Healthcare Fundraising: How to Modernize Your Approach

Between direct mail, golf outings, galas, grants, major gifts, planned gifts, QR codes, and text-to-give, there are so many channels hospitals have access to when it comes to raising money. 

However, healthcare fundraising has always had unique elements that influence development officers’ strategies. Hospitals and healthcare organizations can and should still host events, send fundraising emails, and conduct phone drives, but when it comes to asking for gifts from their primary audience—patients, patient families, and hospitals’ communities—healthcare fundraisers have to take a strategic approach that addresses changing demographics and donor preferences.

With modern advances in fundraising, healthcare organizations are discovering new ways to craft fundraising strategies that are both profitable and empathetic. To help your organization develop its own strategy, this guide will dive into how modern technology and attitudes toward giving can influence your fundraising for the better. 

Rethink Your Donor Engagement Lifecycle

Despite the growth in digital and social media channels for fundraising, a major component of modern fundraising is still personal relationship building. Donors today expect hyper-personalized communication, whether this takes the form of direct social media messaging or content tailored to their interests. 

For healthcare fundraising, strong relationships are already a part of the process. After all, grateful patient programs revolve around clinicians, volunteers, other donors, and your fundraising team building relationships with prospective donors before, during, and after treatment. However, healthcare organizations can still benefit from reassessing their approach to the donor lifecycle to improve these relationships’ longevity. 

Assess your organization’s current approach to the donor lifecycle by paying extra attention to:

• Relationship-building post solicitation. The donor lifecycle is a cycle, and your relationship with supporters should continue long after their first gift. After a donor gives, assess your follow-up procedures to ensure you express proper thanks and continue stewarding the relationship to potentially earn future donations. 
• Touchpoint tracking. Create a map of your touchpoints with various types of donors, starting from their first interactions with your healthcare organization to post-gift follow-up. Knowing how and when donors encounter major turning points in their relationship with your organization can help you maximize these moments’ potential. Also, be aware that your first contact with donors may not involve your fundraising team. For patient donors, their first touchpoint is likely to be their intake process or even browsing your website from home. 
• Automation opportunities. Ultimately, donor relationships require a human touch. Still, software can be essential when it comes to managing relationships at scale. For instance, your analytics software can assess your entire supporter base to find prospective planned donors, or your marketing tools can auto-populate message templates to ensure content is personalized to each supporter. 

The key to a healthy donor lifecycle is that as many supporters as possible restart it after giving. This allows you to build up long-term relationships that can lead to bigger and bigger gifts, such as major donations like capital campaign gifts.

Break up your donor lifecycle into stages to assess how various interactions with your organization move supporters forward or might influence them to drop out. Your lifecycle stages might be something like: initial contact, intake, in-hospital treatment, post-treatment follow-up, and continued stewardship. 

When assessing these stages, for example, you might realize you have a strong patient care program and good stewardship practices for patient donors, but struggle to smoothly transition patients into supporters.  

Create a Structured Solicitation Process

While modern donors want personalized relationships with your nonprofit, a structured solicitation process will help your fundraising team stay organized and operate at scale. 

However, remember that structured does not mean impersonal. In fact, reliable fundraising processes often involve many moments of personalized interaction, as well as branching paths based on donors’ interests. For example, you would take a different approach with a donor who gives immediately than with one who indicates they cannot give now but would like to in the future. 

When it comes to the donation appeal itself, your team should have a structured playbook that fundraisers can use to create individualized pitches. For instance, a grateful patient fundraising program should have solicitation guidelines that advise development officers to consider:

• Timing. Timing is key in grateful patient programs, as many donor prospects have likely undergone major medical procedures, and some may still be in long-term recovery programs. With the right timing, you can ensure that the positive care they received is still in recent memory without appearing pushy or insensitive. 
• Past gifts. New donors and recurring donors require different solicitation processes. New donors need an introduction to your fundraising program, whereas recurring donors need a strong, enduring connection with your organization. 
• Past solicitations. Always consider the donor’s response to previous gift requests when putting together subsequent pitches. If a donor responded enthusiastically last time, you may aim to recreate your previous approach. In contrast, if the last solicitation did not go well, you should direct fundraisers to consider why and how future donation appeals can better meet the supporter’s needs and interests. 

