How to Attract Major Donors for Hospital Fundraising Campaigns

Here are the top five strategies to attract major donors for hospital fundraising campaigns. It's no secret that in healthcare and in all fundraising, sometimes upwards of 80 all the way up to 95% of money raised comes from just major gifts. Now, major gifts can be different depending on your organization size. I'd say the average maybe starts at $25,000 and up. We kind of define it as $50,000 and up. This could be pledged over a couple years, but we'll call it a singular gift of $50,000 or more. Some organizations bring that as low as 5 or 10,000, but regardless, this is where most of the money comes from. Very, very few people are going to give you the biggest percentage of dollars. So, we really just try to focus on those donors. And if we don't get the rest, we don't get the rest cuz we know we're 85-95% of the way there. So, these are our top five strategies to actually make sure that we are focusing on those and we're not wasting our time both from a prospecting perspective through cultivation all the way to getting the gift.

Number one is donor research. When most people think of donor research, they think of these wealth screening tools. There are obviously you can put in someone's name into the wealth screening engine and there's software that looks up their property values and if they've given any political donations and if they have any donations in the system already you can kind of estimate how much total wealth they have or at least how much total capacity to give that they have. Those are accurate roughly 60% of the time. Now this obviously changes based on the tool, but as a very rough estimate, we're about 60% accurate. So, if it says for sure that they have money, they probably do. If it says they don't have money, they may or may not. So, this is kind of a first step.

The second thing is obviously just to do a little bit of advanced Googling and research on your own. Most of the time, again, shared this trick before, but it's it's such a a powerful one. I would recommend you do it. Googling their name and then putting the name of your city and just the phrase "annual report" or "donation" or "fundraising." Just doing a little bit of Googling to see if there's any public gifts that they've given. You may not be able to get any information. Nothing may come up, or sometimes it comes up with a lot of information like, "Oh, they gave to the local school, they gave to the local botanical garden." So getting those paid tools get you 60% of the way there, and then if you can use a little bit of Googling, maybe you get 80%. And even if that gets you close, even if you're able to make it to 80% accurate with what you can ask for and who's available to ask for this money, you have to start this way.

Tactic number two is of course meaningful relationships. It's very unlikely that you're going to get an extremely large gift from any donor ever without some sort of personal connection. You occasionally will get surprised, but if we're trying to build a system and a pipeline to move along donors from "here are the people who could give and are relatively interested in giving big gifts" to "how do we talk to them" all the way to "oh, they've given a gift finally and we're very grateful." That requires some back and forth, learning about them, them learning about you, and this long stretch of mutual trust that goes back and forth. So, you have to actually form those relationships. This also requires a lot of getting out from behind your desk and going out into the community and talking to people face to face. Of course, it's possible to solicit over Zoom or over the phone or have these more transactional relationships, but in terms of revenue, if you're trying to maximize for revenue, this is a really important key aspect that we just can't skip.

There are kind of two main components that we talk about this. The first is personalized outreach. So instead of going one to many with our messaging, with our outreach, with our phone calls, with our emails, with our letters, with trying to get in front of people, we're let's get in front of many as many people as possible. We're going to avoid this and we're going to focus on one to one. And anytime we can have a totally customized, totally personalized one-to-one outreach greatly increases the likelihood. This means you're going to have to have a lot of repeated one-to-ones, which is certainly more work, but say you reach out to over the course of a a few months, 50 people. And of those 50 people, maybe 20 of them respond to you. And of those 20 that respond, you maybe get 10 personal meetings set up over a few months. That feels pretty realistic. And of those 10 personal meetings, you can make, we'll just say, five asks. Hopefully, it's more than that, but you say you make five asks. And of those five asks, you get two gifts. Now, that doesn't seem like a lot, but if those two gifts are $50,000 a piece, that was very much worth it to reach out to all 50 of those people to make sure that we ended up with that $100,000 at the end. It would be much worse to send a generic something, email, letter to 5,000 people and hope that some of them give and that we can reach $100,000. It'd be a a very very large percentage of people giving, which just doesn't happen with generic outreach. So, personalized outreach is the first piece.

