Ceca Foundation

Ceca seeks to improve the patient experience by recognizing and rewarding exceptional caregivers. By celebrating acts of compassion and kindness in healthcare institutions, Ceca reinforces the caregiving qualities of empathy, humor, integrity, professionalism, and teamwork important to treating patients and healthcare residents.

Ceca partners with healthcare communities and offers the CecaAward Program to their employees. The program is a peer-to-peer recognition process that creates employee engagement, on-the-job learning opportunities, and incentives to advance caregiving skills and values.

The Foundation provides a turnkey program consisting of proprietary software, funding for cash awards, operating support, and best practices to its healthcare partners—so organizations of all means have access to an effective engagement and recognition program.

Our organization’s goals are threefold: expand distribution, foster caregiver engagement, and attain sustainability.

Expanding Distribution - our distribution goals over the next five years are to increase healthcare partnerships to 220, across the country, covering 80,000 caregiver staff, and as many as 1.5 million healthcare consumers—primarily the poor and elderly.

Our ultimate goal is expand the program to 500 healthcare communities across the United States.

Fostering Caregiver Engagement – Our engagement goals are to increase participation rates from 8 to 13 percent; increase recognition rates from 23 to 30 percent, and improve Partner eNet Promoter Scores by 18 percent.

Financial Sustainability Goals -- Our financial sustainability goals are to raise $96,000 from Individuals, $603,000 from Partner-related donations, and $187,000 in sponsorships per year in five years. Additionally, we expect to reduce our “unit” operating costs (per eligible caregiver) by 48% in 2023.

Cecas strategies for reaching these goals are as follows:

Expanding Distribution - We are affiliating with healthcare associations to effectively reach skilled nursing facilities in targeted regionsthose contiguous to the metropolitan Washington, DC area. We recently developed working relationships with healthcare associations in DC, PA, VA, and WV, DE, MD and NC. We are targeting other state healthcare associations as we expand, including hospital and medical professional associations.

We've also partnered with healthcare communities whose parent companies may look to adopt our program more broadly. For example, Doctors Rehabilitation is operated by Genesis Healthcare, which has 450 centers across the US. In mental health, we partnered with Psychiatric Institute of Washington, part of Universal Health Services, with over 350 behavioral care centers.

Finally, to improve our public profile, we have initiated a public relations effort to raise awareness of our work using free media, social networks, and participation in healthcare conferences.

Fostering Caregiver Engagement - Our strategy here is to provide services our partners can use to drive caregiver engagement and participation in the Ceca Award Program.

These include: cheerleading through CecaTV monitors placed in high traffic areas; an orientation program for first time users; training videos and visits, and incentivization like the Best Nominator Award to encourage teamwork and keep our program top-of-mind.

We also are constantly upgrading our web-based application to provide easy access to our software through smartphone apps (iOS and Android) as well as PC devices. We are introducing gamification and funification techniques to promote usage, and will continue to explore new engagement techniques based on the latest industry research. Ultimately, our goal is to create an environment where the caregivers feel like the CecaAward is their programeffectively, they own it by the caregivers, for the caregivers.

Attain Financial Sustainability - The Foundation is backed by the Lawlor Family, which has donated over $2 million and committed additional funds as needed. The Family is committed to the success and longevity of the program, and recognizes that Ceca must develop other financial sources to sustain itself if it hopes to grow its impact. To that end, the Board and Ceca Management are engaged in a capital campaign to raise $15 million from wealthy individuals, and foundations to fund cash awards in perpetuity.

We believe Ceca Foundation has the financial resources and capacity to fulfill its mission, honor its existing Healthcare Partner relationships, and modestly expand.

We have been fortunate to have the financial means to fund continued operations for the next 3 years. The challenge is to build out additional sources of funding so that we might grow our impact—throughout the country.

On the operating side of our Foundation, we believe we have demonstrated the program management, project management, technical, marketing and relationship management skills to operate our program well. The challenge is to continue to build technology scale and an organization that executes well.

Ceca has developed and provides a host of tools and services to our Healthcare Partners to support our caregiver recognition program. These include:

CecaAward.org – an accessible, easy-to-use online system that enables caregivers, patients, residents and their families to recognize outstanding caregivers, and nominate them for the Ceca Award using their smartphones, home computers or office workstations;

CecaTV – Ceca powers proprietary content on TV monitors placed in high traffic areas of partner facilities. We announce Ceca Award honorees, show summaries of nominations, photos of nominees, and promote caregiver education and engagement;

Evaluation Tools – reporting and analysis that tracks the number and nature of award nominations that are prepared for each facility’s Ceca Award Selection Panel;

Feedback and Measurement Tools – polling software that enables measurement of the program’s effectiveness and blind-pool comparisons to other healthcare communities;

Training and Marketing Packages – educating Healthcare Partner management and staff on our mission, recognition process, tools and best practices, enabling them to effectively promote the program;

Best Practices – continuous coaching and forums among participating healthcare communities that share experiences and practices that promote success.

Since inception Ceca has successfully:

developed contractual and collaborative partnerships with 50 healthcare facilities in in the Mid-Atlantic region and across the nation with an aggregate of nearly 25,000 employees.

educated their employees about the importance of recognition, and reinforced the caregiving qualities of empathy, humor, integrity, professionalism, and teamwork that are essential to caregiver excellence.

recognized about 16000 exceptional caregivers for their selfless service and dedication to providing compassionate care.

honored over 1300 of these caregivers with the CecaAward, and attendant cash rewards exceeding $403,543. (This includes inactive facilities, and nominator prize winners, but does not include facilities not yet through one award cycle).

met or exceeded outcome expectations, and every one of our facilities currently serves as a reference.

developed state-of-the-art software and turnkey service for healthcare communities that is uniquedifferent from any other platform or program.

developed distribution partnerships and a pipeline of additional healthcare facilities for 2024, with additional facilities already confirmed.

built the nucleus of a great staff, with complementary skills and a mission-centric culture thats both fun and challenging.

recruited, trained and coordinated enthusiastic volunteers, who are Cecas face within our partner facilitiesbecoming engrained in those communities.

developed an experienced and effective Board of Directors; and have allied ourselves with an outstanding core group of partnerships.

designed and started execution of a funds-raising plan to supplement existing financial commitment from the Lawlor Family.