AHP Connect Articles

In Grateful Patient Fundraising, Timing Is Everything

The following post is sponsored by Windfall.

 

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At Windfall, we’ve been thinking a lot about fishing when it comes to running successful Grateful Patient programs. One of our children’s hospital customers recently shared this analogy about fundraising. Some types of organizations, such as those in higher education, can fundraise like they are fishing in a pond. They might not catch a fish for several years. But over time, that same fish will get bigger and bigger, and they’ll eventually catch it!  For hospitals, fundraising from a grateful patient population is more like fishing in a river. Timing is everything. Your team has to catch a fish as it swims by, or it may be gone forever.

 

The episodic nature of healthcare visits and Grateful Patient fundraising means that organizations need to move quickly to identify, prioritize, understand, and properly engage with their constituents while their last visit, and their gratitude, are still top-of-mind. However, manual workflows, stale data, and research bottlenecks can bog down your organization’s ability to meet constituents when they are in this window.

 

Here are three tips to ensure you are maximizing your Grateful Patient outreach:

1. Build a foundation of trustworthy data: This can be challenging, especially if you store records across multiple systems or if visits and interactions occur across numerous sites. Some of our most successful healthcare customers leverage nightly automated data reconciliation and screening processes to ensure that each day’s visit records are consolidated, deduped, and enriched with screening intelligence by the time their team starts work the next day.
   
2. Utilize multiple data points to drive your strategy: To determine how to prioritize recent patients, organizations should leverage their first-party data in conjunction with additional intelligence and insights, and even AI. For example, one of Windfall’s healthcare customers runs each patient record through a quick decision tree that accounts for visit recency (first party data), Windfall Net Worth (third party data), and their customized Grateful Patient Propensity-To-Give model score (AI) to determine whether each screened constituent should receive a set of general ‘Patient Welcome’ emails or should be moved into a Gift Officer’s portfolio for more personalized touchpoints.
   
3. Measure your progress and continue to iterate: Finally, you’ll want to consistently analyze and measure your program’s results, so you can identify areas for improvement, surface and share wins, and continue driving your program’s success. Metrics like new major gift prospects identified and qualified from this population, meetings and visits accepted, and gifts secured can help quantify your progress.
   

Whether you are thinking about starting a new Grateful Patient program or are working to optimize an existing program, Windfall’s eBook on Developing a Data-Driven Grateful Patient Program provides additional insights and an actionable checklist to help you get started.

 

If you develop data-driven grateful patient workflows now, you will ensure that your future outreach meets your constituents in the right channels and at the right times for them to express their gratitude.