And the second way to craft meaningful relationships with your donors is stewardship or we'll call it ongoing stewardship. And the biggest key concept here is you want them used to hearing from you when you're not asking. This is something that a lot of charities screw up is that all the time we're just asking asking asking of our donors. Maybe they're generous. Maybe they really do love us. But if we have our handout in every single communication piece that we have, every single thing that we do across the board, they're going to be way way less likely to pick up the phone to feel excited. So instead of if this is a calendar year across the continuum here and we have four interactions per year and we ask them for money in the spring and then we ask them to come to an event, and then we ask for a sponsorship for the gala, and then we ask them for a year-end appeal. We have four asks. That is a lot of interaction that's maybe positive, maybe not, but they know, we're training them that, hey, when we call or reach out, we only ever need something. So, it goes to the next year and we reach out again in this early part of the year and they're like, "Uh, I've already kind of been feel like I've been tapped dry here." And realistically, because they're giving in small amounts throughout the year, there's nothing that's customized or personal or a large ask. They don't know how to budget for the year. They're just like, "I'm just going to take a break from this charity." Whereas instead, if we have all of these interactions, let's say we even add a couple more and we have one ask at the beginning of the year and then this is just thank you, impact report, invite to an event, another thank you, a handwritten card, and then a holiday card. And all of those things don't need anything from them. They're just a wonderful way to reach out. When we get back around to the beginning of the year, we ask them again at the top of the year. They're like, "Oh, I love hearing from so-and-so charity." because they're always just sending me cool stories and cool impact reports and saying thank you in these wonderful notes and phone calls. I love hearing from them. We're almost training them in a Pavlovian way that when we reach out, it's positive and that hopefully we can secure their support in the future.

Tactic number three is to craft compelling appeals. In the age of lightning-fast communication, it's super super easy to send anyone a message at any time. I can send thousands of people a message instantly with basically no effort. I with AI don't even have to make effort to craft the message. So when we're getting bombarded with information, bombarded with text and video, the importance of having something that's compelling and specific and custom and meaningful goes way up. The only way to stand out from the crowd these days is quality. You can't make it up in volume, especially if you're a small shop healthcare organization. We have to make it up in something that's quality and compelling. Here are kind of the three ways that we do that.

Number one is urgency and impact. We really want to focus on how is this money spent and what good does that do for the community. The step that charities tend to skip is how this money spent on the charity can flow through the charity and impact the patient population. Example for a hospital, it's like, "Oh, we need this new piece of equipment. Equipment costs $500,000, so that's why we're raising $500,000." It's like, "No, skip right over that. Don't talk about the piece of equipment. What does that piece of equipment do? Talk about how many patients or the type of patients we can serve or now we have this new state-of-the-art thing on the back end of this that's so compelling and important and we're going to talk about how urgent it is and what kind of impact we'll have with that piece of equipment." We don't need to know that the hospital needs a $500,000 thing, but instead the thing that will actually help the community on the other side.

Number two, alignment with donor interests. So, you may have a list of things that you need to raise money for, but if those things aren't exciting and interesting specifically to the person who's going to be giving the major gift or the major gift prospect, they're not going to give. They're only going to give big money to the areas that are of interest to them. The only way to know what's both on your list of needs and their list of interests is to ask them. So, it goes back to the relationship piece where we have to sit down and talk to them. A good discovery call or if you're meeting a prospective donor for the very first time should look about 50/50. You should be sharing about 50% of the stuff. You should be asking questions and listening 50% of the time to get information of what might line up. You can ask them about their philanthropic interests. You can ask them about legacy. You can ask them about how they would like to give. There's so many things that we can do that gather information as well as share it. And if we're not aligned with their interests specifically, they may give a small gift or kind of like a pity gift or we call it a go-away gift, or they may not give at all. But if we have something that's exactly in kind of their personal wheelhouse, something that they're excited about, that's where we can get those big transformational gifts. Again, only way to know is to ask. We can guess based on their past giving, but it's totally appropriate for you just to ask them outright what kind of things like to support and that you can help them find something that's a good fit for them if it's of interest to them.

