Brian Mullaney first realized he was interested in philanthropy after watching a little girl with cleft lip get reconstruction surgery while he was visiting China in 1994.

‘I saw the girl holding the mirror up, speechless,’ Mullaney said. ‘She’s just totally fine, and one tear came out of her eye. I felt like I witnessed a miracle. In less than an hour, you can transform a child’s face for only $250. I was in awe.’

Mullaney co-founded his own cleft lip and cleft pallet philanthropy, Smile Train, in 1999, which has performed 500,000 surgeries in the past decade. Smile Train helped Mullaney win an Oscar in 2008 for a documentary, ‘Smile Pinki,’ about a 7-year-old girl born with a severe cleft lip and the surgery Smile Train performed on her.

He spoke to Syracuse University students in the Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium Tuesday night about the charity’s success, which he partly attributes to its advertising and public relations strategy. He also focused on how students can apply their advertising and marketing knowledge to promote philanthropic organizations.

‘We are the only major charity in America that does direct-response advertising,’ Mullaney said. ‘We run full-page New York Times ads. We are about launch and learn versus sitting around discussing people’s opinions.’

Mullaney’s advertising background helped him run Smile Train more like a business compared to other philanthropic organizations, he said. He outlined the progress of his advertising career, from creating print ads and brochures during his days at Harvard University to creating his own ad agency in 1990.

In his discussion, Mullaney showed a graph comparing the number of surgeries Smile Train has completed since its founding to the number of surgeries Operation Smile, a rival cleft charity, has completed since it was created. The results for Smile Train were significantly stronger.

‘Smile Train is predicated on a totally different strategy,’ Mullaney said. ‘We help local surgeons do the surgeries rather than flying the American doctor in.’

Mullaney showed a demonstration of the 3-D images they use that zone in on a child’s problem and show the step-by-step process of how it is reconstructed.

According to Mullaney, one thing that spurred his interest in this kind of philanthropy was the fact that cleft lip and cleft palate deformities were often overlooked.

‘You never see it on the front of The New York Times,’ he said. He noted that malaria and AIDS are so prevalent in the news and that there is little that can be done to treat those diseases, while cleft lip and cleft palate deformities can be fixed in less than an hour.

Mullaney’s passion for this kind of charity not only stems from the need to promote cleft lip and cleft palate deformities, but also from his first-hand experiences working with the children and doctors.

‘I always wanted to do charity work because I always felt that it is for the donors more than the participants. I wanted something meaningful. I ended up with a mission group flying around and actually seeing the slums and refugee camps. It was really tangible and real,’ he said.

Jillian Duff, a junior advertising major, said Mullaney’s talk inspired her to get involved with a philanthropic organization.

‘This was really inspirational because I’ve thought about working in nonprofit before but didn’t know that they could actually achieve so much,’ she said.

In his concluding statements, Mullaney left the audience with career advice: trust your gut as you go out into the market, don’t think you are too young, think big and accept failures and consider the nonprofit world to use your talents toward a very good cause.

‘There are so many jobs with good causes that need good people,’ Mullaney said. ‘This is a huge opportunity to work for a great cause that you’re proud of.’

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Published on February 2, 2010 at 12:00 pm