What Has Fundraising for Global Health Been Like During the Pandemic?

COVID-19 treatment center in New DELHI. PradeepGaurs/shutterstock

The pandemic has elevated global health needs to the top of donors’ minds, while raising the profile of the underlying systems and science that address such needs, according to fundraisers we spoke with recently. Although there’s no apparent donor fatigue on the horizon, that doesn’t mean it’s been smooth sailing for development professionals, whose creativity and resolve have been tested along with those at most nonprofits over the past two years.

Fundraisers who rely heavily on personal interactions say it’s been a challenge to attract new supporters; some reported difficulty raising funds for non-COVID-related causes. While bottom lines have stayed steady or risen, it is mostly thanks to loyal friends already in the fold. In other words, as with the rest of us, global health fundraisers are more than ready for the COVID era to end.

Global health is a big, complex topic, a challenge for fundraisers in the best of times. There are virtually no organizations that take on the entire scope of what global health encompasses—improving health for all people in all nations by promoting wellness and eliminating avoidable disease, disability and death. While some organizations focus on big-picture health systems and strategy work, it is much more common for an organization to select just a sliver of this pie.

To provide a snapshot of global health fundraising these days, we took a closer look at four points along the spectrum, charities whose approach to the issue and to fundraising vary quite a bit—Global Health Ministries (GHM), with 2020 revenue of $5.5 million; Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi), with total revenue of $64 million, Partners In Health (PIH), with revenue of $217 million, and the GiveWell Maximum Impact Fund (MIF), which disbursed $560 million in 2021.

Here’s how their fundraising has evolved in recent years, and where they’re headed next.

Global Health Ministries: Relying on traditional outreach, eyeing younger donors

GHM is an independent Lutheran nonprofit started in 1987 that specializes in capacity-building for Lutheran health systems in 13 countries where churches manage hospitals, clinics and community-based outreach. Their mission incorporates many facets of the definition of global health—they distribute medical supplies, offer grassroots support for village health workers, and provide consulting and professional development for health leaders.

In 2020, they impacted 1 million people and, according to Director of Philanthropy Ceallaigh Anderson Smart, increased their distribution of in-kind donations by well over $1 million. At their Fridley, Minnesota, base, just outside Minneapolis, they have a warehouse where more than 2,000 volunteers sort and pack medical supplies and equipment to ship around the world.

Smart says the biggest negative impact COVID had on GHM was in early 2021, when in-kind stockpiles got very low. But in the last quarter of the year, despite loud concerns about supply chains, supplies poured in, and GHM ended up exceeding previous totals.

Similar to other charities in the $5 million budget range, GHM places a heavy reliance on traditional direct mail campaigns. Since Smart came on board in February 2020 as their first staff member devoted to development, she overhauled and increased direct mail efforts, adding new appeals and emphasizing segmentation and targeting. Plus, Smart added monthly asks for specific countries and projects, such as their clinic in Liberia, targeted to donors who had supported those efforts in the past. Despite tripling their asks, Smart is not observing any donor fatigue.

In terms of tactics, Smart added more touchpoints with postcards and calls to major donors. However, she says that with the number of major donations increasing among their 8,000 active donors, she may have to reassess who gets personal calls.

By necessity, she transformed a longstanding in-person conference, where GHM providers gathered, into a virtual symposium with guest experts from around the world, yielding added credibility for GHM’s work. In the past few years, their donor base has evolved to the point that 50% are not in Minnesota. She also took their gala online, enabling them to include donors scattered throughout the Upper Midwest and even farther afield. In 2022, it will be hybrid.

While GHM has added to its donor pool during the pandemic, it was not by as much as they would have liked. Smart’s next target is younger donors. She aims to appeal to them by creating on-the-ground video stories.

Smart’s focused presence has had an impact. In 2020, GHM raised $2.2 million in cash donations, 15% more than in 2019. In 2021, they raised 4.5% more than 2020, including 21% more for general operating contributions—some of the toughest to land. She’s aiming for 8% year-over-year for the next three years, with positive results speaking to the benefits of a person dedicated to fundraising.

Partners in Health: Weary of virtual fundraising, but greater visibility offers a boost

Partners In Health (PIH) describes itself as a social justice organization dedicated to providing high-quality healthcare to those who need it most. They have programs in 10 countries, plus two in the U.S.

Andy Wilson, chief development officer for Partners In Health (PIH), finds a virtual environment to be more of a challenge these days than it was in 2020. “People are tired of it,” he says. The organization has two tracks in its fundraising strategy. For the personal-relationship-based fundraising model that Wilson relies on for outreach with foundations and corporations, the pandemic has indeed created a challenge.

Nevertheless, PIH is ahead of its goals in every individual giving revenue stream, thanks in part to a strong pandemic response from institutional donors. “We are doing well with our current donors, who already know and understand our work,” he says. Another factor is the strength of the stock market’s performance during this time. But it has been “tougher in the early stages of cultivation and acquisition to not be able to interact personally.”

