How a major hospital foundation achieves sustainable growth
Crafting a scalable strategy to meet each campus’s unique needs.
OVERVIEW.
Hospital foundations face many of the same challenges as traditional cause-based nonprofits. However, they also have a unique set of circumstances that make healthcare-based fundraising its own animal, including complex donor pools that blend grateful patients with corporate sponsors and medical staff, strict compliance and privacy regulations like HIPAA, and the pressure to align fundraising goals with institutional priorities that can shift rapidly with public health needs.
This is how we have partnered with one of the largest and most respected systems in New Jersey.
Our client is a foundation that serves as the fundraising arm for an extensive hospital network across New Jersey. The Foundation assists multiple health campuses with acquiring and adopting cutting-edge medical technologies, recruiting the highest quality healthcare professionals, and providing financial assistance for uninsured patients.
Healthcare fundraising saw a considerable spike in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. And the strategies we built with the Foundation aimed to keep these donors engaged and convert them from one-time donors into loyal supporters.
THE APPROACH.
amplifi had already worked as a key print and mail vendor for one of the Foundation’s anchor hospitals. They sought new ideas beyond direct mail and requested our strategic assistance to build a more integrated approach.
We expanded their work holistically to build a multi-channel outreach strategy involving email, tactful use of their data to optimize targeting and maximize donation amounts, and data analysis to achieve continuous improvement. The results of this more integrated approach were immediately noticeable.
Following a state-wide merger that consolidated multiple campuses’ philanthropic efforts under a centralized Foundation, amplifi was asked to replicate their strategic approach throughout the network. This involved using highly specific data to create variable and versioned outreach for each campus through a cost-effective, multi-channel campaign.
The goals were the same – grow each hospital’s annual giving program and build a pipeline of new potential donors by streamlining their direct mail and digital communications. However, the strategy needed to be tailored to each campus’s donor base and what motivates them to give.
We used our initial strategy as a blueprint to build the approach for each of the other hospitals in the Foundation’s network. We planned a core set of multi-touch, integrated appeals throughout the year versioned for each campus, while incorporating specific, targeted appeals that tended to outperform for certain campuses.
An integrated communications strategy.
While healthcare traditionally relies on direct mail, the Foundation recognized the need to broaden their outreach through digital efforts that complement their direct mailers.
We helped them understand the limitations of their current system for segmenting and personalizing their messages. We also adjusted their email outreach to follow similar segmentation and personalization strategies used in direct mail, including messaging and imagery specific to the recipient’s campus and giving history.
amplifi brought a fresh perspective to the Foundation’s strategic planning. We helped them think from a data-first perspective that would help sustain growth in their annual giving program.
Once the initial pieces were in place, we assisted the Foundation with applying more advanced personalization, stronger ask strategies, different approaches to design, and robust A/B testing across their network. We also used what we learned from other hospitals in the network to identify which messages or mediums were most successful with specific groups of donors to maximize results.
Data-driven decision making.
After the blueprint was applied and refined for each health center, our focus shifted to creating awareness and engagement for different initiatives the client prioritized. Advanced data analysis became a key component of our work together as we sought to achieve continuous, sustainable growth in the annual giving program.
In one instance, the Foundation asked us to help them examine their data and provide some fresh ideas. So, we analyzed the reports they had available and helped them build four new reports that were used to take things a step further. We recommended they look deeper into specific donor attributes, giving compared to the ask strategy, giving compared to past history, and the overall intersection of campus/appeal/package code response.
These new reports helped us better understand who is responding to what, and what these donors may have in common. They dug deeper, beyond donors and dollars to determine who was responding, what motivated them to give, why others didn’t give, and how the Foundation could adjust based on these findings.
We helped the Foundation break things down by campus package codes, demographic details, and psychographic information to see what’s working on a more micro level. This also involved identifying appeals that seemed to be outperforming with certain groups and examining rates of online versus offline donations for specific appeals or donor groups.
This analysis was designed to empower the Foundation and its individual giving team and help them utilize their limited resources more effectively by refining and streamlining their approach while being more cost-effective with their fundraising outreach.
Moving forward.
The individual giving program has become a consistent performer for the Foundation. The department continues exceeding the goals set by their leadership during a time when healthcare fundraising is anything but predictable.
And this can be attributed, in part, to strategies that focused on achieving cost-effective, sustainable growth in the post-pandemic period.
While the Foundation is large, their annual giving team was comprised of just a few key individuals, focused on the day-to-day tasks of an ever-growing to-do list. They recognized that they could not handle everything on their own. Partnering with amplifi helped the Foundation expand their capacity and how much they can achieve in a given year, without adding additional staff members.
Our current work with the Foundation is focused on making further changes that keep pushing the needle forward. Like all organizations that commit to being data-driven, the Foundation saw positive impacts of their efforts at the macro-level.
Now, we’re focused on continuing to break things down with them on a more granular level to achieve consistent, sustainable growth.
services utilized
Project Deliverables:
Integrated campaigns (direct mail + email)
Campus-specific versioning
Donor segmentation strategies
Custom performance reports
Strategic campaign planning
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