3 Major Healthcare Fundraising Trends You Need to Know 

In the changing landscape of healthcare fundraising, it’s crucial for healthcare institutions to stay on top of new trends. Understanding the shifting demands and needs of donors will allow your organization to pivot and adjust your strategy for successful fundraising.

To make sure you know how to navigate these new trends, we’re sharing the three biggest healthcare fundraising trends and how you can use them to your advantage:

1. There Are Fewer Donors, but Larger gifts
2. Online Donations Are On the Rise
3. Donor Retention Is a Continued Challenge

Adapting to changing trends doesn’t have to be difficult or intimidating. With the right tools and this guide to healthcare fundraising trends, your organization will be well-equipped to make the best of new donor behavior and expectations.

There Are Fewer Donors, but Larger Gifts

According to the Blackbaud Insitute, total giving was up 2.8% in 2020, but the number of donors was down 10.8%. While larger donations are not inherently a problem, the difference in the increase in donation size and the decrease in the number of donors, ultimately resulted in 75% of healthcare organizations receiving fewer donations in 2020 than in 2019.

Understanding this trend is important for adjusting your strategy for maximum fundraising success. Because donors are more inclined to give larger gifts, this is an excellent time to focus on prospect research and optimizing your major gift solicitations.

Consider updating your software to help you more effectively identify potential major donors. While manually looking for wealth indicators in your prospect pool can work, it takes much longer and is much less accurate than making use of artificial intelligence-empowered software like DonorSearch.

AI can help you more accurately and efficiently predict:

• Who’s going to donate in the next 30 days
• Non-donors most likely to make their first gift
• Donors who are most likely to donate again
• Donors most likely to give over $250

To keep up with changing trends and to maximize your fundraising efforts, you need the next generation of fundraising tools. Give your fundraising totals a boost with DonorSearch’s cutting-edge AI technology.

Online Donations Are On the Rise

Data shows that online donations are up 11.7%, which indicates the importance of an online presence for healthcare fundraisers. More and more donors are flocking to the convenience of an online donation form that they can fill out while waiting in line at the grocery store.

This means that your healthcare organization needs to focus on having:

1. A robust and mobile-optimized website where supporters can donate.
2. A social media presence and digital marketing plan that drives supporters to your website.

If your healthcare organization successfully drives traffic to an excellent website, you’ll be able to easily take advantage of this increase in online donations. Because this trend is not likely to reverse in the future, now is the time for your organization to focus on your digital strategy and presence.

To ensure that you’re driving traffic to your website, your team should:

• Regularly post on social media.
• Include CTA’s in your posts, directing users to your website.
• Use eye-catching graphics and images in all digital marketing materials.
• Publish SEO-optimized blog content on your website.
• Use digital ads to drive additional traffic, if necessary.
• Send out a regular email newsletter.

While you’re working on driving traffic to your website, you should also ensure that your website converts visitors into donors. You can do this by:

• Optimizing your website for mobile users.
• Featuring a “donate” button prominently.
• Having an easy-to-use navigation menu.
• Using accessibility best practices.
• Branding your donation form to increase trust.
• Writing compelling and easy-to-read website copy.
• Including all important information, like the details of your grateful patient program.

Whether your strategy needs a few tweaks or a lot of work, it will be well worth your time to bring your website up to current standards. Not only can it help increase donations, but it will also position your organization as modern, forward-thinking, and reliable. A glitchy, outdated website will do just the opposite!

Help instill confidence in your potential donors with a website and digital strategy that lets them know that their donations are in good hands.

Donor Retention Is a Continued Challenge

Not only is the total number of donors down, there was a 12.8% decrease in donor retention in 2020, indicating that this is not simply an issue of donor acquisition. This tells us that if healthcare organizations want to see their fundraising totals increase, they need to focus on donor retention.

To improve donor retention, your organization needs a comprehensive strategy and a deep understanding of your donors and their affinity, propensity, and capacity to give. By ensuring that you are collecting the necessary data and have the tools to understand what it’s telling you, you will greatly improve your engagement and retention strategy.

A few elements that all organizations should include in their donor retention strategy include:

• Creating multiple touchpoints. Reaching out to a donor once is rarely enough to convince them to donate. Create a communication plan that involves strategically-timed touchpoints that help you convert prospects to donors.
• Training individuals on philanthropy. Educating your healthcare staff on philanthropy can help them better support fundraising staff. While healthcare staff won’t make actual solicitations, their cooperation can still help secure donations, particularly in grateful patient programs.
• Personalizing communications. No donor wants to receive an email addressed “Dear donor.” Using communication software that allows you to automatically input a donor’s name and even their previous donation amount helps donors feel that they’re being personally addressed.
• Segmenting donors for higher engagement. In addition to personalizing your communications, you should also only be sending relevant emails to donors. Donor segmentation can help you more effectively target your communications so that donors are more likely to open your emails.
• Always expressing appreciation. Even the most dedicated donors may become disillusioned if they never hear “thank you.” Use an intentional donor appreciation strategy to ensure that all donors get properly and promptly thanked.

As we mentioned, to get the full picture of the impact of your donor retention efforts, you’ll need to be collecting donor data, fundraising data, and engagement data. Software with AI capabilities, like DonorSearch, that helps you capture and then make sense of your data will be most effective in helping you improve your donor retention.

Final Thoughts

To keep up with changing trends and new expectations, your healthcare institution needs top-of-the-line tools to help you execute your fundraising strategies successfully. DonorSearch’s next generation of fundraising tools uses AI and machine learning to make the best use of your data and deliver accurate prospect predictions, giving you the insight you need to excel.