Healthcare Fundraising: How to Use Your Data for Success
A data-informed healthcare fundraising strategy is one that allows you to make the best fundraising decisions for your organization and your donors. When you responsibly collect, organize, and use donor data, you can make sure that messaging and strategies align with what your donors respond to, resulting in more effective fundraising overall.
To help you understand how to effectively (and compliantly) make use of data in your fundraising, we’re going to cover:
- What Kind of Data Should Be Collected?
- How Do Fundraisers Use Data?
- Data Privacy and Security: HIPAA and Other Regulations
- How AI Technology Can Take Your Data to the Next Level
Don’t let an uninformed strategy be what holds you back from connecting with donors and increasing fundraising success. If you’re ready to learn more about the important role that data plays in healthcare fundraising, let’s get started.
What Kind of Data Should Be Collected?
One of the most significant barriers to high-quality donor stewardship is a lack of information and meaningful insights. When you don’t understand your donors, it’s difficult to meet their needs and excel in your donor stewardship strategy.
But using a data-informed approach to your donor communications and solicitations can vastly improve fundraising outcomes. A few types of donor data that can help you better tailor your strategy for individual donors include:
- Basic and demographic information. While every donor is an individual, knowing information like someone’s age or employment status can help you more accurately target communications. For example, a retired volunteer is likely not interested in your Young Professionals Fundraising Mixer.
- Donation and volunteer history. This information will serve to help you both understand a donor’s giving habits as well as avoid asking for donations too frequently.
- Event attendance. Use this information to improve your outreach efforts before events. Some donors may be key players in improving attendance if they’re frequent attendees, while infrequent attendees might be best targeted with new ways to engage.
- Survey answers or other communication responses. If your donors have explicitly stated their opinions on events, fundraising campaigns, or other aspects of your organization, it’s important to take those into consideration for future communications.
- Wealth indicators. This data will allow your team to conduct prospect research more effectively to identify potential major donors and increase your fundraising totals.
Publicly available data and information that your donors have shared with you can go a long way in helping your organization create stronger bonds. When a donor feels like they’re understood by your organization, rather than thought of as just another source of money, they’re much more likely to remain connected to your cause.
How Do Healthcare Fundraisers Use Data?
Collecting data is only the first step in moving your organization forward for more effective fundraising. In order for the data you’re collecting to be valuable, your organization needs to have an in-depth understanding of how to effectively use it to impact your fundraising outcomes. Effective use of your data allows you to create better donor retention strategies, improve prospect research and solicitation, and measure the success of your efforts. But how exactly does it do this?
Healthcare fundraisers use data to drive results for their organizations by:
- Creating prospect profiles. These profiles help you better manage your pool of donors and keep up with changes in your donors’ affinity, propensity, and capacity to give.
- Segmenting donors. The data you collect can help you group your donors so that you can better target them with tailored communication and retention strategies.
- Identifying potential major gifts. Without proper data, it can be difficult to know who is a good candidate for a major gift. Soliciting major gifts should never involve guesswork as you could risk a donor relationship by asking for an inappropriate amount.
- Conducting Grateful Giving Programs. For healthcare organizations, these programs are a crucial part of not only engaging patients and their families in philanthropy but also building the reputation of your organization.
- Measuring success. Internal metrics allow you to identify what parts of your strategy are helping you reach your goals as well as areas for improvement.
To successfully use your data in these ways, it’s crucial to maintain highly-organized and robust data with software that makes your job easier, not harder. Sorting through data can be a time-consuming and ineffective process without the proper tools. Your team can greatly benefit from software that uses artificial intelligence to automate and expedite many of these processes.
Data Privacy and Security: HIPAA and Other Regulations
Privacy is an important concern for many patients who are sharing large amounts of personal information with their healthcare providers. Despite fundraisers needing data to efficiently fundraise, patient privacy cannot be overlooked. Practicing proper data security and following all laws and regulations is crucial for patient trust, organization reputation, and legal protection.
(HIPAA) aims to give patients more control of their health data and prevent the sharing of their information without their consent.
While HIPAA is in place to protect patient data, there is some information that is permissible for fundraising use under its guidelines:
- Patient information (name, address, phone/email, date of birth, age, gender, etc.)
- Health insurance coverage status
- Dates during which they received care
- The general type of department where a patient received care.
- Treating physician information
- General outcome
Even in situations where patient information can be shared, it’s critical to do your due diligence in preventing accidental leaks and privacy violations. This standard of security applies to all fundraising but is especially important for healthcare fundraising. It’s also important to note that HIPAA has a “minimum necessary” standard which implies that even when using this information, fundraisers should only use the necessary information.
Additionally, there are a few explicit pieces of information under HIPAA that cannot be used without written patient consent:
- Diagnosis
- Nature of services
- Treatment
As you navigate data privacy and security while engaging in healthcare fundraising, it’s crucial to keep your standards high for everyone’s safety. Even an accidental violation of privacy can pose serious issues for your organization.
At DonorSearch, all of our employees undergo thorough HIPAA training and master our strict data security and file processing methods. These methods are specifically designed with data security in mind and are a leading factor in why DonorSearch is one of the most reliable partners in healthcare fundraising.
How AI Technology Can Take Your Data to the Next Level
Data is the foundation of a successful donor strategy, and how you manage that data directly impacts its long-term value for your fundraising efforts.
When it comes to managing your donor data, there is no better partner than DonorSearch. DonorSearch has the next generation of fundraising tools that utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning to help you approach prospect research more efficiently than ever. Instead of sorting through data manually or with clunky software, DonorSearch’s AI can automate and drastically improve many of these processes.
The advanced AI and machine learning technology in DonorSearch’s software also has incredibly accurate prospect prediction capabilities that can make a huge difference in your donor stewardship. Some of the predictions include:
- Who’s going to donate in the next 30 days
- Non-donors most likely to make first gift
- Donors most likely to donate again
- Donors most likely to give over $250
- Donors most likely to respond (engagement score)
- Best way to reach out to a donor
These targeted predictions give your fundraisers a wealth of information to work with that they’ve never had before.
Additionally, while artificial intelligence is great for quickly streamlining your work, the added benefit of machine learning means that the longer you use DonorSearch’s products, the better the algorithm will become at making predictions for your unique set of donors and prospects. AI and machine learning are the future, and DonorSearch presents the opportunity to take your organization one step further than your competition.
Wrapping Up
Whether you’re just beginning a Grateful Giving Program or you’re simply outgrowing your existing software, making the investment in data management software and artificial intelligence-driven prospecting tools will position your organization as forward-thinking. Because data is so integral to a successful fundraising strategy, these platforms are the future. Get ahead now with DonorSearch.
