If you’ve read our past blogs or reviewed our patient surveys, you will find a common theme that stands out – the lack of awareness of a hospital foundation. According to our 2020 and 2021 consumer surveys, more than 50% of respondents knew little about their community hospital foundation.
So, here’s a thought. What if you were able to use patient surveys to help drive awareness for your foundation and fundraising efforts? The ability to conduct immediate outreach to patients with high satisfaction indicators coupled with the capacity and inclination to give can help your foundation engage with more qualified prospects! These are your most loyal patients and most valuable prospects.
As discussed in my last blog, the-case-for-fundraising-through-patient-satisfaction-surveys, hospitals are required by federal law to survey patients through CAHPS, using generic static surveys. The questions in these surveys are defined by regulation and rely on patient interaction by mail or phone. New leading survey practices in monitoring the patient experience now include intentional and personalized engagement that allows you to build loyalty via text and email during a patient’s stay or immediately after discharge.
These new survey methodologies can now serve two purposes. Build loyalty for your hospital and support fundraising efforts. Engaging patients through the entire patient experience – preadmission, during their stay, and post discharge, offers valuable touchpoints to build satisfaction and loyalty. Data shows that this intentional engagement throughout the patient journey has a direct impact on patient loyalty. This engagement also provides a great opportunity to introduce the foundation and drive fundraising efforts.
The fundamental approach with this process is to tie your analytics to patient satisfaction. This process allows you to engage patients likely to donate in a more efficient manner, sooner, and with lower costs. Your outreach is more meaningful to the patient as you can act during and immediately after an episode of care. Ultimately, these are the patients that you are trying to target for grateful patient so by engaging them sooner you streamline the process for the patient while helping your organization become more efficient.
So how do you get this started? Here are some ideas that can support a conversation with your patient experience team.
- Initial outreach about the foundation can trigger after a survey is completed using text and email messaging. At this point, educate the patient about the hospital’s non-profit status and needs.
- Share a link within these messages that will connect to the foundation website to learn more rather than push an immediate ask.
- Continue engagement and cultivate those that connect to your foundation page through the survey.
- Use predictive modeling and wealth screening tools to define who to continue engagement with and specify follow-up messages along with the amount of the ask. This is a great way to build your pipeline of interested and qualified prospects.
- Continue to work with the patient experience team to focus on service lines where you might also be raising funds for expansion and improvement of services. Satisfied patients are also loyal patients so appeal to that aspect of their experience.
We look at outreach from patient satisfaction scores and predictive modeling as a way to build your base of mid-level donors and a pipeline for larger gifts. A great approach to help bring more patients into your organization and promote them to major gifts in the future.
For more information about our turnkey patient satisfaction and prospect screening tool, please contact us.
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