This series will help fundraisers making the transition from higher education to health care understand key differences between the two sectors, including first-hand perspectives from philanthropy leaders who have successfully done so.

The single biggest difference between fundraising in higher education and health care is the donor. Health care donors, especially grateful patients, develop affinity for health care in unique ways and have different motivations for giving than alumni.

Two Keys to Understanding Health Care Donors

1. A narrow engagement window demands timely response from health care fundraisers

In health care, personal care experiences are a central motivation for many donors. A large percentage of top gifts to hospitals come from individuals who have had meaningful care experiences, or whose family has been impacted by the hospital.

However, the nature of grateful patient affinity is such that it’s more likely to diminish over time than the affinity held by an alumnus or alumna for their Alma Mater. Unlike colleges and universities, which have programs designed to engage alumni across their lifetime, hospitals hope to avoid repeat visits from their patients. As such, many top-performing health care development teams try to connect with prospective donors as soon as they can following a care episode, sometimes even while the patient remains in the hospital. Similarly, follow-up outreach methods are most successful when contacting prospects within 60 to 90 days of their care experience.

This shorter time frame in health care can be energizing for fundraisers who are used to the slower cultivation process in higher education, but the quick turnaround from care experience to cultivation requires two specific approaches:

• Mechanisms to quickly identify prospects. Fundraisers must be more proactive in tracking, identifying, and engaging prospects in a timely and organized fashion than they might have been in higher education environments.
  
  See our Patient Fundraising Program Toolkit for specific guidance and tools for connecting with patient prospects.
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• A menu of well-defined and clearly articulated priorities to share with prospects. Trish Jackson, Vice President of Development at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center noted that this is especially true when your role is to make “an in-the-moment connection with a potential donor.”
  
  See Curating Donor-Ready Campaign Priorities for our best practices in sourcing and translating strategic priorities for donors.

2. Personal care experiences elevate demands for personalized cultivation and stewardship

Many of the top gifts in health care are tied to a deeply personal or even life-changing care episode for the donor or a family member. 

These personal experiences often anchor a donor’s affinity with a hospital or health system, requiring fundraisers to connect a patient’s extremely personal and meaningful care experience to a philanthropic opportunity. Christian Gold Stagg, Director of Development at Asante Health, said, “These personal experiences exist in higher education too, but as a fundraiser you don’t often have to go there in order to make a deep connection. In health care, you do.”

Think about it this way—there is no health care equivalent to homecoming. Grateful patients do not have a single unified experience, so they require more individualized attention if they are to develop a long-term relationship with a health care organization.

Grateful patient prospects also present opportunities for engagement and impact that are often unavailable in higher education settings. As Trish Jackson explained, the nature of an unexpected care experience and wide diversity of donors in health care allows frontline fundraisers to maintain an “opportunistic edge, and to engage donors who would never be considered a prospect in higher education.”

In the Philanthropy Leadership Council’s interviews with development leaders who made the transition from higher education to health care, they unanimously agreed that the opportunity to engage a wider variety of prospects and donors is a positive and welcomed change.

Further Steps in Transitioning to Health Care Philanthropy

The donor experience is not the only difference between higher education and health care philanthropy. New health care fundraisers must understand two additional factors:

• How the health care industry works
• What defines the culture of philanthropy at their own institution

This discussion will follow in subsequent resources (Part 2 and Part 3) on transitioning from higher education to health care philanthropy.