Question: Our advocacy team has spent an extraordinary amount of time working on health reform. Can you help me to understand what would count as community benefit, and what might not? Some examples include: staff time doing policy analysis and grass roots advocacy, CEO time speaking to community groups and policy makers, paid advertisements in local and national media.

Recommendation: We recommend determining what portion of your advocacy efforts were directed at expanding access and improving community health (rather than addressing reimbursement issues). That portion of staff and CEO time could be reported as advocacy/community building. We recommend not reporting the cost of paid advertisements.