution than we realize, and should always be held in high regard to provide real, true “leadership.”

With these initial pieces of your first real resource development plan in place, it now becomes the job of management, your chief fundraising staff and your volunteer fundraising leadership to move forward the strategies and tactics within the plan to achieve your vision and keep your fundraising moving forward!