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In 2007 Booz Allen Hamilton set out to help small nonprofits in the Washington, D.C. area gain access to expert advice and guidance on management and fundraising that was otherwise unattainable for them due to cost. In the four years since, the Booz Allen Hamilton Nonprofit Development Conference Series has grown exponentially and now successfully serves more than 400 unique nonprofit organizations with top tier guest speakers from around the metropolitan area who provide the sorely needed advice and guidance.
2010 Conference: HBO’s partnership with Fidelity on “The Alzheimer’s Project”
By Tim Wilson, Editor & Writer, Boston College Center
Until arriving to speak at the Boston College Center’s conference Monday evening, John Hoffman wasn’t aware the term corporate citizenship is used in such a formal way. But he did understand there is an enormous amount of corporate citizenship going on at HBO, where he is an award-winning documentary producer and vice president of HBO Documentary Films.
Hoffman and Jennifer Brown, executive vice president, Corporate Services and Sponsorship, Fidelity Investments, spoke to conference attendees about HBO’s partnership with Fidelity on “The Alzheimer’s Project”, a four-part series which won two Emmy awards. “The Memory Loss Tapes” was honored for Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking, while “Grandpa, Do You Know Who I Am? with Maria Shriver” won for Outstanding Children’s Nonfiction Program.
Putting HBO’s approach to corporate citizenship in context, Hoffman explained that because it is a subscriber service, the network recognizes that an important factor in retaining subscribers is to make them feel they have a relationship with HBO. One way to engage subscribers, he said, is to use HBO’s platform that goes into living rooms as a way to give back. Because HBO does not have advertisers, it can take on issues that ad-supported broadcasters can’t.
Hoffman told how experiences in the workplace sometimes give rise to issues covered in documentaries. When a colleague died of cancer, it led to a documentary look at clinical trials and the treatment of cancer moving from an evolution to a revolution in which patients are encouraged to take control of their treatment. This generated a further relationship with the National Institutes of Health and eventually “The Addiction Project”, a documentary that explores the current state of addiction in America through the lenses of several highly accomplished documentary filmmakers. The nine segments of the documentary are punctuated by the latest thinking on treatment and recovery by leading experts on drug and alcohol addiction.
After showing a video overview of the documentary, Hoffman said that with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, HBO learned from “The Addiction Project” how to go beyond its TV platform, where the content is something people pay for, to making it a public health campaign that needs to be widely disseminated. And then HBO asked itself what next.
Hoffman explained that his father had died of Alzheimer’s disease but he turned away from the disease as a subject despite having done other health-related projects including one on HIV education. But encouraged by the NIH to confront his fears, Hoffman learned Alzheimer’s is the second-most feared illness among Americans and the most feared for those over 45. He also learned there are things you can do to prevent the disease and the heroic work being done to fight the disease.
“We became very inspired to highlight the science that is going on,” he said.
Hoffman then showed highlights from the extraordinarily moving four-part documentary series. The impact of just the short video clip was evident in the faces of conference attendees. Scanning the audience it was clear some people were deeply affected, as the stories of Alzheimer patients, caregivers and researchers touched them in a very personal way.
After the video was shown, Brown and Hoffman talked about the impact of “The Alzheimer’s Project” and the partnership between HBO and Fidelity.
As a public health campaign the project appears to have been a resounding success. Hoffman explained that through the documentary itself, companion books, DVDs and kits distributed about Alzheimer’s, as well as coverage of the project by other media, it is estimated to have made 900 million media impressions or instances of individual exposure to the project in some way. By comparison, HBO’s wildly popular series “The Sopranos” was estimated to have made 600 million media impressions at its peak.
Asked if “The Alzheimer’s Project” was a profit-making venture for HBO, Hoffman explained that the subscriber structure of the network makes it difficult “to peg profits to any one venture.” Without revealing specific figures, he said the millions spent on the project by HBO was “a small investment” when compared to the opportunity to extend the brand and the return in good will. He noted that when HBO opened its signals to allow nonsubscribers to the view the documentary for a week, it also exposed them to the other programming offered by HBO.
Brown said that involvement in such a widely publicized project was a departure for Fidelity which historically has kept a lower corporate citizenship profile. But in considering the partnership on “The Alzheimer’s Project”, Brown saw the connection between Fidelity’s role in securing the retirement of many people, and the lack of security some of those people had in their own minds, due to the disease.
After “The Alzheimer’s Project” was broadcast, Brown said, anyone she ran into — from clients to employees — the visceral response was “thank you” for making Fidelity a part of the project. She agreed with an audience member who noted that Fidelity’s decision to be a part of the “The Alzheimer’s Project” demonstrated that having an open mind about sponsorships can lead to opportunities. Brown commented that having an open mind requires that when any request meets a company’s criteria for support, corporate citizenship practitioners need to “give it a good listen” and respond.
Hoffman talked about how the partnership with Fidelity along with the NIH National Institute on Aging, the Alzheimer’s Association, and the Geoffrey Beene Gives Back Alzheimer’s Initiative, allowed HBO to make the public health campaign much more than just broadcasting the documentary. The entire documentary is still available to view free on HBO.com and parts of the 500 hours of filming that was not used in the documentary was used to produce a Supplementary Series of films on Alzheimer’s. In addition, there are kits available to thousands of communities nationwide that include DVDs of the films, viewer discussion guides, information resources, and practical details about hosting a community event to promote education and discussion about Alzheimer’s on a local level.
Up next for Hoffman and HBO is a public health campaign on obesity. He told the audience the project has been in research for nine months and it will start filming in July with plans to air it in spring 2012. He remarked that obesity is a complex problem that involves more than looking at the science of weight gain and loss. “It requires massive changes in how we live and are organized as a society,” he said.
It sounds like a job well-suited for the corporate citizenship leaders working to drive change in their own organization.
