Episode 267: How to Work with a Family After Loss - It is all About Them and Gratitude
It's such an honor to have you join me, Randall, on this edition of Around with Randall. A great question from Sugg in Kansas City, I’m guessing a nickname, asking about how to handle scenarios in situations where there is loss or passing of a donor and or in this case, a grateful patient. But we're going to tie this into education 1 or 2 times in social service when there's loss, how do we react in this process?
What are some of the things we should do in trying to continue to build, figure out, honor the relationship that we have or had with individuals? And this is a difficult subject because frankly, many times gift officers will run from this. They it's emotional, it's tough, it's challenging. And we're scared to make a mistake. And yet what we know is, is that many times gifts are very much, vibrantly and willingly given after the loss of someone as they consider that legacy or their connection or the value that they place on the experience.
And so today, we're going to try to take this apart in kind of a high level. Let's start as we do from the top kind of work our way down. Is that what we're talking about in one way, shape or form is the idea of gratitude, that gratitude all too often is seen as something transactional, meaning that it happened in the moment.
But we don't understand how that longitudinally or over the long term affects people's decision making and how they come back and circle back as to those moments in life. And then here a moment or two, we'll talk about that more in more detail. The key to all of this is, is that when we walk into these scenarios, we are not here to close a gift.
Air quotes. Because if we try to do that, we are making the gift opportunity purely transactional, which we talked about. It's really more longitudinal. So, we should be focusing on honoring the meaning the connection, the relationship, the memory. Why was it that someone thought that making a gift in honor of in memory of, in connection to the individual, the experience was so important.
It's finding that emotional connection, not about the gift. All too often what I find, what I see, what I hear when I work with gift officers in these scenarios is they look at it as a gift scenario and I'm like, no, no, no. The experience is what matters. Their experience in the moment, whenever it was, they were tied to that, to your organization, to that organization, and also the experience that they have with you, the trust that's built that you're not pushing a gift.
So let's talk for a moment, a little bit about why this all matters. What's the context in all of this is, is that if we look at it from a health care perspective, then we'll kind of tie it back into education, social service, other nonprofits, other philanthropic organizational missions or direction sectors. Is that what we find is that the experience people have is more important than the outcome.
So in health care, there are some great statistics that say that when a patient and or family member goes through an experience or a health care need, while outcome is something we all hope for, it isn't. What's the driving factor in people's choices for philanthropic gifts? Now there is a kind of a side to side part of this side.
Step around research that if great clinical trials are effective, that people are more likely to give to research which is more based on outcome. But if we take that out and we just make it the typical health care experience, what we find is it's about experience overall that drives the willingness, the wanting to engage. Let's take it out of health care.
Why is it that we look back on using gratitude as a lens into some of our educational experiences and say, I'd like to give to that. I've had the privilege of having multiple educational experiences, both as a student, multiple places, as well as not as a teacher per se. Although I think about what I do now as being a teacher, but as the head of philanthropy in educational schools or institutions, and you talk with people and what they realize is that the experiences of many years ago was so powerful in their life today.
So let's take it in from a success perspective. I really value my legal education. I can't tell you how much it gave me a head start. It gives me stepping stones that I didn't think were available at the time, just based on the fact I went to law school. The way I shape and think things. Now, if outcome was the most important, I did get the degree.
I like to make the joke because it's not far off from the truth that I made it possible for everyone in my class. The class of 1997. Unique not to finish last. If outcome was the basis, what was my outcome? But it depended on my experience. It was formidable. The best friends I have in the world, I made in law school, the people I trust the most outside of my family.
For the most part, I made in law school the career I have. It's been based upon experiences and maybe unruly or unnecessary expectations of what you really smart. You went to law school. I can tell you that's not true based on that. On that experience, I'm grateful. So it can be in that framework. It could also be let's take it out of the academic per se or professional.
I had the privilege of working in two phenomenal private, independent schools, one Jesuit, one Catholic, but it didn't make any difference. There are private schools that are non-religious to the same, where the framework of who they are as a person was exemplified in that experience in those years at that school could be high school or college, and it framed a concept of what they wanted to be.
