As I demonstrated yesterday, pro-life investors cannot rely on form 990s to determine which pro-life Pregnancy Help Centers deliver the best Return on Investment.
990s simply don’t give you enough, if any, information about the results you want from a PHC: the number of lives saved from abortion.
Instead, to learn about actual results achieved, you have to go directly to the source: the Executive Director (ED) of the PHC.
What do you ask the ED?
Something to the effect of, “How much does it cost you to save a baby from abortion?”
Blank Stares Are Not Good
If an ED can’t answer that for you immediately, or they look confused by your question, then you are likely either dealing with a PRC (Pregnancy Resource Center) that primarily assists women who are already likely to carry their pregnancies to term, or you are dealing with an ineffective PHC.
PRCs are not really competitors to Planned Parenthood.
PHCs, on the other hand, compete directly with Planned Parenthood for clients who want to get an abortion, but that doesn’t mean a given PHC is effective, as measured by market share, at doing that.
Are You Getting What You Deserve?
With that in mind, let’s return to ThriVe Express Women’s Healthcare for a moment and ask their ED, Bridget VanMeans, the question, “How much does it cost ThriVe to save a baby from abortion?”
In the interview I did with Bridget last year, she answers, “It costs us about $1,200 per saved baby.”
As a pro-life investor, that number gives you something to work with as you consider your possible investment.
Bridget continues:
“So what does that do in my conversation with a prospective donor, when I can say, ‘If you give me $12,000, I’ll show you 12 saved babies’? Where does that put me in the conversation against other pro-life organizations? Not that we’re openly competing with other organizations, but I’m about stewardship. And a lot of people have given a whole lot of money in good faith.
Don’t get me wrong about this. I know that everybody who’s in this movement is in it for the right reasons. But the bottom line is that there has been a lot of money given that has not produced outcome.” – Bridget VanMeans
Bridget is often invited to speak at Pregnancy Help Center events across the United States, so consider her next statement:
“For instance, I spoke at a pregnancy help center in San Francisco. That city is seeing around 17,000 abortions every year, and that pregnancy help center is perfectly happy with saving only 30 babies. And honestly speaking, most of those 30 are not actually rescues. Most of the women were there to get diapers.
And that’s not uncommon. It’s not uncommon for a market to have 5,000 to 20,000 abortions annually, and the total number of babies rescued is under 100. And yet, you’ll see that a lot of money is being invested by pro-life people in those markets. Nothing against the pregnancy help centers, because I know that their hearts are in the right spot. But the donors deserve good outcomes for what they invest in.” – Bridget VanMeans
I love Bridget’s use of that word, “deserve,” and I couldn’t agree with her more that pro-life benefactors deserve good outcomes when they invest in Pregnancy Help Centers.
That being said, as famous negotiator Dr. Chester L. Karrass once expressed, “In business as in life, you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.”
I propose to you to keep that quote in mind as you investigate which PHC in your local area can prove itself, using real results data, worthy of your investment.
Regards,
Brett
Ed Mello
So, in healthcare there has been a push for outcome-based ratings and even outcome-based reimbursements for doctors and hospitals. A number of thoughtful healthcare experts have argued that just measuring outcomes is unfair to those doctors and facilities that take on “the toughest cases.”
Some cases are especially difficult or complex and the doctors that currently agree to take them might not if it would affect their “quality” ratings or level of reimbursement from Medicare or insurers.
Could there be something like this at play with PHCs? Would PHCs located in certain difficult neighborhoods, cities or even cultures be at a disadvantage if the Cost-Per Life-Saved metric became ubiquitous and became the sole measure of success?
Maybe an inner city clinic in New York City is at a disadvantage to perhaps a rural clinic or one located in a heavily hispanic neighborhood? In other words, should there be a “degree of difficulty” rating like there is in figure skating or diving to level-out the CPLS metric? Just a thought.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
Thank you for your feedback Ed.
You raise a great point.
In my experience working with PHCs, it is true, all things being equal in general, that Cost-Per-Life-Saved (CPLS) is higher in more difficult neighborhoods and cities.
You could say that Planned Parenthood has so convincingly won the battle for hearts and minds in those areas, that it is much more difficult for even an effective pro-life PHC to compete.
And interestingly, in my experience, those difficult areas tend to be highly populated cities on both the east and west coasts of our country, and also the areas where the majority of total nationwide abortions take place because abortion numbers tend to follow population numbers.
For pro-life investors, I wonder if the preference of some investors to invest in PHCs in their local communities, no matter if the CPLS is higher than that of PHCs in other less challenging cities, would overcome the possible problem of over-investment in competitively “easier” markets, and under-investment in competitively difficult markets?
I don’t know the answer to that, but my educated guess is that it would.
In my own experience working with benefactors at Heroic Media, I see both tendencies.
Some benefactors are not interested in investing in PHCs outside of their own communities; and some benefactors are perfectly happy to let us invest in ads “wherever the need is greatest.”
One thing is for sure: to win the nationwide market share battle against Planned Parenthood at an industry level, significant pro-life investment capital would have to flow into the more challenging cities on the east and west coasts.
Ed Mello
So, in healthcare there has been a push for outcome-based ratings and even outcome-based reimbursements for doctors and hospitals. A number of thoughtful healthcare experts have argued that just measuring outcomes is unfair to those doctors and facilities that take on “the toughest cases.”
Some cases are especially difficult or complex and the doctors that currently agree to take them might not if it would affect their “quality” ratings or level of reimbursement from Medicare or insurers.
Could there be something like this at play with PHCs? Would PHCs located in certain difficult neighborhoods, cities or even cultures be at a disadvantage if the Cost-Per Life-Saved metric became ubiquitous and became the sole measure of success?
Maybe an inner city clinic in New York City is at a disadvantage to perhaps a rural clinic or one located in a heavily hispanic neighborhood? In other words, should there be a “degree of difficulty” rating like there is in figure skating or diving to level-out the CPLS metric? Just a thought.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
Thank you for your feedback Ed.
You raise a great point.
In my experience working with PHCs, it is true, all things being equal in general, that Cost-Per-Life-Saved (CPLS) is higher in more difficult neighborhoods and cities.
You could say that Planned Parenthood has so convincingly won the battle for hearts and minds in those areas, that it is much more difficult for even an effective pro-life PHC to compete.
And interestingly, in my experience, those difficult areas tend to be highly populated cities on both the east and west coasts of our country, and also the areas where the majority of total nationwide abortions take place because abortion numbers tend to follow population numbers.
For pro-life investors, I wonder if the preference of some investors to invest in PHCs in their local communities, no matter if the CPLS is higher than that of PHCs in other less challenging cities, would overcome the possible problem of over-investment in competitively “easier” markets, and under-investment in competitively difficult markets?
I don’t know the answer to that, but my educated guess is that it would.
In my own experience working with benefactors at Heroic Media, I see both tendencies.
Some benefactors are not interested in investing in PHCs outside of their own communities; and some benefactors are perfectly happy to let us invest in ads “wherever the need is greatest.”
One thing is for sure: to win the nationwide market share battle against Planned Parenthood at an industry level, significant pro-life investment capital would have to flow into the more challenging cities on the east and west coasts.