“Brian Mullaney has done more to change the lives of poor children than just about any other person on the planet.”

Professor Steven D. Levitt

University of Chicago

Best-selling Author of Freakonomics, SuperFreakonomics and Think Like A Freak

 

Steve Levitt Is one of the smartest people I have ever met.

He is also one of the nicest.

It’s not often you find people with both of those attributes. Even more impressive is the fact that Steve uses his massive brain not to make massive amounts of money — but to make the world a better place.

Steve Levitt is incredibly selfless, compassionate and philanthropic. It starts with his own family which includes two girls he adopted from government orphanages in China. And it is reflected in his amazing career which is primarily focused on changing the world in many different ways.

I met Steve about 15 years ago when he was a donor to the Smile Train. He came to one of our major donor dinners which we hosted in Chicago and after that Steve started helping us in a bunch of ways.

He came to our offices in New York to interview us for an article he was writing in the New York Times Sunday magazine.

In his article Steve wrote that “Smile Train just might be the most productive, dollar per deed, charity in the world.”

This was high praise indeed and that article helped us tremendously.

Steve also wrote a lot about us in his best-selling book, Think Like A Freak. That brought us a lot of donors and donations that paid for tens of thousands of surgeries.

After Steve got to know us, he quickly realized that 99% of our fundraising came from our direct mail program. At the time we were mailing around 40 million letters a year. The challenge was that our small management team was overwhelmed with data from all these mailings. None of us were data analysts or math geniuses. And to make matters worse, all of our direct mail vendors offered one solution to every problem we faced: mail more letters!

We knew that have the money we were spending on direct mail was being wasted, but we didn’t know which half.

Steve came up with a very innovative solution. He offered to take his brightest PhD student and move her from Chicago to New York to work in our office so she could help us not only understand all the data but also to develop predictive models that would make our direct mail program significantly more effective and less expensive. (He also offered to pay for her entire salary and all expenses.)

The woman Steve sent to us, Amee Kamdar, was simply brilliant.

In a matter of months, Amee, and her team from Steve’s nonprofit organization, the Greatest Good, completely transformed our direct mail program. They enabled us to cost-effectively increase our mailings from 40 million letters a year to 120 million letters a year.

These additional letters helped us raise tens of millions of dollars in additional donations while at the same time reducing our expenses by millions of dollars.

I am pretty sure we were the only charity in America that has ever had its own team of brilliant PhD’s and data experts working on our fundraising programs to make them as productive cost-effective as possible.

This is just one example of many brilliant ideas I’ve seen come out of Steve Levitt’s massive brain over the years.

And he’s still going strong.

As I write this, I’ve been working with Steve on various projects including reinventing the ankle bracelet for the justice system and trying to help Facebook come up with some innovative social good initiatives.

It’s been a real honor for me to know Steve Levitt and to have the opportunity to collaborate with him on such worthwhile and inspiring endeavors.

Steve Levitt is the William Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. He Levitt received his BA from Harvard University in 1989 and his PhD from MIT in 1994.  In 2004, Levitt was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded to the most influential economist under the age of 40. In 2006, he was named one of Time magazine’s “100 People Who Shape Our World.”  Steve co-authored Freakonomics, which spent  2+ years on the New York Times Best Seller list and has sold more than 4 million copies worldwide. SuperFreakonomics, released in 2009, includes brand new research on topics from terrorism to prostitution to global warming.