And what they wanted to do to make a difference in the world. That isn't to do with academics. That has to do with experience. All this is to say is it experiences influence behavior both in the short and long term, and they drive engagement. People make conscious choices to do this. The experience itself becomes an intrinsic value in someone's life.
In health care, it's about how they're treated, which we'll talk more about. It's education, it's social service. Maybe it's even delayed. And we'll talk about this from the tactics. It's at their pace. Meaning you're a social service agency or you handle food insecurity housing great. And someone is given that opportunity to be served. And then they go on in life and do other things.
They may come back with gratitude for the experience and the help. Gratitude is about driving connection and it comes in many different forms. The other thing is, is that the research underscores all of this, that in health care, what we know is, is that when you survey patients and families that over 90% say that their experience is really about the importance and how they were treated in the influences, their next health care choice, their experience, not their outcome.
And this goes to say, if we think about education coming back as an alum or if it's social service or whatever, or being moved in a museum, I we love the zoo here in Omaha, and I will always advocate kids one zoo in the world. People say that go Google it. It's true. Is is that my wife and kids, they're down there all the time.
It's a philanthropic choice for my wife and I to support that because of the smiles we see on our kids faces. And frankly, we love it too. All this is to say is, is that gratitude, health care, education, social service, zoo, museums, whatever drives these connections. And it's important for us to always be thinking about that and connecting to people who are going through loss rather than transaction and gift.
The other thing about gratitude is, is that, and I probably should do a pilot. I don't think I've done a podcast on the science of gratitude, although I've written about it extensively in my career. A lot is that it's related to health, that when we have gratitude so we can go back and look at episode 157, I talk a little bit about it there.
There are number of episodes each year about Thanksgiving. I did a quick look on my podcast episode 3207. There are others where I keep coming back to this is is that gratitude in in itself has these healing powers, whether it's how we feel about ourselves, getting more sleep, our epigenetics all the way down to our genes. There's a great study from 2015 and our age looking at how our genes trigger to fight major disease more effectively and more quickly.
When we have a sense of gratitude in our life, is that all of this is that we're living in a world where gratitude is all too often overlooked.
Every night at the dinner table, when I say the blessing for our family, I talk about this. That helps us to be grateful for the things we have, the things that I'm not sure we deserve, but most importantly, help us to share them with others. We're less fortunate. How do you look at your life and the experiences about gratitude?
Drive? The kind of decisions that go on not just today, not just tomorrow, but all through life? Which brings us to the tactical. How do we do this? So what Sugg was asking is, what do you do here? Somebody passes in a circumstance or situation. How do you handle the conversation and what I want to do is I want to break the tactical into four kind of scenarios.
The first is, is that we're looking at it from the perspective of is it a philanthropic conversation started, but no gift occurred. Number two, the gift has been made and then someone passes away. Number three is, is that someone passes away and someone reaches out to express gratitude for the connection, whether they're themselves or it's family member or their loved one.
And finally, the fourth is they just bluntly ask the framework of all of these recommendations and kind of this for scenarios and things I'm going to walk through is the tactical are all based on the knowledge I've learned by building grateful, patient, family, philanthropy and health care through hospice that the lens of hospice is really important because there's an immense amount of research.
And frankly, these are angels who are dealing with families and individuals who are going through the end moments of life, and they do so in such grace, bringing a family through this. I've taught it, understood it, to some degree with my grandmother, you know, 12 or 15 years ago. But it wasn't until my dad, a little over two and a half years ago, where I really understood its value for us to be able to say goodbye in a meaningful way, to give him, I think, a little bit of peace.
Although he didn't really want to go. That's dad. He fought his entire life for the betterment of himself, his family and things he believed in. But it gave us a sense of understanding about how to do that. Well, the hospice research kind of breaks generically. I’m not the content expert, but big picture into three major sectors that when someone passes the first is this first 2 to 3 weeks.
This is about obviously immense amount of grief. It's about high emotional levels. And your contact is condolence only, which makes perfect sense. It's not rocket science there. The second is the next 30 to 90 days where there is, you know, there's the tough stuff, 6 or 7 steps of grief and things of that nature that can be even more detailed.
