Grateful Patient Fundraising Essentials: Gratitude to Impact
A grateful patient fundraising program is an essential component of your healthcare institution’s development strategy. These programs give patients an outlet to support your organization beyond a heartfelt “thank you” by philanthropically expressing their gratitude to the healthcare providers who made a difference in their lives or the lives of their loved ones.
However, grateful patient fundraising is far more complex than other types of fundraising. Institutional complexities, patient privacy regulations, and the personal nature of patient-clinician relationships all make running these programs uniquely challenging.
Despite these obstacles, institutions of all shapes and sizes—including hospitals, universities, and clinics—build and maintain highly effective grateful patient fundraising programs that sustain their work and help them serve more patients. How? We’ll review all the essentials in this guide:
- Grateful Patient Fundraising FAQ
- Essential Elements of an Effective Program
- How to Start a Grateful Patient Program: 10 Steps
- Grateful Patient Fundraising Best Practices
- A Patient-First Approach
Grateful Patient Fundraising FAQ
What is grateful patient fundraising?
Grateful patient fundraising is a type of fundraising conducted by healthcare institutions in which organizations solicit donations from patients or family members who have had positive care outcomes. Specifically, this strategy involves approaching individuals with both the capacity and inclination to give large gifts.
Like other forms of major gift fundraising, grateful patient fundraising is a form of nonprofit development and requires completing the full identification-cultivation-solicitation-stewardship cycle. However, grateful patient fundraising has a few distinctions, such as its healthcare context and highly personal nature.
What’s a grateful patient program?
A grateful patient program consists of all the steps and resources a healthcare institution uses to consistently secure grateful patient donations. This involves establishing processes for identifying prospects, building relationships with them, soliciting gifts, keeping them engaged, coordinating across departments, and managing the backend logistics that keep the program running.
At their core, grateful patient fundraising programs are designed to foster a culture of philanthropy and raise money to support the institution’s work. An intentional framework allows this work to be done as strategically, efficiently, and effectively as possible.
Why do hospitals need grateful patient fundraising programs?
Grateful patient fundraising programs accomplish two key objectives:
- Raising financial support for the institution’s work, including research, technology and equipment upgrades, endowment growth, and general operational funding
- Giving patients and their families a clearly defined opportunity to express gratitude proportional to the impact their medical care has had on them
Maintaining a dedicated grateful patient program allows hospitals and clinics to pursue these objectives strategically. When grateful patient fundraising is centralized and managed as an intentional priority, it can be done efficiently, drive impact, generate significant returns, and even improve an institution’s operations across the board.
What resources do you need to run a grateful patient program?
Like other fundraising programs, effectively managing a grateful patient program requires specific tools and processes, such as:
- A database for storing and managing fundraising data and donor records. A dedicated fundraising CRM that includes purpose-built features is likely the best choice for healthcare institutions pursuing grateful patient fundraising. This type of platform keeps fundraising and sensitive healthcare records fully separate and allows organizations to simultaneously manage fundraising initiatives not targeting past or current patients.
- Software integrations and clear data reporting protocols. A separate fundraising CRM requires creating standardized methods of sharing authorized, relevant patient data between clinicians and development staff.
- Referral processes and training for frontline staff. Grateful patient programs thrive on cross-department communication. Staff who directly engage with patients will need training, encouragement, and clear processes for reporting potential prospects to your fundraising team.
- Compliance and technology audits. Patient privacy and data security compliance must be maintained at all times. Before investing heavily in your new initiative, a review or audit conducted by third parties is highly recommended to ensure you adhere to all relevant laws and regulations.
- Materials to share with patients and prospects. To build connections between your program and prospective donors, you’ll need a case for support, brochures, email and phone scripts, posters, newsletters, mailers, and more.
We’ll explore all of the resources and considerations to keep in mind when we walk through the steps for establishing your grateful patient program.
Essential Elements of an Effective Grateful Patient Program
The underlying elements and principles that, if mastered and managed effectively, will set up your grateful patient fundraising program for success can be broken down into six key categories:
- Compliance. Patient privacy and data security are paramount. All tools and processes that support your grateful patient program must comply with HIPAA requirements and best practices.
- Patient Experience. Engaging or declining to engage with your fundraising program should never create a worse patient experience. Your first responsibility should always be to ensure positive medical experiences and outcomes for all patients.
