A Team of Teams Closes in on a Million Dollars
Bill Gillispie’s Walk MS team changes its name to a different song title every year. In 2009 they’re going with “Team Gillispie ’09: If I Had a Million Dollars.”
The reason? By the end of the spring, that’s how much they expect to have raised for a world free of MS.
“We’re on fire this year!” said Gillispie, a supermarket executive currently based in St. Louis.
Then again, Team Gillispie has been on fire every year since 2000, when it began. In nine years it raised $650,000 for a world free of MS. The goal for ’09 is $350,000, bringing them to a cool seven figures.
Have you ever wished you could clone yourself to be more productive? That’s essentially what Gillispie has done. He moves frequently for his job, and at every stop he launches a new Team Gillispie. By the time he’s ready to move on he has a whole new crop of friends and relatives running the new team and introducing new events like wine tastings, silent auctions and golf tournaments (his mom's idea). In 2009 Team Gillispie will have a presence at 14 Walk MS events in six states.
“Once you realize, Hey, you can touch people and raise money, it just takes off. Probably the biggest thing I do is keep them positive, help them keep their confidence,” he said.
Gillispie discovered his knack for fundraising in college, when he headed the building fund for the university chapel. Two weeks after he introduced a “build a brick” campaign, the committee had met its target — four times over.
When he was diagnosed with MS in 2000, “it gave me a focus in my life. I celebrate MS because God gave it to me for a reason, and He gave me a mild case so I could go out and help people.”
Despite the huge number of people and locations involved, Team Gillispie is all about one-on-one contacts. At an annual dinner of 75-100 people before the Chicago walk, Gillispie several years ago introduced a kids’ award. “It’s just a $3 trophy,” he said. But he has watched in amazement how the prize, which was suggested by his father, motivated one particularly shy child to nearly quadruple his fundraising over the years.
“Last year he said, ‘Can I go first? I want to tell my story!’ You’ve moved that child’s direction for the rest of his life.”
With higher rollers, Gillispie nudges and needles and jokes his way to bigger donations. “I have a friend who’s a supermarket executive and we all goofed around. We said, ‘Did you misplace a decimal point or what?’ Today he’s a big supporter. He’s got the decimal point in the right spot.”
Joining Team Gillispie is like getting a free career coach and motivational speaker. The one thing Gillispie can’t abide is a fundraiser who won’t raise funds.
“They’ll sit there and say, 'It’s a bad economy, or they just got laid off, or they just had a kid, so they won’t give.' What I say is, 'Don’t talk yourself out of asking. Let them make the choice.'”