But the family begins to go through what they call sense making, that they're trying to make sense of the loss, the changes, the daily life that all of a sudden things around gratitude begin to surface. The memories of what you went through was important. And really, you can have some safe outreach and contact in this time. Not to ask, but what I would consider just kind of basic outreach.
It's a gentle connection. At the end of this period, somewhere between 1900 and 20 days, it's there's kind of these moments where people begin to bring this all together. It could be anniversaries, could be holidays, but philanthropic meaning or connection or gratitude becomes more crystal clear. I remember sitting with my mother about four and a half months after dad passed in her kitchen, just six blocks from where I live, and sitting in dad's chair, and mom looked at me and sheet out of nowhere and happened to be closer to the end of the year.
So when she typically in that she and dad would typically make up a larger percentage of their philanthropic gifts, she looked at me and she said, have you thought about the hospice house where dad passed? And I said, yeah. She goes, do you want to write down the names of those nurses? I said, yeah, I've got right here in my phone, mom.
And now I'm opening my son, but I'm not going to the note section where I have the, the, the, names listed. I'm going to my calendar to see how long it's been from the moment dad passed to now. And it was right at the four and a half month mark. And I started kind of chuckling, and she looked at me and she was what are you chuckling?
This is your time frame is perfect mom. There's this moment somewhere pinch different for everybody between three and a half to five months where all of a sudden they begin to think about and as I mentioned, it begins to crystallize as to what maybe the experience was truly like, honoring others in this process, part of the grieving process.
This is really important because it's less important to think about a calendar. I gave you kind of some rough outline of time frames, more about the how you build that trust and create the right level of contact. But these windows are more studied than you would realize. So it's in that 4 to 6 month where you begin maybe the discussion moving toward some philanthropic thought, not a gift, but a thought that someone might have.
So let's take apart the four scenarios, kind of break them apart, give you some tactical suggestions, and then you can go forth and maybe think about how you build in or continue relationships after you. Someone's lost in the in the relationship building process. They've passed away. The first as mentioned was, is that there was a conversation that started about philanthropy, but necessarily a gift wasn't completed.
So this is about creating what I would call a common reality at the right moment is that intent was kind of discussed. It was maybe a naming opportunity, maybe it was a recognition of grateful. You're a grateful patient or family member of a caregiver. Maybe it's of their experiences. We talked about, like with mine, with law school. Maybe it's coming, through the process of having been a recipient of social service, a lot of different ways of looking at it.
But the point is, is that there was a common moment where somebody was thinking about this, and we're trying to reinvigorate that. Let's start with what you don't do. You're not going to pick up the phone and start where it left off. You're going to have to restart the process. So if we look at moose management as a part of this discussion, then we're going to have to kind of requalify in a very soft way.
So, we're going to this is going to lead us to this idea of remembrance. We want to tie this back to what exactly they went through and why it was important or what came out of it. So this is about acknowledgment of the gratitude, not pressure to move them forward to from a qualification to a cultivation. No. So we have language that we can use.
We had some wonderful discussions before we lost Charlie or Bob or Cindy, where you spoke about gratitude, about the experience, about the connection, what I'd like to know, what we'd like to know is why that mattered to you, which it says nothing about a gift. This is about reconnection to the moment or the experience or the emotions of exactly why things were important.
And what you may find is, is that the surviving spouse doesn't have the same connection that happens often. But a lot of times, and even in, you know, having lost dad, as mentioned, a couple little more than two years ago, my mother still wants to honor him, even though she's sharper than attack and has her own opinions and many of them really, really smart and good.
But sometimes you pull that with you, particularly in long standing relationships. I want to honor him. I want to honor them. I want to honor that. And that becomes an overwhelming way of looking at it. So you want to pull that back into, as mentioned, the connection of why gratitude is important. And I'll repeat that language before we lost Charlie, Bob, Cindy, Peter, whatever we were speaking about, we were talking about why this was so important to all of you or to him or to you, to.
I wanted to know why this matters so much.
Frame it around that emotional connection. So the first is no gift yet, but there may have been a conversation. The second was is that a gift was made? Maybe there's ongoing conversation about additional gifts, but there was a philanthropic gift in the process and then they passed away. So this may be your alum who's been giving you for years and years and years, and all of a sudden they're passing and you're like, well, where were we at?
