Katie was named President & CEO of Hoblitzelle Foundation in January 2018, continuing a treasured, multi-generational connection with the Foundation. Her grandfather, Lynn Harris, worked alongside Mr. Hoblitzelle for decades, and her father, Paul W. Harris, served the Foundation from 1986 until his retirement in 2017. Katie joined the Foundation staff in 2016 and now leads its efforts to carry forward the legacy of giving established by Karl Hoblitzelle.
In her role, Katie oversees the Foundation’s grantmaking, finances, and investments and engages directly with nonprofit partners. She fosters active connections across the Dallas/Fort Worth philanthropic landscape and the broader Texas nonprofit community.
A Dallas native, Katie earned a Bachelor of Science in Accounting from Texas A&M University and a Master of Business Administration from SMU. Outside of work, she enjoys staying active and spending time with friends and her two sons.
So, what if we start with you giving me a rundown on how you found your way into the arts world? Are you an artist yourself?
I’m a CPA by trade and by education, so naturally I am a numbers girl. Personally, I’m more of a performing arts consumer, but I have an appreciation for what the arts can do for a community…
For that reason, Hoblitzelle Foundation’s grantmaking includes the arts. We were started in 1942 by Karl Hoblitzelle and his wife Esther, wonderful local philanthropists, who wanted to make Dallas a great place to live. He had made money in the arts space through his company, Interstate Theater Company. They built beautiful theaters throughout the Southwest, originally for vaudeville performances but eventually for movies. The Majestic Theater in downtown Dallas was the crown jewel of his theater empire; about 25 theaters are still open today in some form.
Oh, the Majestic is beautiful!
The top couple of floors of the Majestic are office space. The company was headquartered there, and now it serves as the offices for the City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture.
How has the foundation’s work evolved over the 86-year history?
We are an all-capital funder, meaning we prioritize providing nonprofits with things that have a multi-year life. We don’t fund operations or programs at all, which is a unique space in the market. Mr. Hoblitzelle articulated on multiple occasions that he was happy to fund the things that were hard to fundraise for, or things that equipped staff to do their jobs well. We support plenty of new construction, but also fund renovations, technology, HVAC repair, etc.
In the arts space, this means we have helped build theaters and museums, renovate exhibition spaces, purchase equipment and lighting, and supply technology. We have given over $28 million to arts organizations over the life of the foundation, which is about 10 percent of our total giving.
Katie Robbins with the MMIAM 13 students and professors in Italy. Credit: Megan Heber’s archives.
So how did you get connected to the MMIAM program?
That is a great story about great people. But that is the end of the story.
To accurately forecast my grant budget, I needed to track the nonprofits raising large amounts of money for capital renovations and new facilities. Once I compiled the list, the total number of active campaigns was shocking—over 70 and billions of dollars—but it made sense. With the age of our city, many of the cultural, medical, and civic assets that were built in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s were all aging out of service at the same time.
When you put all the campaigns on paper, you realize two things. One, there’s not enough philanthropic capital for all these campaigns to succeed. And two, smaller and mid-sized organizations often don’t have the $50,000 or the $100,000 for a feasibility study and end up launching a campaign that is not right-sized.
So about a year ago, I started to think about building an online, AI-powered tool that could help. So much of the data needed to assess readiness is public information; it just needed to be captured and displayed in an easy-to-digest way. Public information could be paired with some basic governance questions to provide a decent assessment and potential alternatives, like considering co-location.
As funders, we’re aware of nonprofits that have excess capacity. For example, someone may be looking to rent excess capacity, but they don’t know how to get the word out, and the people looking for space don’t have time to think about who around them might have extra.
The idea evolved into this democratization of feasibility studies. The report could show where the nonprofit was strong, areas to strengthen, and considerations such as co-location and banking relationships that could help a nonprofit be more informed. I worked on it last fall with ChatGPT and got it to the point of needing some technology assistance. Near the holidays, I began to think that it had potential as a project for an SMU class and reached out to the new provost.
The provost thought the idea sounded interesting and scheduled a meeting in late January with a couple of different groups across campus that could take on the project. We all gathered for lunch, where I introduced the idea for the readiness assessment tool. Megan Heber was there, and she and I just clicked. I could tell immediately she shared my vision and thought it could be helpful in strengthening the nonprofit community. We kept in communication throughout the spring, and she came to me in late April and said that she’d talked to Greg Warden and François Colbert about their MMIAM students working on this project in the afternoons when they’re in Italy.
Of course, I was thrilled, but I wanted to be sure that it was additive to the curriculum and something the students would enjoy. Megan indicated that she liked that it was a technology-based, AI-initiated project—they hadn’t done something like that—and that, while not every person in the program will be launching capital campaigns, knowing how to do so, especially from a funder’s perspective, would be beneficial.
So that’s how I ended up in Italy. And that is the link back to people. Megan, Greg, and François were generous with their time and the student’s time to help bring this idea to life.
Megan Heber and Katie Robbins in Rome. Credit: Megan Heber’s archives.
It’s interesting that they didn’t do it during the Dallas semester.
I hadn’t discussed the idea with SMU until after the fall semester was over. I do think that some students found it interesting to loop back to the fundraising principles they learned at the beginning of the program. Perhaps this tool can be used in the fundraising curriculum in the future.
Has it been developed and put to use in the way that you initially visualized?
The outcome from developing the prototypes in Italy was different, better, than what I expected. I think it is because it was a group of arts management students; the perspectives that went into why you would create something like this, the risks, the unintended consequences—it was a more robust discussion than perhaps if it had been a group of MBA or engineering students.
We broke into four groups, and ended up with four prototypes. All the groups used ChatGPT in a paid closed model.
Everyone started with the same information. Megan, with the help of AI, created a best practices document with information on how to run a successful capital campaign or how to do a feasibility study. By the end of the week, the students had taken the four models through two different case studies.
One was the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas. There are a couple of good case studies about bringing that venue and the arts district to life. So, we said, ‘Okay, tell your model it’s 2010, Dallas is building a centralized cultural district, and here are the volunteer leaders. We also did a second, smaller organization in the social services space called Viola’s House.
The readiness scores were quite varied and showed a couple of things. First, we wanted to harness the power of AI to do what AI is good at, which is grabbing public data, crunching financial metrics, providing a visualization of certain geographies, and grading things against a rubric. Second, we want to have more control over the question-and-answer process to provide consistency in the output.
And of course, the MMIAMs started a conversation about the safety and security of someone’s data. So we talked quite a bit in Italy about how the tool would need to prioritize confidentiality.
Where does the tool stand now?
Megan and I are working with Eliza Solender, a Dallas-based real estate broker who focuses on nonprofit clients, and a technology consultant to create a minimum viable product that we can start testing this fall. The three of us believe in the value of the tool even more now that the MMIAMs helped bring it to life, not only as a helpful way to plan for a campaign but also to provide longitudinal data to support research on this topic.
Katie Robbins having lunch with the MMIAM students and Megan Heber in Italy. Credit: Megan Heber’s archives.
*Katie Robbins’s headshot credit: the Hoblitzelle Foundation.