Grateful Patient Prospects are not made equal, just like general fundraising prospects aren’t made equal.  In order to make the most effective pipeline strategy, it’s important to know what information you need on prospects, how they should be organized and where they should go once you have the patient data.

Generally, most organizations are looking at patient information to support Annual, Major and Planned Giving programs.  In order to select and prioritize the right prospects for the appropriate program you’ll need a certain set of information.  The higher the potential gift amount, the more data points are beneficial.  

It’s important to note here that more doesn’t mean everything you can get your hands on.  It’s about the right data and limited, allowable PHI.  Data-driven decision making doesn’t assume the more data the better.  It assumes that the appropriate data is used to inform specific situations.  Keep the data you need to what directly provides gift officers with what they need to grow the pipeline, including your annual giving folks.

So what pieces of information are important to have?

Annual Giving

Prospecting for your Annual Fund and Annual Giving programs are the most broad.  Like with other constituents, patient prospects require the least amount of information.  These are larger quantity pools with lower level givers, providing support through single gifts, recurring gifts, events and more.  

And with most programs moving to implement or enhance online annual giving programs, now you can reach more prospects for a fraction the price of mail. 

Using patient data to fuel these programs is fairly straightforward.  You don’t need more than basic demographics and visit information to determine if you should email patients.  Once you’ve determined if patients are also donors, you can develop target audiences.  For new patients that are non-donors, it’s common for organizations to message everyone with an email who’s opted in or or meets the patient exclusion recommendations.  

• First, Middle and Last Name

• Address

• Email

• Phone

• DOB

• Patient ID or MRN

• Visit Date

• Visit Location

• Visit Provider

• Visit Specialty

• Visit Inpatient vs. Outpatient

Major Giving

To identify a Major Gift Prospect, you’ll need all the same demographic and visit data as an Annual Giving Prospect, plus various wealth indicators.  

These are often established givers to your organization, but that doesn’t rule out Grateful Patient Prospects with capacity who could be extremely appreciative of the care they receive(d) and want to support monetarily.  

The types of wealth information will vary between organizations depending on size, prospect research capabilities and access to outside tools/services for this information.

• Wealth Capacity

• Income

• Assets

• Giving to Other Organizations

• Giving Likelihood Indicators

• Internal Affinity Score

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

Planned Giving

As we saw in the chart above, planned gift donors are often your most loyal.  Depending on your program, you may also be looking at higher-level planned gifts that come in the form of a wide array of vehicles.  

Planned Gifts require the same or similar information as both Annual and Major Giving, but limitedly so.  Identifying these prospects is often about assessing existing data in different ways that align with certain planned giving indicators.

• Planned Giving Indicators

• Age (DOB)

• Internal Affinity Score (specific to planned giving)

Organizing grateful patient prospects makes building the analytics more targeted and, therefore, more effective.  There’s a multitude of ways to use the data, but it’s critical to first have the right pieces at your disposal.  

Now that you’ve identified the data needed to organize your prospects, determine your process for moving that information between systems.  Almost certainly you have more than one place the data gets stored and it’s crucial that it stays accurate, moves efficiently and the process is transparent to key stakeholders.