This really brings in things like education. We know from the data science that many times some of the larger alumni gifts come after years and years of separation, because there's a sense of gratitude. As I was talking about with law school that comes to fruition based upon success. And so they begin to think back, well, what were some of the things?
And that may be law school. It could be the fact they've had a wonderful life and it was based upon the experiences nonacademic in a some type of, independent school or a group of friends or whatever. But they've made a gift and now they're passed away. And this brings after the grieving process. Remember, I kind of set that in the hospice window, 90 or 30 to 90 days where it's kind of peaceful, and then it builds into, hey, three and a half to five, six months.
They begin to bring in processes altogether. It may bring a great deal of pride or vulnerability or desire to kind of reassure that things were done. The right way. So they reconnect to things that were important before the passing. And I've seen that again with my mother where she's, just she's amazing that she will tie back the things that she and dad did because not only were they important to him, they were important to her.
And so this things it doesn't mean they're going to give a lot more. But could they would they be willing to talk about it? The key here is, is that you need to immediately acknowledge that connection. This isn't about technical details. This is about impact. This is about why it was important. Why did they choose to make these gifts or he or she made these gifts.
And we're going to separate this idea of the tactical to the emotional. Because if you can find the reason why, the emotional rationale as to why this occurred, boy, is that a game changer about continuing a discussion with surviving spouse or family members. So consider things like that are more individualized handwritten notes, remembrance, acknowledgments. You know, a call that really doesn't have anything to do with giving, but you're just checking in.
Families often want a confirmation that gifts, if particularly that were important to a matriarch patriarch where the patriarch or patriarch is passed, were meaningful, were not just processed, they meant something, they changed that. And we're going to connect the memory of that directly to the people we loved. I can live with this in a very vibrant way because of the scholarship fund we established for mom and dad, I don't know, 17 years ago, in their honor, man, I want people to know because Mom and Dad gave us an opportunity how important education is.
And so we established a scholarship fund, and my giving has gone up based on the memory of my father, and certainly and also an honor of my mother, because they valued education and giving their children. And by the way, with some help from my grandparents, the chance to use it as a catapult in life, not just for money, but for value success.
And I don't mean business success, I mean personal success. So I sense this in feel this. So again, it's about the emotional connection, figuring out the why. That's scenario two. Scenario three is about if the patient passes away and the family reaches out based upon gratitude, a connection. The reason this gets separated is a change. Your approach changes.
This is about listening. This is about active and listening and the engagement, not about asking. Because what they're trying to figure out or probably go through is dealing with reflection of the moment, of the gratitude of the other. They're looking to tell stories, not make a commitment, and they're looking for validation of the experience. So this is where grateful patients or family members reach out and want to thank a caregiver.
This is about, a, widower or widower going through the process of saying, I want to make a gift in honor of my loved one who loved you. And what we need to avoid is assuming that there is a set piece to this. There isn't there processing. So we have to take them where they are and help them go at the speed they want to go.
So you foreseeing conversations early on about what would you consider this? Or in honor of your husband or the caregiver or whomever, we could do this, or any language that accelerates the moment you want to avoid that. Because if they really want to do something quickly, they'll tell you. But what they don't want to do is to be pushed into something so families will come back later.
Individuals or surviving spouse will come back later, sometimes months or even years later, with a philanthropic intent to make a connection.
And even if they don't, you want their experience to be so good with you that they become an advocate. Even the gifts isn't. Maybe as large as you want. You want them to be an advocate for the way in which you're treated them. The end of the day, which, as I always say, were Sherpas carrying the luggage or the whatever the supplies, whatever it might be, whatever they need to their gift, so they don't have to worry about the big picture.
That means not pushing them. We follow behind them. And so it's up if, if, if a loved one passes that that donor if patient whatever, and they family reaches out, don't push them. Walk with them. The last is they just bluntly come and ask about honoring somebody somehow, someway, i.e. we'd like to make a gift in honor of dad who passed, or we'd like to make a gift in honor of the caregivers who were part of the process.
