Your healthcare organization’s success depends on effective fundraising in many ways. In fact, fundraising dollars help you secure adequate staffing, resources, equipment, and facility improvements. But, how can your organization tap into significant and consistent funding that makes these things possible? The answer: using donor data.
Use data to strengthen your healthcare organization’s fundraising efforts by:
- Segmenting Your Supporters
- Creating Prospect Profiles
- Tailoring Your Communication Strategies
- Using Data Appending Services
Data takes the guesswork out of your organization’s fundraising strategy, enabling you to experience long-term growth. Let’s explore these data-backed fundraising tactics in more detail!
Segment Your Supporters
Segmenting your supporters is key to unlocking new fundraising growth opportunities. It’s the process of seeing shared characteristics between donors and meeting groups of your supporters where they are. It’s the first step in understanding your donor base, so you can better connect with them.
To give you an idea of how you might segment your donors, consider using NPOInfo’s donor management demographic criteria:
- Age and life stage: Separate your donors into age groups like young adults, new parents, and seniors. From there, you can organize fundraising efforts relevant to each group. For instance, parents of young children may be interested in supporting fundraising research related to child cancer treatment.
- Location: Determine where the majority of your donor pool lives by state or region. Then you can research healthcare issues related to each area and consider them in your campaign planning.
- Income: Collect ballpark income estimates for each of your donors to set your fundraising expectations and target the right donors for each campaign. For those with limited disposable income, focus on making small asks.
- Employment: Determine where your donors work and look to see if they are matching gift eligible. This could mean double the number of regular donations!
- Health condition: While adhering to privacy laws, segment your supporters based on previous health conditions such as heart disease or diabetes. You can then use this information to tailor your marketing strategies.
Other information you can collect to segment your supporter audience includes communication preferences, giving habits, and volunteer status. Once you segment your donors in a way that makes sense for your fundraising goals, you can tailor your messaging to those specific segments to ensure your outreach resonates with your supporters every time.
Create Prospect Profiles
Donor prospect profiles hold all relevant data gathered during the wealth screening and prospect research processes, including wealth or capacity markers and philanthropic indicators. This information is key to identifying top-giving candidates and is extremely helpful in fundraising planning.
Additionally, these profiles are the result of detailed data aggregation and data exchange, as they compile useful research from multiple sources into referenceable metrics. And, as you learn more about your fundraising prospects, you can update them.
There are two key indicators included in prospect profiles: philanthropic indicators and wealth indicators.
Philanthropic indicators represent an individual’s willingness to give to your organization. They include previous donations to your nonprofit, other nonprofit involvement, and personal information like related interests or hobbies. For instance, a top prospect might have philanthropic indicators like recent advocacy involvement or years of volunteer experience.
On the other hand, wealth indicators measure a prospect’s capacity to give. They can include real estate ownership, business affiliations, or political contributions. A prospect with many wealth indicators would be in a position to give your organization a large gift.
By collecting and combining these two types of indicators, your organization can target donors with the highest ability and affinity to give.
Tailor Your Communication Strategies
Once you’ve compiled your prospect research data, you can begin to use that information to tailor your marketing communications. For instance, you could send prospects fundraising information related to their interests and previous experiences.
On the other hand, you should send long-time donors updates on how their contributions are being used to further your organization’s mission. For example, was there a new program your hospital adopted? Has your facility seen any recent progress with new or historically slow research initiatives? Illustrating the impact of previous donations will encourage further gifts.
To keep your communication meaningful, incorporate these tips:
- Focus on impactful storytelling by highlighting inspirational physician or patient stories.
- Use eye-catching visuals, photos, and infographics.
- Make donors feel involved and update them on any progress you’ve made toward your healthcare vision.
- Provide consistent examples of the real difference donor gifts make.
- Thank new and long-time donors alike and make them feel valued with unique and targeted gestures.
- Provide a way for donors to contact you should any questions arise.
There are near-limitless numbers of digital communications your healthcare organization can leverage to communicate with donors. Just remember to stay HIPAA compliant and prioritize emphasizing each donor’s individual value during the fundraising process.
Use Data Appending Services
Just as thoughtful use of predictive analytics can improve patient care, predictive analytics can improve donor outreach. In the world of fundraising, predictive analytics are furthered by third-party data appending services.
In a nutshell, data appending involves collaborating with a third party to gather additional data points to supplement your organization’s existing records. There are several services that data appending providers offer, including:
- Data hygiene services. A provider can prepare your existing nonprofit database for appending and enhancement by cleaning up your organization’s outdated data and duplicate entries.
- Marketing and campaign management. Partner with a data appending provider to target donors across various communication channels.
- Predictive data analytics services. Use these services to create donor segments and determine an informed fundraising strategy with forecasted outcomes.
- Custom data solutions. If your organization has specialized needs or does not quite know where to start, partnering with a data appending service can help you fill in gaps.
Data appending services are a great way to streamline and propel your fundraising efforts. If you’re stuck in a rut or feel overwhelmed with large quantities of donor data, use a data appending service for increased efficiency and effectiveness.
Donor data offers actionable insights for your healthcare organization to tap into. Segmentation and prospect profiling can help you tailor your marketing campaigns and reach out to new donor prospects. Additionally, data appending services can help you maintain a robust and clean database, allowing you to reactivate lapsed donors and create meaningful communication strategies.