To keep your efforts organized but personal, consider creating different general solicitation plans for different groups of donors. For example, you might have a new donor solicitation strategy that provides information about your program, and one for past donors that focuses on your long-term relationship. 

Leverage Data to Inform Your Fundraising Strategy

Modern fundraisers are data-driven for good reason. With thorough data on your donors and past successful fundraisers, you create informed solicitation strategies that are likely to yield better fundraising results. 

However, healthcare organizations also have to be conscious of patient donors’ confidential information. A few ways your organization can leverage data while respecting supporters’ privacy include:

• Creating comprehensive donor profiles. Each supporter should have a profile in your CRM that you regularly update every time they interact with your organization. This helps maintain a consistent donor experience and make strategic steps in their engagement. Additionally, ensure all of your fundraising-related software is connected so all data flows smoothly into your CRM. For example, you might monitor which donors attended a past fundraising event by connecting your event management software to your CRM. 
• Leveraging predictive analytics. Discover new giving prospects by analyzing the profiles of past major donors. Use this information to create a profile of your typical donor and leverage it to identify new supporters with similar characteristics. 
• Tracking engagement data. When you send an email, host an event, or create a new website landing page, ensure you can track its engagement data. Information like bounce rate, click-through rate, and conversion rates can help you determine what types of content and outreach work for your audience. 

To leverage your data, ensure you also practice proper data hygiene. Routinely assess your database to update outdated information, remove duplicate data, and identify missing information. This will ensure your organization can create more accurate fundraising reports that give you a better understanding of your donors. 

Take a Patient-First Approach to Fundraising

Hospitals and healthcare organizations face a unique hurdle compared to other nonprofits: maintaining high-quality patient care programs. No matter your fundraising strategy, your organization should never compromise on patient care. 

A few ways you can take a patient-first approach include:

• Educating staff about their role in fundraising. In a successful grateful patient program, your care team and fundraising teams will work together. Ensure care professionals understand how they can help fundraisers without imposing fundraising responsibilities on them or jeopardizing their relationships with patients. For instance, in many grateful patient programs, care teams are simply asked to communicate to development officers which patients may be worthwhile prospective donors. Provide your clinical partners with training about how to assess potential grateful patient donors, and provide updates about patients they helped point your fundraising team toward to keep them engaged. 
• Treating all patients equally. Patients who are not strong donor prospects or who decline to give should receive equal treatment to patient donors. Ensure patients understand that the care they receive is not in any way tied to the amount they donate. This is another reason why development officers should be conscious of their timing for donation appeals—an ask at the wrong time may make patients question whether their response will impact their quality of care. 
• Maintaining high ethical standards. Anyone who engages with donors should adhere to the highest ethical standards regarding patient privacy and care. Review relevant laws for collecting and using patient data to ensure your fundraising team maintains patient privacy and protects your organization from liability. 

After patients leave your hospital or healthcare organization, you can keep them engaged in your fundraising efforts by creating donor-focused experiences. For example, you might start a donor membership program that provides participants with exclusive content, such as free merchandise, access to published medical studies, private events, and more. 

Additionally, try new marketing efforts. Hospitals have expanded their marketing efforts to include billboards, TV commercials, and online ads. These ads discuss the role philanthropy can play in making a difference, and when placed strategically, this outreach can be instrumental in spreading the word about your hospital’s fundraisers. For example, some hospitals even have ads for their giving program in their waiting rooms.

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A modern healthcare fundraising approach takes many factors into consideration: data, automation, and human relationships. Remember that “modern” doesn’t mean that technology alone runs your program, but rather that software, data analysis, and automation tools can work with your fundraising team to make relationship building simpler. 

To start modernizing your hospital or healthcare organization’s approach to fundraising, map out your donor lifecycle to identify key inflection points. Then, collect data about those moments to create a structured stewardship and solicitation process that guides supporters toward making a gift, all without sacrificing your high-quality patient care.