United Way names Deborah Sinay Chief Development Officer

BOSTON – Michael K. Durkin, president and chief executive officer at United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley, today announced Deborah Sinay as the organization’s new Chief Development Officer. With the move, Durkin taps into the leadership and development skills that recently drove to completion a $47 million capital campaign for the Boston Children’s Museum on Children’s Wharf. Sinay will begin her new position on October 1, 2008.

“Deborah has spent her professional career taking organizations to new heights,” Durkin said. “I am confident that her leadership and creative thinking will enable United Way to more fully engage the community in our work and demonstrate to donors the results that their support are making possible. This combination will enable United Way to deliver more resources to advance its strategies to help our region’s children, families and individuals to succeed in these economically challenging times.”

As the recent Senior Vice President for Institutional Advancement at the Boston Children’s Museum, Sinay led and managed the five-year, $47 million Capital Campaign for Children’s Wharf. In this position, she created and implemented a strategic plan for revitalizing the development and communications divisions, worked closely with the Chief Executive Officer and Board to raise the level of giving from institutional stakeholders, solicited, managed and cultivated board members, major donors, foundations, and individuals and heightened museum’s name recognition nationally by providing leadership in fundraising, marketing and communication.

“I have been a great admirer of United Way for many years,” Sinay said. “The prospect of helping this extraordinary organization reach its goals and impact the lives of children, families and individuals is very appealing to me. I look forward to building and leading a great development team who share a common goal of helping spread the powerful message of United Way in the Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley regions.”

Sinay also comes from a successful career in the broadcast industry. Her previous experience included positions at the Boston Globe, WPRI and WNAC-TV in Providence and WCVB-TV, Channel 5 in the Boston region. While in Providence, she headed the merger and turnaround of two top 50 market television stations and introduced customer-driven, state-of-the-art technologies in sales, news and business operations. Ms. Sinay delivered 15% improvement annually in operating margins and managed personnel challenges, rebuilt staff morale and cut employee turnover by introducing management empowering policies and motivational incentives. She is a member of several prominent professional associations, including the Development and Membership Executive Board of the Association of American Museums, the Association of Fundraising Professionals and Women in Development. Sinay is married to New England Cable News President and General Manager Charles Kravetz and lives in Wellesley.

United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley has changed significantly over the past five years, moving from a sheer fundraising model to an organization that, with extensive input from the community, identifies and targets the biggest, most engrained challenges facing the region. Its community goals include ensuring young children are healthy, nurtured and enter school ready to learn, youth graduate high school with positive options for the future, and families have access to safe, affordable housing and the education, skills and opportunities to achieve financial stability.