Bill and Nancy Thompson are two modern-day saints. .
They’ve been blessed with tremendous success and wealth, but they remain extremely down-to-earth, humble and very philanthropic. That’s something I really respect and admire.
I never knew them when they were major donors of Smile Train. We connected after we started WonderWork and they quickly became two of our most valuable supporters.
The Thompsons gave us an extremely generous impact loan of $7.5 million. Their loan inspired a few other donors to give us an additional 2.5 million in Impact Loans — and almost $2 million of donations. It was like a miracle – just when we really needed it.
The purpose of the impact loans was to finance direct-mail campaigns that would help us acquire new donors. Like all new charities, we started out with virtually no donors. We knew that direct mail was the cheapest and most efficient way to acquire new donors, but it was expensive, and it took time. You lose money acquiring donors and then over time their donations more than make up for the initial losses.
But while you’re waiting for that to happen it’s challenging. Every day we had to choose between spending more money on surgeries for our patients – which was our mission and passion – and spending more money on direct mail which would help us acquire new donors.
Short-term versus long-term. Every new charity faces this dilemma. The Thompsons understood it – most donors do not. Most donors want as much of their donations to be spent on surgeries – not direct mail. But without direct mail, you don’t get any new donors and eventually you go out of business.
This is why the Thompsons were such a godsend to a tiny startup with big ambitions but very limited funding.
We used our Impact Loans to fund direct-mail campaigns which helped us acquire more than 250,000 new donors. The lifetime value of those donors was between $15 – $25 million.
In the process of figuring out the Impact Loan, we got to know Bill and Nancy pretty well and so we invited them to come on one of our program trips to India. It wasn’t easy convincing them as a never been to a developing country before. I actually brought my wife Cricket out to Newport Beach to have dinner with the Thompsons. Cricket and come with me on a few trips to India and absolutely loved it. Her stories and memories really helped reassure the Thompson’s and they agreed to come.
Their trip was quite ambitious. We took them to more than a dozen partner hospitals and screening camps all over India.
The best part is they met these patients both before and after their miracle surgeries. They get to see burn patients whose bodies and faces have been rebuilt and restored. They watched children who had been crippled with clubfoot walk and run like any other kid. And they were there when our surgeons took the bandages off of blind children and watch them open their eyes and see for the very first time.
They also met hundreds of doctors, nurses, social workers, administrators who make all of our programs possible. They could see how hard these people work and how they are turning tears into smiles and despair and hope in some of the poorest places on our planet.
Watching Billy and Nancy Thompson connect with patients and their parents, with peasants who are living on less than a dollar a day, with nurses who made $20 a month and surgeons who made $300 a month was really inspiring.
The trip was such a success they agreed to come with us on the trip to Africa as well. We took them to see some of her best partners in Tanzania and Rwanda.
These trips really gave the Thompsons a better understanding of the impact of our programs and the tremendous need. The screening camps at which thousands of peasants would show up for on one day were quite overwhelming. More than 600 severely burned children and adults showed up the day we were there and it really affected the Thompsons.
With our partner Dr. Subodh Singh, we waded through the crowds of burned children and their parents, stopping with each child and hearing their story. It was quite emotional and depressing to hear these tragic stories and how these children were all turned away from hospitals because they were poor. That night over dinner we talked about how Dr. Singh and his team were doing their best, but the sheer magnitude of the problem was too much for their tiny 80 bed hospital. Subodh told them about his dream of building a much larger hospital with 225 beds in a dedicated burn center which would be the first and only one east of New Delhi.
We never talked about that again on that trip. But a few months after we returned, I get phone call from Bill Thompson. He told me that he and Nancy wanted to help turn Subodh’s dream of the new hospital into reality. They made an extraordinarily generous pledge of $4 million towards building of the new hospital that would cost around $7 million. Subodh knew that he could raise an additional $2 million and WonderWork pledged $1 million for the project.
We worked on this hospital project for more than two years. We hired architects, an expert project manager from Citibank, and created a budget. After we finally found the perfect land, and right before Subodh was to submit a bid for the land, Wang’s lawyers forced WonderWork into bankruptcy and ultimately out of business. If they hadn’t, Subodh’s hospital would be built by now and providing 20,000+ surgeries a year.
I will always regret that we didn’t get the chance to finish this project with Bill and Nancy Thompson. They are among the nicest and most generous donors I have ever met.
And I will always be grateful to them for helping us get WonderWork on its feet at the beginning when we really needed the help.
