We’re thrilled to present the latest addition to Afluencer’s content lineup – our podcast series featuring insightful conversations with influential brand owners. In this inaugural article, we have the privilege of introducing Dan Hubbard, the visionary founder of 4Amanda, as our esteemed guest.
Meet Dan Hubbard: The Mind Behind 4Amanda
Dan Hubbard, the innovative mind driving 4Amanda, takes center stage in the Afluencer podcast series. With a wealth of experience in the world of influencer marketing, Dan shares captivating insights, challenges, and triumphs that have shaped his brand’s journey.
Podcast Premiere: Delving into the 4Amanda Universe
Join us in exploring the enchanting world of 4Amanda through the eyes of Dan Hubbard himself. We’ve embedded the riveting YouTube podcast video below, offering an exclusive glimpse into the transformative power of influencer marketing.
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Transcription Insight: A Peek into the Conversation
Gain an insider’s perspective as we burrow into the transcription of our engaging conversation with Dan Hubbard. Discover the strategies, anecdotes, and wisdom that have fueled 4Amanda’ success, all captured in this in-depth transcription.
In Conversation with Dan Hubbard, Founder of 4Amanda:
Dan:
Our very first trip to the hospital. We stayed in a Hilton hotel and we found six families sleeping in their cars. What we do each month is we spend about 63% of our programing towards rent for cancer patients. About 12% of our programing goes to nutrition. What we know for a fact is that good nutrition, good food costs a little bit more, but it’s critical to a patient undergoing care.
The financial component is something that I think everybody can understand. Imagine not being able to add. He’s got cancer.
Brett:
Welcome to our influencer podcast, where we connect influencers and creators with not only up and coming brands but up and coming charities and great causes. And that’s what we have today with Dan Hubbard. He’s the director of For Amanda. It’s a charity focused on getting direct financial support to cancer patients. I mean, Dan, unfortunately has experience with not from the financial side, but on the on the cancer treatment side and kind of saw firsthand how difficult it was for patients to get proper care.
So for a man is an awesome charity that really helps people who are going through the cancer treatment process get money, and then how to get money directly to the people that need it. So really a great cause and also an opportunity for our influencers and creators to share and to help this great cause. And we’ll bring on Dan here.
So Dan, thanks so much for joining us today in Kenya. Hopefully, hopefully I did a decent enough job of the intro here, but can you tell us a little bit more about the mission and objectives of for Amanda?
Dan:
Sure. So Amanda and I were quite fortunate when she received her cancer diagnosis. We had great insurance. We had good employment and we had a good support structure from friends, family and friends. But what we learned, starting from our very first trip for her having a report installed and then starting her infusion was a lot of cancer patients are not fortunate.
Our very first trip to the hospital, we stayed in a Hilton hotel and we found, I think it was six families sleeping in their cars and the hotel was allowing them to do that. But the choice was pay for the fuel and food and these sort of things to get to the destination or stay in a hotel. They couldn’t do both.
We heard horrific stories of bankruptcies and, you know, not being able to afford rent because of the high cost that comes along with the cancer diagnosis and the health care industry. It’s called financial toxicity, cancer care, essentially. You know, Amanda received her treatment at Duke and two researchers at Duke about 15 years ago coined that phrase financial toxicity.
So what we do each month is we spend about 63% of our programing towards rent for cancer patients, and that often includes utilities as well. About 12% of our programing goes to nutrition. What we know for a fact is that good nutrition, good food costs a little bit more, but it’s critical to a patient undergoing care. And then we have programing that that also pays for phone bills, maybe the patient needs a very comfortable mattress because of the chemotherapy deter it in their body.
So it’s you know, we recover the plant in the unplanned and we’ve been doing it since. Well, officially we did We started while Amanda was still alive in January of 2022. We got our IRS determination in December of 2022, and we’ve been doing it ever since.
Brett:
That’s awesome. In terms of I mean, the support that you provide, what are the costs? I guess just to give me an idea of the ballpark, I mean, are we talking I can only imagine. But I mean, there’s got to be like five figure kind of costs. So you’re looking at starting it in in the tens of thousands of dollars with the diagnosis that these families have to deal with and handle, I guess, on their own if they don’t have the insurance coverage, as you mentioned.
Dan:
Yes. So that’s a really important question. And it really comes down to the type of cancer someone has, but also their genetics. So, Amanda, you know, her genetic makeup and the makeup of the cancer qualified her to take an immunotherapy called Penetrant about. And some insurance companies don’t pay for a genetic testing or B, the immunotherapies. So on kind of the low end such as payment in that you’re looking at I can buy them actually in bulk for patients at about $700 each individual patient that would have to buy one every other week would pay about 1200.
Well, if you’re going to be taking between six and nine weeks of means so that that’s very costly.
Brett:
So you’re actually buying them in bulk on your end and then. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s cool. That’s cool.
Dan:
But, you know, this insurance doesn’t cover the nutrition shakes, right? So it’s a case of boost, you know, 30, 40 bucks. And, you know, if if that’s one of your main intake pathways for protein, then, you know, your, your nutritionist and your colleges are going to want you to have at least three a day. Right. And a lot of families look at that and they think, well, you know, that’s that’s taking food out of the mouths of my children.