- Case for Support. Why would prospective donors want to give through your grateful patient program? Assess your supporters to gain a thorough understanding of key donor motivations to both build a universal case for support and connect with individual patients.
- Cross-Department Coordination. How will clinicians and fundraisers communicate? How will prospects be referred to your fundraising program? Communication, training, cultural buy-in, and a shared understanding of everyone’s roles are uniquely important for these fundraising programs.
- Fundraising Resources. Staff, technology, and fundraising-specific processes should be in place to manage the logistics and day-to-day work of running a fundraising program.
- Ongoing Measurement and Maintenance. Regularly measure your program’s effectiveness and outcomes, report its results, analyze potential improvements, and maintain logistics to ensure its success.
When these elements come together, your institution will have a robust foundation to grow a successful fundraising program.
If you’re in the early stages of developing a program, take a moment to think through each of these elements. Where is your organization already succeeding or well-equipped? Which areas can you already anticipate will need extra attention? Keep these in mind as you explore the steps for starting your program below.
How to Start a Grateful Patient Program: 10 Steps
Creating a detailed implementation strategy for your grateful patient fundraising program will set your efforts up for success from day one. Here are the essentials to keep in mind:
1. Gauge your program’s feasibility.
Decide if it’s feasible to run a grateful patient program at your healthcare organization. Assess your current fundraising team to determine what resources or training they’ll need. Additionally, review both federal, state, and local regulations, as well as your own organization’s internal policies, to ensure you’ll be able to create a grateful patient program that enhances, or at least does not detract from, patient care.
If your assessment is positive, formally make the decision to move forward, and recruit a small core team to help.
2. Seek professional support.
Most healthcare institutions opt to hire external experts to support their fundraising, technology, and/or compliance needs. Review consultants based on their familiarity with grateful patient programs to ensure you partner with an agency that understands your unique needs.
For example, Graham-Pelton has extensive experience working with healthcare organizations to launch valuable and compassionate grateful patient fundraising programs.
3. Conduct a Diagnostic Review and secure buy-in.
Successful grateful patient programs require buy-in from your fundraising team, healthcare staff, and leadership. To make a strong case for your proposed program, drill down deep into the details of your plan by running a Diagnostic Review. This process is similar to a fundraising feasibility study in that it determines your organization’s current capabilities and makes recommendations for how to improve in order to establish your program.
4. Engage key clinical partners.
Involvement from physicians, faculty, and nurses is essential to your program’s success, as these individuals will help identify prospects and serve as friendly faces at the start of the fundraising process.
Your program pitch should explain the role these individuals will have in it, how the program benefits your organization as a whole, and assuage any concerns about how participation might impact faculty or patients.
5. Identify and secure necessary staffing resources.
Determine whether you need to hire any new major gift officers or prospect researchers (and how many), and account for them in your program’s startup budget.
6. Identify and secure necessary tech investments or upgrades.
Consider whether you will need to purchase or upgrade your fundraising and data management software to provide your program with proper technical capabilities. Like with additional staff, account for software, training, and implementation expenses in your budget.
7. Train all stakeholders on their roles.
Educate staff about your program’s purpose and promote it internally to your entire organization. Provide all relevant departments with role-specific orientation and training on your grateful patient fundraising process.
8. Set up new systems as needed.
Implement your new software and processes. To keep your organization running smoothly, lay out concrete rollout plans and timelines whenever setting up a new system.
9. Continue building buy-in and producing support materials.
Continue securing buy-in from key stakeholders, and produce supporting materials for your fundraising team that they can share with patients to start securing donations.
10. Get your referral pipeline up and running.
Conduct prospect qualification and wealth screening to find strong giving candidates, and establish a process for receiving and researching referred patients. Then, continually monitor your program’s progress to identify and resolve gaps in your process.
If you already have a long-standing grateful patient program at your healthcare institution, it’s still worth ensuring that all of these steps were successfully completed during its initial implementation. You can overhaul or improve foundational gaps and weak points using these steps as a guide. Then, move on to improving your program by applying best practices.
