Dan Pallotta

Daniel M. Pallotta (born January 21, 1961) is an American entrepreneur, author, and humanitarian activist. He is best known for his involvement in multi-day charitable events with the long-distance Breast Cancer 3-Day walks, AIDS Rides bicycle journeys, and Out of the Darkness suicide prevention night walks. Over nine years, 182,000 people participated in these events and raised $582 million. They were the subject of a Harvard Business School case study. He is the author of Uncharitable – How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential. He is also the author of Charity Case: How the Nonprofit Community Can Stand Up for Itself and Really Change the World, and When Your Moment Comes – a Guide to Fulfilling Your Dreams. He is the president of Advertising for Humanity and president and founder of the Charity Defense Council. He is a featured contributor to Harvard Business Review online.

Early life and education Pallotta was born in Malden, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, the oldest of four children. He attended Harvard University and graduated cum laude in 1983.

At the age of 19, Pallotta placed second in a field of twelve candidates and became the second youngest member ever elected to the school board in his hometown of Melrose, Massachusetts. Also that year, Pallotta became chair of the Harvard Hunger Action Committee, an undergraduate student organization that raised money for Oxfam America by hosting symbolic fasts that raised approximately $2,000 each twice annually. He was studying development economics at the time and became frustrated at the gap between the scale of the problem of world hunger compared to his committee's fundraising totals.

During the summer before Pallotta's senior year at Harvard he heard about two cyclists crossing America to raise money for cancer research. It inspired him to create a cross-country bike ride for world hunger. He and his co-chair, Mark Takano (now a Congressman representing the 41st district in California) recruited 39 students to make the journey. During the summer of 1983 they traveled 4,256 miles along a primarily northern route over the course of weeks from Seattle to Boston. They crossed the continental divide at 9,658 feet at Togwotee Pass in the Absaroka Range of the United States, between the towns of Dubois and Moran Junction, Wyoming. The event raised approximately $80,000 for Oxfam-America. Pallotta appeared on television and radio during the course of the ride, including an in-studio appearance with Bryant Gumbel on the Today show.

Los Angeles In 1985 Pallotta moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career as a singer and songwriter. He was auditioned by Clive Davis and had a single recorded by Edgar Winter and sang the national anthem at Anaheim Stadium for the Los Angeles Rams. During his time in Los Angeles he also met David Mixner, a leading civil rights activist, and went to work on Mixner's Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament, envisioned as a 5,000-person march across America to promote nuclear disarmament. He also met and worked with Irving Warner, author of Bantam Books' The Art of Fundraising, who mentored him in the field of major gift fundraising.

In 1992, after a serious bout of Hepatitis A which he believed was HIV at the time, Pallotta decided to seek counseling and entered a 12-step program known as SLAA (Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous) to deal with addictive behavioral patterns that he felt were undermining his potential. His first book, When Your Moment Comes, details these years in Pallotta's life.

Events

AIDS rides In 1991, building on the 'power of the journey' as a metaphor, he conceived of a 600-mile bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles, which combined his marketing, fundraising, mobilizing and motivating skills. Three years later, the movie Alive motivated him to realize his idea. He brought his plan for the event to the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Community Services Center, which was looking for a new signature event. The Center put up an initial investment of $50,000 in risk capital, which was enough for the effort to survive until a sponsorship was secured from Tanqueray for an additional $110,000. 478 people participated in the first California AIDS Ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles, netting $1,013,000 – much more than expected.

From 1995 to 1996 Pallotta expanded the AIDS Rides to include San Francisco, Boston, New York, Chicago, the Twin Cities, Miami, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and Raleigh, North Carolina.

In nine years the AIDS Rides netted, after all expenses, $108 million. The company charged a fixed production fee for its services. It did not do commission-based fundraising or get a "take" off of the top. One hundred percent of all donations went to lock boxes under the charities' exclusive control. The charities then reimbursed the company for its expenses on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Pallotta TeamWorks fees, in a hindsight calculation, amounted to 4.01% of funds raised.

Pallotta was criticized for the large amounts of money Pallotta TeamWorks was making each year and the $394,500 salary he was receiving, described as "stratospheric" for the aid world. His annual salary ranged from $150,000 in 1994 to approximately $425,000 in 2002. Palotta commented that "We allow people to make huge profits doing any number of things that will hurt the poor, but we want to crucify anyone who wants to make money helping them". Clive Wilkinson & Associates (CWA) were contracted to create the new headquarters. The design used raw exposed lumber, shipping containers, and tents.

Controversy In 2001, the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation broke ties with Pallotta TeamWorks, which had organized the California AIDS Ride. They cited budget overruns and excessive self-promotion. They perceived accounting anomalies. The following year, two Washington, D.C. charitable groups, Whitman-Walker Clinic and Washington Food & Friends, also dropped Pallotta Teamworks.

Shut-down of Pallotta Teamworks In 2002, the company's events netted $81 million for charity after all expenses. At the time the Breast Cancer 3-Day program was the company's largest fundraising event series. For five years the Avon Products Foundation had been the beneficiary of the events, which netted $194 million in unrestricted funds for the Foundation in five years. In 2002, Avon informed Pallotta TeamWorks that it would no longer be associated with the company's events. Pallotta TeamWorks began negotiating with another charity to become the beneficiary of the events. During that period, Avon announced a nationwide series of multi-day breast cancer fundraising walks, each with a four-figure pledge minimum, in many of the same cities in which the 3-Days had been conducted and, in many cases, on very similar dates. As a result, the new charity with which Pallotta TeamWorks had been negotiating, fearing that the events would cannibalize one another, decided against partnering with Pallotta TeamWorks on the 3-Days. A few days after the news, on August 23, 2002, the company laid off its entire staff nationwide and closed the doors on its new headquarters. Ultimately, the Susan G. Komen Foundation hired an event company, which was founded by former Pallotta staff, and resuscitated the 3-Day Walks, continuing to produce them through 2017.

In 2012 Pallotta wrote, Charity Case: How the Nonprofit Community Can Stand Up for Itself and Really Change the World, which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. called, “an Apollo program for American philanthropy and the nonprofit sector”. The book calls for the creation of a “Charity Defense Council” to act as a national leadership organization for the humanitarian sector in the United States.

Current work

Pallotta founded Advertising for Humanity in 2004 as Springboard. The company helps institutional funders and philanthropists grow their grantees' impact.

In 2012 Pallotta founded the Charity Defense Council, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. According to their website, their mission is "to change the way people think about changing the world".

Pallotta gave a talk at the 2013 TED conference, which became available for public viewing online on March 11, 2013. and had 3.6 million views over the next two years. The TED Talk also garnered critics such as Phil Buchanan, President of the Center for Effective Philanthropy.

In February 2016, Pallotta gave another TED conference talk - "The dream we haven't dared to dream" It was published in May 2016.

Affiliations Pallotta is a member of the Project Reason Advisory Board.