So we step in and every month we send out a.
Brett:
Probably about.
Dan:
50 or so cases of boost from Amazon. But, you know, patients are driving on average 200 miles round trip to get to treatment.
Brett:
Oh, it’s because they got to find the specific.
Dan:
Yeah. If you need to get to a place of care. Yep. So you know this involves wear and tear on their vehicle gasoline. Obviously. I cannot tell you how many windshield we’ve repaired. So, you know, you got all these costs and they add up. And one of the really unfortunate things is, you know, a lot of the patients we serve are not under the poverty level.
You know, they’re closer to 50,000 and it’s difficult for them to qualify for social services. And that the sad thing is they’re amassing a ton of debt. So, you know, that ratio is really sort of, you know, one of the other things that we we try and focus on it. We’re doing a lot better job as a lot of patients are traveling with children.
And that can happen during the school year. It can happen, you know, during the summer I was involved with this. Children do need something to do. So we’re trying to team up with different organizations, local to different hospital systems and maybe get them to a movie. Right. You know, something like this, give them a little bit of enrichment because emotionally it’s really hard on them.
It’s not so which which starting to to focus more on that as our programing dollars increase.
Brett:
Yeah that’s a cool benefit of the dollars coming from you as a you as a human being know how to allocate it and you know that they need the shakes and the kids got it. You know, sentimental to go see a movie, right. Versus having to get the stuff reimbursed as you said. What a nightmare. Right. With the red tape, I guess, is you can you can get around that you can allocated as you see fit versus just that bureaucratic mess that you had to experience.
How do you connect with the how do you connect with the families down in terms of who needs help? Do they know? Do they how do they find you to apply for help?
Dan:
Yeah. So what we’ve tried to do a good job at is get close to hospital systems. Sometimes it’s just, you know, sometimes it’s as simple as just finding some licensed clinical social workers that are on, you know, some hospital systems website. Just shoot them an email saying, look, we’re a resource. Do us a favor. If you think that a patient might later suffer from financial toxicity, send them to us now.
Let them let us get them in the system because it’s ultimately what happens to frequently as a family will get to us when they have late fees, disconnect fees, these sorts of things and of course recover them. But we’d rather not we would rather pay for things before they get to bad. There’s a lot of of just organic based organizations pretty much in every state that we reached out to and said, look, we’d love to do it for everyone, but, you know, we only serve cancer patients if you come across one and you can tell us, look, they’ve been either pre-qualified or prescreened, get them to share that data with us and then we don’t
have to spend a lot of time doing the same thing. Hospital systems in particular are really, really good at taking a holistic approach to that evaluation. They don’t just use the poverty level because the poverty level is not a good barometer for financial toxicity. Like I said, most of the patients we serve, their incomes are up around $50,000.
Brett:
Yeah, I got you know, it makes I mean, if you’re paycheck to paycheck, to paycheck to paycheck or if you don’t, I mean, maybe that’s not even fair to say. But if you don’t have this large pile of cash reserve, which if you’re you know, if you’re middle class, you probably don’t. Right. And then you get hit with these costs and you have to pay the bills.
Right. So you’re putting them on. And I would say to my credit cards. Right. And that’s running up and that’s where the toxicity comes in, because now you’ve got this interest running against you and it it can snowball pretty fast. I mean, I know starting a company or two on credit cards is not good, right? You got to get the money back.
But this is not something where there will be a return from a monetary side on the back end. Right. You’re not going to there’s no cash flow that’s going to pay this off here. These are expenses. And you’re just right. Keep someone. And.
Dan:
You know, one of the things that I always ask people to take into consideration is there’s a lot of clinical evidence and research that indicates that when a cancer patient is in real financial toxicity, even even without bankruptcy, the three times more likely to die. And that’s just a real simple fact. And the other thing that I ask them to consider is currently cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States.
It’s just behind heart disease and not far behind it. The expectation is, if not this year, by 2025, cancer will be the leading cause of death in the United States. The reason to ask people to take that consideration is one in five people have a personal experience that they can talk about friend, family member, and imagine the pain and struggle that you’re aware that they went through and now add crushing debt to it.
And so that’s that’s why we do what we do, because ultimately it saves lives.
Brett:
Tell us a little bit, how can influencers and creators help out here? Obviously, a very important because I think it’s something that people maybe are not quite I don’t wanna say not aware of, but I mean in my like everything makes perfect sense. This is, this is not something I think about on a day to day basis, right?
Everything is I’m reading our notes before we hop on and we start talking like, yes, of course. It’s like the most yes, these are very expensive treatments. And if you don’t have great insurance, there’s no way to pay it. And it’s a terrible situation. But I’ll admit, I didn’t wake up this morning thinking about it right as I’m getting ready to hop on with you.
Right. So awareness strikes me as a way that the influencers and creators can help out just talking about this because it’s not like just helping kind of connect the dots, right? Like, hey, these there are people out there that are going through this. So my on the right track in terms of what we’re looking for in terms of influencers and creators to help out.
