Reaching the Entire Patient Population With a Digital Grateful Patient Program
In order to build a long-term pipeline of annual, mid, and major donors, hospital foundations should consider expanding their grateful patient program to include the majority of the patient population. Email can be an efficient channel to build donor relationships that convert over the long term.
Most hospital foundations focus the majority of their budget and energy on their top tier of donors. And why wouldn’t you? Most of your revenue likely comes from a small percentage of your donor file.
Most hospitals spend time and money working with wealth screening platforms like G2G from Gobel Group or Target Analytics from Blackbaud. These platforms help you identify your best annual, mid and major prospects for your direct mail and gift officer outreach efforts.
As a result, most patients that visit the hospital are never contacted via mail or gift officer outreach.
Digital Grateful Program
Email, as a channel, offers a cost-effective way to reach the majority of your hospital patients. We would still advocate focusing Direct Mail and Gift Officer outreach on the top tier, but email would give us the ability to reach just about everyone else in your hospital system. We would ensure that there is a suppression strategy that excludes inpatients, behavioral health and certain other factors
We call this a Digital Grateful Patient Program. This strategy would allow you to nurture relationships with potential and mid-level donors that may not meet the wealth-scoring criteria today or were misclassified by your wealth screening tool.
Results
The conversion that we can expect in the initial emails is quite low. These are cold emails to someone new, so we need to moderate our expectations. But with the right content, over the long term, you can build relationships that lead to conversions at key moments like Doctors’ Day, Giving Tuesday or End of Year.
Potential Concerns and Solutions
There are a few reasons why this strategy is only adopted by a minority of hospitals today:
- There may be pricing limitations in your current CRM, like Raiser’s Edge, that doesn’t make it feasible to import and email all of your patients. This is solvable by considering a separate email platform from your CRM like Luminate Online or Emma.
- You may be worried about offending or being too aggressive towards someone that just visited the hospital. This is solvable by not being as forward in your initial communication and having a more long-term approach to your conversion. For example, your initial communication may focus more on the community and impact versus asking for a donation.
- Return on Investment (ROI) could be a concern, especially for a smaller foundation office with limited development time and resources. Because this is more of a long-term effort, it is hard to justify taking time away from prospecting constituents that may not convert today. This is solvable by working with Doing Good Digital or a third party to outsource this initiative, so you are not taking time from your short-term prospecting.
Finally
By launching a digital grateful patient program to the majority of your patient file, you can build a long-term sustainable pipeline for your hospital foundation.
Please contact us today if you would like to discuss how you can set up your grateful patient program.