Wilson says the new individual donors are thanks, in part, to pandemic-related advocacy and elevated visibility, which is translating into greater interest and support. Another part is the tremendous response of donors to the tragic earthquake in Haiti, where PIH has been working for 30 years. PIH’s donor base in 2019 was 29,000 and it has increased each year since.

Laura Soucy, PIH director of marketing and donor support, explains that at the beginning of the pandemic, they sent out lots of emergency messaging, increasing their direct mail and email cadence, and started texting to add urgent tones. Then they transitioned to working COVID messaging into all of their campaigns.

An immediate goal for PIH is to deepen engagement through the use of field videos to tell stories, similar to GHM’s effort. But in the COVID era, that comes with its own set of challenges.

While there is currently less urgency, there seems to be no donor fatigue, with COVID messages still driving the most engagement. “For example,” Soucy says, “an email for myth-busting about omicron garnered one of our highest open rates ever. People look to Partners In Health as a trusted source, and feel compelled to give extra.”

GiveWell Maximum Impact Fund: Relying heavily on word of mouth—and podcasts

GiveWell’s Maximum Impact Fund stands apart from other organizations featured here, for a few reasons. For one, it’s at the upper end of the dollar range, with giving increasing from $243 million in 2020 up to $561 million, thanks primarily to an influx of donations from Open Philanthropy (backed mainly by Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna) totaling $91.8 million.

GiveWell carries out few traditional fundraising activities. They don’t run Google or other web advertising or email, and they dabbled in direct mail for the first time in 2021, unenthusiastically describing their results as mixed, at best. They rely heavily on peer-to-peer word of mouth—GiveWell has become well known among tech industry and other donors, landing widespread media coverage—and employ a team of advisers who share results of research about organizational effectiveness with prospective donors.

The exception, since 2019, has been advertising on podcasts. The ads stick to the core GiveWell message of helping donors ensure their charitable dollars do the most possible good. Ads are placed on podcasts suggested by their current donors, which seems to be effective because of high levels of trust involved. Podcast advertising has created successful entrée to new donors, with GiveWell Philanthropic Advisor Taylor Caldwell describing the response as “enormous.” Based on that success, they are now considering advertising on YouTube videos.

What MIF has in common with global health causes at the other end of the dollar spectrum is that they increased their donor pool across all levels of giving and that they are not finding that the pandemic has negatively affected giving to them.

Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative: COVID dominated giving, loyal backers held strong

Another charity that has no structured direct marketing program is Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi). Joelle Tanguy, director of external affairs, is the former executive director of Doctors Without Borders, which started DNDi in 2003 in response to the frustration their physicians experienced when they succeeded in identifying diseases but had no good way to treat them. Tanguy describes the diseases DNDi addresses as less well-known, because they are rarely encountered by the traveler, yet deadly, affecting 1 in 7 people worldwide. And in less than 10 years, she says, the group has delivered nine new treatments for six diseases of poverty, “saving millions of lives.”

Even so, there is a growing need for DNDi’s work. “These neglected diseases are often sensitive to climate, and experts think climate change will make things much worse,” Tanguy says. “For example, WHO lists the viral tropical disease Dengue fever as one of the top 10 threats to global health. It will become even more of a concern as it expands across regions, fueled by climate change.”

DNDi funding comes from government and philanthropy, with multiple grants from agencies in 26 countries and international bodies, as well as from several dozen private foundations around the world. “Our philanthropic funding is healthy,” Tanguy says, “but because of COVID, we were not able to expand our work on Dengue, river blindness and other neglected tropical diseases.”

While the pandemic accelerated giving, ironically, it exacerbated one of their key issues—restricted donations. As experts in drug development for infectious diseases, DNDi was immediately invited to engage on COVID. “But,” Tanguy explains, “we decided not to refocus on COVID alone, but also to advance our traditional portfolio of work on neglected diseases. That was tough because the public focus on COVID overshadowed these other life-threatening epidemics.”

She adds, “The practice of ear-marking funding for hot issues is not necessarily a healthy way to do philanthropic support.” DNDi’s current ratio of unrestricted to restricted gifts is about 50/50, but traditionally, it has been closer to 70/30. Tanguy hopes the talk of shifting to unrestricted funds to enhance the resilience of nonprofits translates to action.

DNDi relies on media coverage and word-of-mouth to find likely prospective donors. Tanguy hopes to move to a stage of the pandemic soon in which they can resume one-on-one dialogs. “We have few resources to spread the word,” Tanguy says. “In fact, we’d love some help with that.”

The most traditional fundraising activity that DNDi had was a gala. With nine offices worldwide, they held it in New York City for just two years, raising $1 million a year before the pandemic forced its cancellation. They did not hold virtual events. “We can’t wait for ‘virtual’ to be over so we can meet new supporters,” Tanguy says.