Grateful Patient Major Gift Programs are a beautiful construction of both pipeline and the cultivation of cold prospects through clinician partnership. 

One key aspect of utilizing data insights to establish or better inform Grateful Patient programs is the ability to use patient metrics to guide strategy.  This is an opportunity to look at the data as de-identifiable, taking out any concern from unnecessarily receiving or storing PHI.  This data allows you to assess the patient population you’ll be working with in order to better structure your program.

Here’s the ideal fields to make the first assessment:

• City, State, and/or State

• Email - “X” for not blank records

• Phone - “X” for not blank records

• Age

• Visit Date

• Visit Location

• Visit Provider

• Visit Speciality

• Visit Inpatient vs. Outpatient

If you’re able to get identifiable data, add in fields that will allow you to get external wealth screening information to find strong prospects that should be prioritized before more thorough assessment:

• First, Middle, Last Name

• Address

• DOB

This additional patient information allows you to submit a screening to further get:

• Wealth Capacity

• Income

• Assets

• Giving to Other Organizations

• Giving Likelihood Indicators

• Internal Affinity Score

• Internal Donor RFM (recency, frequency, monetary amount)

Once you’ve been able to get and combine this data for a comprehensive look at individual constituents, you can use it to build statistics that inform your program.  

As you’re building or filling gift officer portfolios, you can take the data to build profiles on departments and physicians to help identify partnerships that should be prioritized.  There’s nothing fancy about merging together some spreadsheets and making a few pivot tables to get this data summarized.  

Combining this gives you a high level snapshot to dig into the makeup of prospects by department, location or physician.  These higher-level stats influence which prospects are assessed further, but also show snapshots that can drive which physicians your team reaches out to first.  Prioritize both team’s time and use data to give the most promising prospects first, building trust with your Major Gift and Clinical teams.

Within each specialty, further breakdown prospects by quartile (1/4s) or deciles (1/10s), assigning them ranking.  If getting to these statistical results seems daunting, you can also consider working your way down those lists, starting with the 

Remember, by taking a group of prospects that have both a high wealth capacity and a high inclination and/or affinity you have a method to identify patient suspects that feed a critical fundraising pipeline.

By examining past visit patterns, physician interaction, and possible giving or communication engagement, organizations can tailor their fundraising asks to better resonate with their patient prospects. This personalized approach can lead to higher donor retention rates and increased donations.