5 Grateful Patient Best Practices for Moving Beyond Gratitude
1. Provide robust training for hospital staff
Providing the necessary training for hospital staff to navigate patient relationships in a new fundraising context is crucial. While healthcare professionals are versed in the sensitive nature of patient relationships, they are likely unfamiliar with how to encourage patients to become donors without risking those trusted relationships. Clarify that your staff will not be expected to ask for donations. Rather, they will be trained to identify potential donors and refer them to your development team for outreach.
Creating a strong relationship between physicians and fundraisers is the foundation of our approach at Graham-Pelton, helping these two departments establish a relationship based on trust and mutual success.
We identify which of your hospital staff will be most instrumental in your grateful patient program. With this information, you can take a targeted, low-stress approach, training these clinicians to look for signals that a patient is philanthropically inclined. Because this is such a crucial part of the process, Graham-Pelton coaches healthcare professionals to find their own style and voice when talking about philanthropy, allowing them to hold personalized, authentic conversations.
2. Make use of your gift officers
As you identify prospective donors and reach out to them, make the most of your development department. If you’ve hired new major gift officers, start entrusting them with prospects. Give them the autonomy to prioritize their work, find ways to improve your program, and take the lead on qualifying and cultivating potential donors.
When provided with the freedom to fulfill their responsibilities, gift officers can help you identify:
- Which prospects have a large capacity to give but are not inclined to give
- If donors have been approached incorrectly for donations before
- Patients who have not yet been convinced to support your cause
- Prospects not previously identified or approached
Empowering fundraisers to do the work they were hired for allows you to capitalize on their wealth of knowledge and ensures they make a bigger impact on your grateful patient program. Plus, as your gift officers feel supported in their roles, they’ll experience greater job satisfaction, increasing your ability to retain them for the long term.
3. Create a strong solicitation plan
With the help of your major gift officers, curate a list of donor prospects with whom to cultivate relationships. However, before actually soliciting donations, it’s crucial to have a well-developed plan that accounts for the sensitive nature of patient relationships.
A few essential things to consider when creating your solicitation playbook include:
- Timing. Because many of your prospective donors are undergoing, have undergone, or had close family and friends undergo surgery or other treatment, your team needs to be selective about when they engage prospects. The last thing you want is for your team to come off as pushy or insensitive during a stressful time.
- Previous donations. Have a plan in place for how to approach donors who have already contributed to your hospital. The solicitation process for an existing donor will differ from your process for building relationships with new donors. While new donors require more up-front explanation and guidance as to the purpose of your program, prior donors need their connection to be solidified through personalized outreach.
- Past solicitations. If your team has already reached out to a prospective donor, ensure you know who engaged them, when, and how. If they did not respond well to a previous solicitation, examine why and if asking again in a new way is worth trying.
Having clear guidelines for how and when your team engages prospective donors will help you avoid confusion and repeat solicitations while also developing and maintaining healthier donor relationships.
4. Keep data secure and organized
When it comes to patient data, there are many rules and regulations, and the absolute last thing you want is to violate a patient’s privacy. Using HIPAA-compliant software and inviting your compliance officer to weigh in early in the process is crucial. The transfer of information between your clinical and fundraising settings must be carefully considered, with secure processes designed to protect privacy and limit the number of involved individuals.
Any third-party vendors you work with to design and implement your program should also be well-versed in healthcare compliance. For example, Graham-Pelton’s Beyond Gratitude™ program heavily emphasizes patient privacy and data integrity. We center these elements in our strategies to give key stakeholders confidence in your new program from the start. We evaluate each institution’s cultural acceptance and readiness for a grateful patient fundraising program through a complimentary Diagnostic Review, outlining the key needs that must be met before a program can move forward responsibly.
5. Track your grateful patient program’s progress
If you are just starting out with grateful patient fundraising, resist the urge to track everything. The sheer amount of data that a robust fundraising program generates can quickly become overwhelming.
Instead, start with a handful of valuable and relevant key performance indicators (KPI) to measure early success. These include:
- ROI
- Donor acquisition rate
- Average gift size over time
- Prospect-to-donor conversion time
- Response rates to different grateful patient communications
- Response quality to different grateful patient stewardship techniques
- The number of patient visits to the hospital versus total gift size
Of course, a grateful patient program’s goal is to secure donations and generate revenue for the institution. However, these are not the only factors that should be considered when evaluating a program’s performance. Your program should also aim to build a loyal base of dedicated advocates and donors. Developing strong and authentic relationships with grateful patients helps boost the authority of your program (and gives you a great marketing tool for securing future support).
