How St. Jude Raised $4.5 Billion in Bequests in a Decade

When Hubert Morales’s wife, Julie, was diagnosed with Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer in 2013, the couple knew they would include St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in their wills. Even before Julie’s diagnosis, it was personal for the couple.

She and her parents in Peoria, Ill., had been big boosters of St. Jude long before Hubert and Julie met in 1984. The family tuned in to its annual telethon and donated every year to support the hospital’s cancer research and care for pediatric patients, some of whom they knew personally. 

Plus, Julie’s mother grew up during the Depression, and cancer ran in the family. Several of her relatives could not afford to see a doctor until it was too late.

Julie Morales died in 2018, and since then, Hubert Morales has remained devoted to St. Jude. A retired bricklayer and groundskeeper, he is one of thousands of legacy donors who have pledged a bequest to the hospital.

St. Jude’s commitment to providing top-quality treatment to children, regardless of their ability to pay, is the way medical care should be, Morales says: “I’m a big believer and hopeful that we will someday have universal health care, but in the meantime, St. Jude is filling that void.”

In the past 10 years, St. Jude has raised $4.5 billion in bequests, including more than $800 million in 2025 alone. Representatives from the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities (ALSAC) — which was founded in 1957 by the entertainer Danny Thomas to serve as St. Jude’s dedicated fundraising organization — share insights into how they did it.

Build trust and give it time to grow. 

Securing a planned gift relies heavily on the trust donors have in the organization, and that takes time.

Ike Anand, who became CEO of ALSAC last year, says that donors’ confidence has to be maintained. Many of the bequests St. Jude is now receiving were added to the donors’ wills 20 to 30 years ago.

“We build it step by step by step,” he says. “The leaders and the founders of this institution — long before my time — realized that building this brand and earning the trust is the most important thing to do.”

Building trust requires what he calls “sacrifice” from everyone on the ALSAC team, but especially from leaders and fundraisers who deal directly with donors: “We live by a certain code, you may say.”

For example, during public events, he will have one drink but never a second. Staff members are discouraged from making political statements or sharing controversial opinions on social media to avoid alienating St. Jude’s supporters, who fall along the full ideological spectrum.

“All of these things add up to build your brand and how you reach out to your donors: the respect you show them, the gratitude you always display, the tone of voice that you use,” Anand says. These qualities are especially important when you need to keep people in the fold for years, sometimes decades.

Invest in technology that can reveal insights into your donors.

When Anand was hired as chief operating officer in 2020, one of his goals was to improve technology to enhance interactions with donors.

“Ever since I’ve joined this organization, my focus has been investing into technologies to not just increase efficiency but really to improve consumer engagement and donor engagement,” he says. 

The organization can now track donor behavior on all its communication channels and tailor content to individual preferences.

ALSAC uses the best features from a variety of customer-relationship management software, including Salesforce and Blackbaud CRM. Its in-house technology team has configured those platforms extensively, developing a donor data platform that connects its email and web systems and draws on a database with tens of millions of profiles. 

In these sophisticated systems, the data can get surprisingly granular. For example, if you were a runner who registered for the St. Jude Memphis Marathon, you would have a profile that includes everything from your fundraising totals to your meal preferences and T-shirt size.

“Tomorrow, if we invite you to a gala, we will already know those preferences and honor them,” says Anand. “That’s the kind of benefit we get out of these systems. It leads to better overall donor engagement and donor experience that then leads to better results from donations for us.”

While these technologies don’t come cheap, Anand says, ALSAC has developed partnerships with its software vendors to secure a discount on pricing.

“It is expensive, but at the same time I believe that these kinds of systems provide you with more value than their cost, and it is in our hands to use it in the best possible way — to drive more efficiency and higher conversion from those systems,” Anand says. “I feel like we’re getting a very strong return on investment.”

Give legacy donors a high-touch experience; they appreciate it.

St. Jude’s supporters live all over the country. Regina Watson, senior vice president of gift planning at ALSAC, says her department uses technology to map pockets of legacy donors in a defined geographic area and arrange visits “to meet with the most people in the easiest and most cost-effective and time-efficient ways.”

Her team’s priority is relationship building. They use technology to automate some lower-level tasks, which frees up staff members to do the human work of getting to know donors one-on-one.

“A lot of our personal interactions with planned-giving donors really are that,” Watson says. “So a lot of that personalization happens authentically, person to person.”

ALSAC employs nearly 30 donor-experience advisers who are paired with legacy donors. These staff members regularly touch base with donors, invite them to events, and coordinate site visits to the hospital’s main campus in Memphis.

It was on one of these trips to Memphis that Hubert Morales got to see his and his wife’s names engraved on the hospital’s legacy wall, which acknowledges every member of the Danny Thomas-St. Jude Society, the hospital’s legacy society. The experience was deeply meaningful to him, he says. “The wall is part of history.” 

Morales says he has enjoyed events closer to home, too, like the annual Evening With the Stars in East Peoria, which features local celebrities, business leaders, dinner, and an auction. He says for him, the highlight of the gala is hearing from former St. Jude patients, along with their medical providers.

“It moves me to see the strong connection between the physicians and the physical therapists and the patients through the years,” he says, noting that many former patients grow up to pursue medicine as a career. “It just shows how strong their gratitude is that they would devote their whole lives to helping others.”