What they're doing is, is they're inviting philanthropy. Now, this is the one exception about not pushing that. You have permission to say, what is it that you want? Offer them options, not direction, with lots of different ways of doing this. Let me give you a couple of different examples that might serve as ways in which this could be done.
Emphasize the flexibility, the time frame nobody's pushing. And this actually normalizes a delay because what they've done is they've said, I'm ready. You will find this occasionally, very quickly after someone's passing, and they and the loved one wants to do something or family. Many times it's actually delayed. And so that flexibility, that conversation about what options are available, that it's value based, you're going to keep it simple.
There's no rush. It's critically important for scenarios in practical ways. You can build relationships or continue to build more deeply, held more connective relationship with more people, depending on the circumstances. When someone dies, once we lose someone. The key here are three operational principles. Grief outranks goals. That silence is also respectful. And when I say silence, there's their silence.
And then there what I call pseudo silence. Man, the best thing that I ever experienced, which had nothing to do with thank God it wasn't, but didn't deal with death, was when our son was in the hospital. I think it was the second time when he was I don't, at that point a month old. We lived in hospitals for six for six months.
It kind of blends together. And I got a text message from a friend of mine who said, I'm in the lobby, I'm going to be here for an hour. If you can come down, I'd love to give you a hug, buy a cup of coffee, and I don't want anything. If you don't have time, no problem. That's what I call pseudo silence.
I'm there, but I'm not pressing. That's what we should be as gift officers. I'm here, but I'm here for you. How you want me. The lastly is. Is that the experience? Not only of whatever they went through with health care, education, social work, or I should say, and or with us Trumps is more important than any gift we do.
If you align those principles that grief outranks, goals, that silence is respectful pseudoscience as well. And lastly, that experience, either when it happened or afterwards, when they're building that relationship with us, is more important. You will succeed because you put them at the forefront. And isn't that the essence of what we do in philanthropy is gift officers in that our goal?
This is just highly emotional time frames. If we just do the things we normally do, we're in pretty good shape. I would advocate that success isn't about a gift. Success is. Did we honor the gratitude? Did we respond in a meaningful way? Does the family seem to feel as if we treated them not as a donor, but as someone who's a part of our life, that this is an ethical path to get to an effective outcome.
But I'm not going to define the outcome they have to a gift for the relationship. Big gift, small gift, volunteering, whatever. Because families will never forget how you showed up when nothing was being asked. It's what I tell my kids. People will remember, excuse me. People will forget what you say, but they'll never forget how you make them feel.
And there's never a point in life that's more important when somebody is in grief to make them feel like you care.
Don't forget to check out the blogs at HallettPhilanthropy.com. Two per week getting RSS feed I ran a report. I didn't know I could do this. There's a lot of people reading the blogs, I appreciate it. Thank you. 90 seconds each. I don't do any more than that. You know about 4 or 500 words, two per week give you something to think about in philanthropy, in life, something to just say, yeah, that's interesting.
Hopefully. And if you'd like to reach out to me like Sugg and the last 4 or 5 podcasts are all based upon questions, recommendations, podcast@hallettphilanthropy.com. Love to take one of your subjects, see what I can do with it. We live in a time when we need philanthropy. We need nonprofits because it's the gap. As I always talk about, between for profit who wants to make money?
But some things aren't profitable and government service, which is trying to do its best but tends not to be that efficient and effective. And in the middle, it's this idea of nonprofits and philanthropy where the gap fillers, you're a gap filler. You make a difference in the life and being of the people that your organization serves. Whether you're a board member, a CEO, gift officer, database, whatever volunteer all of this, those roles play a critical construct in being able to produce the work that's done to serve others.
Which brings me to my favorite saying some people make things happen, some people watch things happen. Then there are those who wondered what happen. You're someone who makes things happen for the people, places, things, organizations, moments that have people have elements of wondering what happened. Pretty cool way to spend a career. I hope you take a moment to remember that, to think about it and how you made a difference today, because that is a way to go home, put a smile on your face and say, today was a great day.
I'll look forward to seeing you the next time. Right back here on the next edition of Around with Randall. Don't forget. Make it a great day.