You can quantify your success in this area by tracking donor retention or developing a scale for relationship warmth for your gift officers.
These success metrics can give you a comprehensive way to assess your improvements year-over-year. For instance, they allow you to continually refine your segmentation strategies and qualification criteria based on proven results. You can continually build on these metrics as your program grows and matures.
Actively tracking your program’s progress allows you to proactively address problems and strategy gaps. Additionally, beyond the context of a grateful patient program, having clean records of donor contributions and impacts allows you to communicate potential impact to all new prospects. Robust fundraising data that demonstrates well-run, impactful programs can be a powerful tool when soliciting donations.
A Patient-First Approach to Grateful Patient Fundraising
Graham-Pelton is a leader in healthcare fundraising consulting through our Beyond Gratitude™ methodology that puts patients first and empowers healthcare providers to discuss philanthropy in natural and authentic ways. Developed through years of one-on-one coaching sessions with over 2,500 healthcare providers around the country, Beyond Gratitude is a comprehensive approach that can be fully tailored to any institution’s unique culture, needs, and concerns about grateful patient fundraising.
Our philosophy grows from personal experience. Sometimes, patients and family members aren’t just looking for a way to say, “thank you” to the healthcare providers and organizations that made a difference in their lives. Rather, they’re seeking closure and want to express gratitude in line with the magnitude of their experiences. We see grateful giving as a healing motivation felt at a very personal level, not a cut-and-dry philanthropic mechanism.
From this deeper understanding of why patients and donors feel compelled to go beyond gratitude, we’ve developed an industry-leading framework for grateful patient fundraising programs. It’s built on five fundamental principles:
- Asking is not the clinician’s job. Grateful patient fundraising must be team-based, with fundraisers playing key roles.
- Not all gratitude is philanthropic gratitude. The key to success lies in recognizing when patients want to go beyond simple expressions of gratitude.
- Philanthropy can be part of the healing process. Giving back to an institution that’s had such a personal impact can bring patients and families closure for major challenges.
- Practice prevents transactionality. Tailored coaching should give healthcare providers the tools they need to authentically discuss philanthropy with patients in their own styles and voices.
- Data is integral to a patient-centered approach. When fundraisers are equipped with HIPAA-compliant data, institutions can develop smarter, more sensitive, and more patient-centric strategies.
To enact these principles and help healthcare institutions build robust fundraising programs, our Beyond Gratitude services are delivered through three key domains:
1. Relational: the people domain
Grateful patient programs are built through relationships between patients, healthcare providers, fundraisers, and administrators. Our methodology stands out for its emphasis on coaching, customized group training, and practice.
2. Analytical: the data domain
Data is essential for successful grateful patient fundraising. We help you build effective data systems and practices that empower your team to identify the strongest prospects for research and outreach.
3. Operational: the process domain
The right infrastructure, systems, workflows, and resources will sustain your program for the long run. Our operational guidance not only helps you secure institutional buy-in and adoption but also keeps your program running as smoothly as possible.
Additional Grateful Patient Fundraising Resources
If your hospital, clinic, or university needs to develop or improve its grateful patient fundraising strategies, you need a true partner. Beyond Gratitude is the proven methodology backed by healthcare providers. Support from the fundraising experts at Graham-Pelton will empower your entire team to approach grateful patient fundraising confidently, professionally, and in ways that are uniquely their own.
Learn more about the Beyond Gratitude™ methodology or reach out to discuss your institution’s goals and needs. We can start laying out a customized strategy that will equip your institution to thrive for years to come.
To learn more about nonprofit development best practices, explore these additional resources from the Graham-Pelton team:
- 9 Key Types of Planned Gifts, How They Work, and Examples. Planned gifts are often a part of grateful patient fundraising. Learn how to respectfully request and steward these gifts.
- How to Write a Case for Support: Pro Tips for Driving Impact. A strong case for support often determines whether patients agree to your fundraising asks. Discover how to write one that compels patients to give.
- Healthcare Fundraising: Overview & Modern Strategies. Healthcare fundraising best practices are constantly evolving. Explore top strategies and how they can elevate your grateful patient program.
