5 Hospital Fundraising Tactics to Deploy During a Crisis
Hospitals across the globe are being confronted with the fallout of an extraordinary pandemic, COVID-19, that requires tremendous investment to combat. While the article below really focuses on the efforts of the recent escalation of coronavirus, the guidance and suggestion below scales to any medical crisis we may face in the future.
Given that COVID-19 has had a global impact on our entire society, it’s objectively never been more challenging to be working in hospital philanthropy. We’ve outlined five strategies for your fundraising organization to consider:
- Prioritization
- Engage the media
- Call to Action
- Strength in Numbers
- Segmenting Donors
1. Prioritization
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) like N95 masks, surgical gowns, medical face shields, disinfectant wipes, and hand sanitizers have quickly become the top requested in-kind donation. If your hospital is facing a PPE shortage, make sure to deploy an all hands on deck approach in soliciting the public. If sourcing PPE is the hospital’s highest priority, make sure all teams are working seamlessly together in procuring supplies: communication departments, clinicians, back-office staff and front-line fundraisers alike.
Remember that corporations and individuals who are willing and able to provide you with their excess supply of PPE, may very well also be willing to donate financially to your hospital. If directly asking them feels overly intrusive, try a passive giving approach like instructions on how they, “can do more to help” after they’ve successfully donated their excess equipment.
2. Engage The Media
One mass-appeal email blast to your donor base, respectfully asking for financial assistance could certainly result in meaningful gifts. Now imagine if that same compelling message was covered in a segment on CNN. For instance, take Seattle Children’s Hospital’s request for N95 masks to be delivered at various drop off locations. It was picked up by multiple news outlets and resulted in a national community mobilized to deliver support. The press coverage also linked readers to Seattle Children’s Facebook post on the topic. From there, readers are presented with the post along with a donate button. This leads us to the 3rd tactic.
3. Call To Action
In an environment of social distancing and sheltering-in-place, make giving online easy across all digital channels, not just your website. Your community wants to support you, so make it intuitive for them to do so with a simple call to action wherever your hospital appears on the internet. For instance, this can be as simple as enabling donations through your hospital’s Facebook presence (believe it or not, many hospitals overlook this important feature). Similarly, if local or national media are covering your hospital during this crisis via online articles, make sure your communications and PR teams have the press include a hyperlink back to your foundation for those readers who feel moved and compelled to provide much needed financial support.
4. Strength in Numbers
Now is the time to leverage networks of all kinds. Sites like DonatePPE and PPE Link aggregate hospital requests for supplies and donations into one simple place for people to find them. These sites provide convenience for suppliers and the public through consolidation while also driving web traffic. If your hospital isn’t listed on sites like these, unfortunately, you’ll be missing out on critical donations from a highly-motivated audience.
5. Segmenting Donors
If ever there was a time to tailor strategic, proportionate, and respectful solicitations, it’s now. With wealth destruction events adversely impacting households as macroeconomic headwinds blow, major donors that you have relied on may no longer have the ability to support you in the manner they once did. Wealth Screening and Propensity-to-Give scoring solutions like Windfall, which fully refresh their dataset weekly, can keep your fundraising operation fully up-to-date on the affluence of your top-tier prospects and donors.
While some fundraisers are shying away from high-figure asks, billionaires like Italian designer Giorgio Armani are donating $1.4 million to hospitals. As highlighted in a recent blog post by Windfall CEO Arup Banerjee, while there has undoubtedly been a huge impact on the economy and the stock market, the impact on overall wealth may not be as bleak, and certainly not evenly distributed. Possessing the data on who can give and how much can mean the difference between landing a transformative gift when your hospital needs it the most and damaging donor relations with an inappropriate request.
At Windfall, our team works tirelessly to bring high-quality, actionable data to the finger-tips of hospital prospect research and fundraising professionals so they can maximize the efforts of their incredibly difficult and important jobs. To learn more about how Windfall’s precise net worth data and Propensity-to-Give machine learning models can help your nonprofit hospital maximize your COVID-19 response impact, contact our team at questions@windfalldata.com.
This article was authored by Josh Hadley, Director of Sales at Windfall. Contact Josh at Josh@windfalldata.com.
About Windfall:
Windfall helps you identify, understand, and engage the affluent. We provide you with precise net worth data on affluent US households, allowing you to make informed data-driven decisions.
For more information about Windfall please visit: https://www.windfalldata.com.
