Sports Fan Repays Her Idols by Advising Them on Giving

When E. Hadley Morash moved to Boston at age 12, school hadn’t started yet and she didn’t know a soul. To take her mind off being the new kid in town, she would watch Red Sox

games on television with her mother or go to Fenway Park with her dad to see the team play.

“They were my friends that whole summer,” she recalls.

Sports was also a way to win the companionship of her older brothers, Jed and Jason. “The way to impress them was to know more about any sport than they did,” she says. “I became a sports junkie.”

Ms. Morash, now 27, has since managed to fuse her love of sports and her professional life. In January, she created MVPhilanthropy, a new nonprofit consulting group that will advise athletes on how to manage their foundations. She plans to offer help with grant making, fund raising, event planning, marketing, and public relations. The organization will also provide referrals to legal and investment services.

At the outset, MVPhilanthropy will be financed with a $200,000 grant from the Institute for Civil Society, in Newton, Mass. The institute is also donating part of its office space, as well as staff time. Ms. Morash plans to raise additional funds for the organization through corporate and foundation grants. She plans to provide initial consultations to athletes free, although she expects to charge fees for more complex and time-consuming services, such as developing a marketing strategy.

Before starting MVPhilanthropy, Ms. Morash spent five years fashioning a niche out of the intersection of the sports and nonprofit worlds.

Through a job in New York at Nasdaq she set up sponsorship promotions in which the stock market helped pay for athletes’ charity efforts.

After a few years as an independent marketing consultant during which she continued to work with athlete foundations, Ms. Morash became assistant director of the Sports Philanthropy Project, a nonprofit group in Newton, Mass., that advises sports teams on how to make their foundations and other charitable endeavors more effective.

Ms. Morash said she decided to create her own organization apart from the Sports Philanthropy Project because she wanted to focus on the charitable activities of individual athletes rather than of sports teams. “Working with teams is really like working with a large-scale corporation,” she says, while athlete foundations usually have few employees.

She says such athlete foundations have “much more immediate” needs than sports teams. “They have more legal and investment questions because they don’t have the team infrastructure there to help them,” she says. “They can’t just call the team lawyer or call the team’s investment guy and say, What should we do?”

Yet despite their small size, she says, athlete foundations “have a lot of clout, they have the potential for a lot of money, and they can do a lot of good with it.”

In an interview, Ms. Morash talked about sports philanthropy and her plans.

How do you plan to assist foundations?

We will look at the way they are legally structured. It is amazing how many athlete foundations collect donations without being sanctioned by the IRS to do so, and it gets them into huge amounts of trouble.

We will also look at what their investment opportunities are, and how they are raising funds, not only from the athlete but from corporate sponsors, other individuals, fund-raising events, the whole nine yards. Then we will look at the programs they are starting, and their effectiveness, and how much they are actually attacking the root of the problem, as opposed to just doing surface help.

From there, we will look at their marketing strategy, which often includes events, PR, Web sites, and everything down to how does the person who answers the phone answer the phone. We’ll ask them, What kind of presence are you creating? And what is the athlete doing to help you?

Why is it important for the athlete to be personally involved?

I come from the school of thought that the athlete’s involvement is vital in terms of bringing in serious corporate dollars.

If you look at the amount of money a golf tournament can raise versus the amount of money that 5 percent of an endorsement deal can raise, the time is so much less to write something into an endorsement deal and have that money go into your foundation than it is to spend six months planning a golf tournament that may net you some money, but when you subtract the amount of staff time that goes into it, there might actually be a loss of revenue.

Doug Flutie [the professional football player] is a great example of this. In all of his endorsements, proceeds went to his foundation and he raised millions of dollars over the course of two years for his foundation. Now, if he had had a fund raiser every month, he never would have been able to do that. That really came from his agents, who were really caring and trying to put their heads together and figuring out how they could raise money for his foundation.

Why do you think more athlete foundations haven’t tried approaches like Mr. Flutie’s?

One, these are a very new genre of foundations. This whole market has exploded in the last 10 years. And even more than that, only in the past couple of years have we seen real professionals being hired as the executive directors of these foundations.

In the past, I don’t think enough credit was given to how hard it is to run a foundation effectively, and people thought, Well, my best friend can run it, my mom can run it, my agent can run it in his spare time. And it is really not the case. If you want to be good at it, you have to do more.

Do you have any clients signed up yet?

So far we have [professional tennis player] MaliVai Washington, [soccer star] Mia Hamm, and [former NBA player] Magic Johnson.

What are your long-term goals?

To redefine the standards of philanthropy, especially for athletes. If the gold standard now is to have your golf fund raiser and raise $40,000 and say you have had a great year, I would love to change that. So it’s not, How much money did we raise at our celebrity fund raiser? but, How many people did we help effectively?

And as our alliance is built, an athlete foundation can come to us and say, This is what we really want to do and we are not sure how to do it. And instead of re-creating the wheel, we’ll know of another foundation that is doing the same sort of program in a different part of the country and then maybe we can have one foundation visit the other and create a sort of a big-brother mentoring program. And so we get this community of people helping each other to do good work.

ABOUT E. HADLEY MORASH, FOUNDER OF MVPHILANTHROPY

Education: Earned her bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University in 1996.

Previous employment: Ms. Morash has worked as a marketing official at Ernst and Young and the Nasdaq stock market. She has also served as assistant director of the Sports Philanthropy Project, in Newton, Mass.

Charitable interests: Ms. Morash received a full year’s academic credit for her senior year by serving as a full-time volunteer for City Year, an organization in Boston that encourages young people to spend time helping charities and other organizations. She wrote her senior thesis about the challenges the service corps faced in recruiting and retaining black male participants. Ms. Morash also donates to Save Venice, a nonprofit organization that raises money to preserve artwork in Venice, Italy, and to the Winsor School, an all-girls school in Boston, that she attended as a child. She also serves as chair of the junior committee and annual gala for the Children’s Trust Fund of Massachusetts.

Hobbies: Ms. Morash runs and does kickboxing, yoga, and spinning classes at the gym. She is training to run her first mini-triathlon this summer.

Favorite sports teams: Boston Red Sox and Denver Broncos.