And number three, multiple giving options. Another thing that's super appealing to people who give a large chunk of money at once is flexibility. Should they be able to pay some from their business or some personally? Can they pay some in this tax year and pay some in next tax year? Can they do a combined cash gift now and estate gift later? Whatever that might be. Being able to talk through those options, you can have them available. And again, best way to know what's exciting and interesting and helpful to them is just literally to ask. We we play this game where we're like, we're going to try to guess exactly what the donor wants and then we'll present them with this perfect pitch and if we've done our research right, it'll be exactly right. And it's very very difficult to nail people down on that way and it ends up that we always get something a little bit wrong. The way to kind of combat that is to be ready to say, "Hey, here's some options for you. We don't know which of these is the best fit for you as a prospective donor, but we'd like to talk through and just kind of explore together which ones might be a best fit. We don't really want to receive the gift unless we feel like it's impactful for you and us. Of course, we can take the money, but it's better for us in the long run and you in the long run for us to have this kind of mutually beneficial relationship. So, which of these giving options do you feel like is a better fit for you? We can also mix it up by year. What's going to be helpful?" And just just asking those questions and being transparent about the conversation always the best way to do it. So having that kind of in the mix with all these other things makes a very compelling appeal, not just a generic one that we see so many organizations use.

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Tactic number four, and this might be the most powerful one of all. If you're going to pick one, I might like number four the best, which is peer influence. Now, the difference here is, am I, as a paid fundraising staff person or a head of organization or an executive director or a CEO or whatever of the of a nonprofit going out and asking, "We'd love to have you consider a gift to to our charity." Totally fine. This is how most charities do it. And obviously, lots of gifts are made this way. It is not as compelling as a peer of theirs saying, "Hey, John, I gave to this charity. I think it'd be a really great fit for you. I decided to do $10,000 towards their campaign. I'd love to have you sit down and hear them out to see if this is a good fit for you as well." Or even better, if John says, "Hey, we gave $10,000 this year. We'd love to have you join us at that $10,000 level." It's so much more powerful to have someone who is a peer ask for the gift or at least be a part of the give process than it is for someone who's just paid to ask. Of course, you're going to ask me, you're being paid to ask me. It's it's your job. There's nothing wrong with that. That's how charities work. But if you can get someone who's a volunteer and has skin in the game themselves to just say, "Hey, I'm doing this. I want you to do this, too." Way more likely. Also, can skip a lot of the cultivation steps leading up to that point as well.

Here's how we do that. Boards and committees. You can either have your board help you by introducing you to prospects, going on calls, or having some sort of setup where you have maybe 3 hours a month or two hours a month of time where they say, "Yes, I'll I'll make one new connection for you a month or two new connections a quarter, however many you want to decide." We can also set up entirely separate independent committees and most of our clients have these as well where they're volunteers just dedicated to fundraising and their job is to help connect you to new people, go on those discovery meetings and explain the mission of the charity and what they're trying to accomplish and in some cases make asks. Not everyone's going to want to do each or all of those things, but some people will want to do some of those things. And that's a huge help as a staff person because you can skip that, "Oh, getting to know you, getting to know the charity. It's like, I don't really know this animal shelter very well, but I know John and if John's vetted it and he's involved and he's giving money. I'm sure he's done his research. This must be a pretty important thing for the community." So, I will at least hear them out or I might even consider a gift because I have the endorsement of John. If John's signed off on it, I'm all in. And that's why peer influence is so powerful.

The second thing is these little donor events. You don't have to have these crazy fundraising events. You know, we don't like fundraising events, but these small gatherings where prospective donors can learn about the organization. You can take a few of your existing donors, have them all invite a plus one. Maybe you get 10 to 12 people total, or a couple of the board members can host it at their home, or you can host it at your place of work if you have a physical campus that you operate from. And just say, "Hey, we don't know if this is a good fit for you. We're not going to be sneaky about trying to give a a pitch at the end here, but we'd like you to consider supporting us. Before you do that, you should hear us out. Like, you just learn a little bit about it. If you don't think it's a good fit for you philanthropically, no worries. You get to have a nice dinner. If you do, we can have a follow-up conversation privately afterwards." There's no hard ask at those events. It's just, "Hey, we're going to have a good time. We're going to hang out with friends and peers. We're going to learn about this charity that does X, Y, and Z. Some of you may choose to support, some of you may not, and that's totally okay." So having these little small intimate gatherings really really key way to do that and again influencing the peers, people who are on your board, your leadership to connect with other community leadership and get them to hopefully understand why you're trying to raise the money that you're trying to raise.