Dan:
Yeah. So, you know, I have to admit I there’s so little that I know about the influence of market and vertical. But one thing that I’ve always found really, really valuable is for an individual that’s going to be speaking on our behalf to speak to their audience the way they know their audience wants to be spoken to. And, you know, if a if an influencer is a young woman, then what I would share what that influencers look.
Currently in the United States, women in their twenties and thirties are being diagnosed at mass rates because colorectal cancer and breast cancer, it’s a significant rise leading away from the pandemic. Yeah, yeah. For an influencer for a part of their persona as a mother with children, I can tell you that 80% of the cancer patients we serve are women with children.
And if the influencer is a person of color, I can tell you that 71% of the people we serve are people of color. I can share statistics with an influencer that I think they could find a way to utilize, and however they get the message out. You know, cancer is incredibly unforgiving to everybody. The financial component is something that I think everybody can understand, right?
Everyone gets money, everyone gets debt, and everyone and everyone has that gut feeling when it’s like, Oh God, I got to pay this huge credit card bill or whatever. It doesn’t make you feel good, right? Imagine not being able to and you’ve got cancer, right? And you’re trying to.
Brett:
Those are probably two of the top worst things on everyone’s. I mean, everyone knows cancer sucks and everyone knows that having to pay a credit card, especially when a high credit card is running against you. But the interest rate, that’s the worst really the worst feeling.
Dan:
You know, and I think something that I’m getting a little bit better at is at the end of every day, I always think about if I get eight more $10 donations, I can buy, you know, a immunotherapy injection for one more patient. You know, if I get $70 donation, that’s a hotel room for a family that’s traveling to treatment.
$40. You know, that’s a digital gas card. I can sense. And I went for the round trip, you know, we can send digital McDonald’s cards, right, so that children can go and get a happy Meal that are traveling with their parents. So these are the things that I think about. And what I’m trying to do a little bit better job at is sharing that on social media.
And certainly I would like influencers to share that as well. I think that it’s easy for me to put statistics on my website that says this is who we’re serving in a cell, we’re serving them. But I think something just really small like, Hey, 70 bucks allows a family to not sleep in the car, right? So these are some of the things that I would like to think about.
But and in my collab or in our collab, I specified to the influencer, I don’t want to tell you how to get this message out. It needs to come from your heart and be communicated to your audience the way you think.
Brett:
It’s into our influencer and creator, viewers and watchers and listeners. We’ll get the link to your collab there. Dan and the Foreman collab. We’re going to be shown out so everyone can click and view the collab and apply it. I think that’s a great way of looking at it from the creative standpoint is that’s what we want is for the creators to kind of take this and put it into their own word and related to their own lives and, and to communicate it to their followers.
Right? That’s the kind of the beauty of the influencer, micro influencer world is that you’ve got there’s, you know, people attached to their, you know, you call followers for a reason because they’re connected with these people and we want them to help spread the word. So to our influencer and creators out there, we’ll get the link to the forum and a collab.
And then Dan Larson for me, can you give us look into the future plans and goals for the charity in the years ahead?
Dan:
Sure. So, you know, one of the things that tends to happen to families and then of course to single mothers is they lose income because they can’t work. So what we are trying is put together a gig site so that these patients, while they’re traveling or while they’re not feeling very well from the effects of chemotherapy, they can work online.
So we’re going to develop that platform for three. It’ll be made available to both the cancer patients that we serve and then cancer patients that are connected with other charities. We’ve got about a dozen really, really good companies that are going to provide dedicated work to the cancer patients. We’ve got a really, really good merchant that’s going to charge us $0.00 so that the cancer patient earns $100, $100 just to be deposited into an account.
So that way they’re not losing small percentages. So this is something that I’m really excited about. We have a grant that covers that. I would also I would also like to say that I’ll have more time to get to hospital systems because I want to meet with oncology department heads and the, you know, clinical social worker heads and say this who we are, this what we do.
Don’t feel like you can’t send people to us. We’ll help anyone that meets the criteria for help. And I think that if I am able to spend that time doing that for the rest of the year, it will save lives, I think. But but also will avoid some of those fees that I spoke about earlier. So I think these are two goals that, you know, looking to accomplish this fiscal year.
Brett:
That’s awesome. That is a great I mean, end to end now on. And hats off to you. I don’t know how you got a merchant to agree to 0%. I mean, that was not is it that that’s really fantastic like you said $100 going straight to the worker who needs the money. So yeah, thanks for sharing, Dan, as always, you keep us posted.
Let me know how we can we can help out on our front if and I know another collab to help that or just kind of spread the word about the platform when it’s live, you know? So thanks for keeping us posted and involved in the for Amanda efforts and again we’ll get the link to the collab. Your cilantro influencer and creator friends can apply here as we have Dan Hubbard, again the director of for Amanda and really about the best guys you’ll ever hear of.
So happy to share this and thanks so much Dan, for coming on our platform. It’s been a really, really meaningful conversation to have with you. Really appreciate it, Brett.
Dan:
I appreciate your time. Thank you for doing this.
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