All right, fifth and final tactic is digital tools for online engagement. Thinking back to the principle where you want to stay as updated as you can and as connected as you can to your donors throughout the year, especially by not making asks. Again, one ask at the beginning of the year, work through the rest of the year not making asks. You can use digital tools here. And here are some of the easy ways that we can stay connected. Again, an impact report, a super easy way to stay connected to someone where you can leverage it. You can send it out to a lot of donors at once saying, "Okay, we're going to talk about a a mid-year update. It's July or whatever, and here's how much we've raised so far, and from that, we've been able to do, you know, 120 of these, and we've able to save five of these. and here are the different impact that we've had on the back end of raising this money. Here's how we've spent it and here's what that has meant for our mission. Our goal in the second half of the year is to do these things and we intend to do this, this, and this." That can all be condensed into a little chart, a singular paragraph and just, "Hey, here's an update." You'd be surprised at how many charities just don't do this at all. Like once they've gotten a gift, they're like, "Okay, good. I don't have to worry about that donor anymore." It's like, "No, that's the time that you most have to worry about that donor. As soon as they give, they're in it." We were almost communicating with our donors. And in many cases we do more than we would with prospects. It's that age-old saying: you treat your prospects like donors and your donors like prospects. Once someone has given a gift, that's the most important time to stay connected to them and saying, "Hey, no, this wasn't transactional. We really do genuinely appreciate the support. This was incredibly meaningful for us. We are very, very grateful for how this has been able to impact the people we serve. And here's just some updates. We'll kind of keep you posted based on what we're doing here." This is what you've basically bought with your gift is the inside scoop on what's going on. So, we want to make sure that we're using our tools online to be able to send email updates. We can have a portal they have. We can do monthly e-newsletters. Um, especially people of giving age right now are pretty dialed into that style of communication. You don't have to write a handwritten note every other month or call every single donor every month to stay connected. You can do kind of these single blasts out, but just keep you front of mind again with no ask attached. It's just, "Thank you so much for your generosity. Here's what we're doing." And it sounds so simple, but I'm telling you, most charities don't do this, and it's incredibly impactful when they do.

The second thing is just to use social media. Now, for social media, if you're a small shop, we recommend no more than 2 to 3 hours per month of stuff only because this is not a super effective way to raise money. But we can what we can do is take these two to three hours at the top of the month or every other week. We can take an hour and a half and schedule out a few posts. Two, three, four, maybe at the most every weekday, but that's probably too much even. And just little posts about, "Here's what we're doing, here's an impact update, here's a story about a patient that we've helped, here's a donor spotlight of someone who's given and why they give." And just staying connected so you're staying top of mind. We don't have to be the best in the social media game. We just have to play. We just have to be a little bit in the space and we want to take as little time as possible. So again, we try to batch that time as much as we can. Impact used to be very one-to-one and even an outreach in like a newspaper or something was very effort and time consuming. The point of social media hopefully is the efficiency piece. We can communicate with a lot of people at once, but we can certainly get lost in the amount of work that we could put in. It could be a full-time job. We do not need to do that. 2 to 3 hours a month, very very little time. Or if you really want to push it, call it an hour a week. Maybe Monday afternoons at 2:00. You just schedule two or three posts for the week across a few platforms and you call it good. Even better bonus points if you can tag the person who's being featured or the person who's quoting or person being talked about because then they will share it to their followers as well. Again, we don't have to do a lot. We just have to be in the space some. So hopefully that helps as well.

Hopefully those five tactics on how to attract major donors for your healthcare organization were useful to you and we can try some of them out. If you have any questions, you can put them in the comments below. We do read all the comments and if you'd like additional help, you can head over to pridephilanthropy.com and click on that "Let's Chat" button and you can chat directly with one of our experts to see if we can help you even further. Thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in the next video.