Effective Data Use in Healthcare Fundraising: A Strategic Approach

Optimize healthcare fundraising by strategically leveraging patient data while navigating privacy challenges.

Patient data forms the foundation of successful healthcare philanthropy. Unlike other nonprofit sectors, healthcare organizations have a unique advantage – their constituents often experience life-changing or lifesaving care firsthand. These profound experiences inspire various forms of philanthropic support, such as grateful patient programs that fund immediate care needs, community health initiatives that expand access to care, endowed research positions that advance medical breakthroughs, transformative gifts that construct new healing spaces, and innovative treatment centers.

Consider the parent whose child receives groundbreaking treatment for a rare condition, the cancer survivor who benefits from innovative immunotherapy, or the trauma patient who walks again thanks to dedicated rehabilitation teams. These individuals don’t just receive care, they experience transformative moments that often inspire them to give back.

For a broad overview of healthcare fundraising, check out our blog, Healthcare Philanthropy and Fundraising: A Comprehensive Guide.

Navigating patient privacy

However, healthcare advancement teams face a complex challenge. While other nonprofit sectors can freely integrate constituent interactions into their CRM systems, healthcare organizations must carefully navigate the intersection of patient data privacy and donor engagement. This creates a fundamental tension: the very information that could help identify and engage potential donors is protected by stringent privacy regulations.

The stakes are high. Timely and strategic engagement with patients can lead to transformative gifts that fuel medical research, expand patient care programs, and advance healthcare innovation. Missing these opportunities doesn’t just impact fundraising totals, it leaves potential partnerships unexplored and powerful stories untold.

The inefficient approach: The data avalanche 

Many organizations adopt what I call the “data avalanche” approach to managing patient and constituent data. This method typically involves extracting extensive datasets from patient systems, whatever is permissible under privacy regulations, without clearly defined parameters for what information would genuinely enhance philanthropic relationships.

The reasoning behind this approach is straightforward – if we can’t precisely articulate what data we need, let’s gather everything possible and determine its value afterward. However, this creates several challenges:

• Advancement operations teams spend significant time sifting through overwhelming amounts of data
• Gift officers receive potential constituent information 90-120 days after meaningful interactions
• Resources are inefficiently allocated to data processing rather than relationship-building
• Teams struggle to identify truly actionable insights among the noise
• Opportunity costs mount as timely engagement windows close

Finding the strategic middle ground

The solution isn’t choosing between complete data isolation and overwhelming data dumps. Instead, organizations need to develop a strategic framework that starts with the end in mind. Let’s examine what success looks like when we get this right—and what failure looks like when we don’t. Consider these real-world scenarios:

Scenario 1: Strategic and timely information use

A gift officer receives an alert about a grateful family whose child received specialized cardiac care. The profile shows not just the clinical outcome, but crucial engagement indicators:

• Multiple family members expressed gratitude to specific physicians and nurses
• The family attended three educational sessions about pediatric cardiac care
• They shared their story with other families in the cardiac unit
• They inquired about supporting research in pediatric cardiology

Armed with this information, the gift officer crafted an engagement strategy that:

• Connected the family with the specific caregivers they praised
• Invited them to a symposium on pediatric cardiac research
• Arranged a tour of the research facilities
• This resulted in a significant gift to establish a pediatric cardiac research fund

Scenario 2: Random and delayed information use

A gift officer learns through casual conversation that a major donor’s spouse received cancer treatment at your facility two years ago

• No record of their experience exists in the advancement database
• The spouse had actually tried to connect about giving opportunities through their oncologist, but the information never reached the Advancement team
• By the time this connection was discovered, the family had already committed major support to another institution’s cancer program

Developing a patient data strategy

The key to developing an effective patient data strategy is starting from the endpoint. Examine your successful donor relationships and analyze what information made those engagements possible. Look at missed opportunities and identify what data could have changed the outcome.

Engagement indicators

In my experience working with healthcare organizations, successful gift officers leverage various types of engagement indicators to guide their work. When a grateful family repeatedly expresses appreciation for their care team, or when a patient takes the initiative to attend multiple educational sessions about their condition – these actions often signal readiness for deeper engagement. I recently worked with an organization where tracking these indicators led to a transformational gift, the gift officer noted the donor’s consistent participation in patient advisory groups and their growing interest in specific research programs.

Care experience markers

Care experience markers provide another crucial layer of insight. One particularly successful program I worked with identified that extended periods of cross-departmental care often created strong bonds between patients and the institution. This insight helped them prioritize data collection points. However, it’s not about tracking every interaction, it’s about understanding which experiences genuinely influence philanthropic decisions.

Patients’ professional and community involvement

Relationship development opportunities often emerge from unexpected places. I’ve seen organizations discover significant connections through seemingly simple data points: a patient’s involvement in community leadership roles, professional background aligned with institutional priorities, or connections to existing donors. One organization found that patients who attended their annual research symposium were significantly more likely to engage in philanthropic discussions.

Analyze success stories

The goal isn’t to collect every possible data point, it’s to identify the specific indicators that meaningfully inform your engagement strategy. Start by analyzing your success stories. What information did your gift officers actually use to build those relationships? What data consistently appears in your most successful donor journeys? Equally important, what information gaps have led to missed opportunities?

Patient data collection plan

Once you’ve identified your ideal data strategy through analyzing successful outcomes, it’s time for a reality check. What data can you actually access, and is that data reliable enough to support your engagement goals?

I recently worked with an organization that identified VIP patient flagging as a critical data point for their strategy. However, upon review, they discovered their patient registration system had three different VIP indicators used inconsistently across departments. Without standardization, this “critical” data point was essentially meaningless for advancement purposes.

Start by assessing these three critical areas: data accessibility, data recency, and data quality.

Data accessibility

Data accessibility in healthcare organizations is heavily governed by both internal policies and external regulations. Your organization’s data access policies and HIPAA compliance guidelines will significantly shape what’s possible. Through my work with various healthcare institutions, I’ve found some common barriers to data accessibility:

• Restrictions on accessing historical patient data beyond specific timeframes
• Limited ability to track family relationships across patient records
• Varying levels of data access for patients treated in sensitive service areas, such as behavioral health
• Restrictions on accessing patient records who have opted out of fundraising communications

Data recency

Data recency can make or break your engagement strategies. The timeline for data usefulness varies significantly by type. Patient satisfaction survey responses might lead to meaningful engagement if received within 30 days but lose their impact after 60 days. Contact information changes frequently, especially after major life events. Event attendance and program participation data become less valuable for engagement after 90 days. Most critically, expressions of gratitude from patients need near-immediate attention for maximum impact.

Data quality

Data quality issues can undermine even the best-planned strategies. I worked with one organization that discovered duplicate constituent records in their CRM, where grateful patients were entered multiple times with conflicting contact information and giving histories, making it impossible to accurately gauge their relationship with the institution. Another organization found that inconsistent data entry of patient treatment locations and departments made it difficult to match grateful patient expressions with the appropriate service areas for meaningful engagement.

Balancing effective collection with strategic goals

Creating an effective collection plan requires balancing these realities against your strategic goals. The most successful organizations focus their efforts on high-quality, accessible data points that directly support engagement strategies. Rather than attempting to collect everything possible, they prioritize:

• Information with consistent collection practices and clear ownership
• Data points that can be validated and maintained regularly
• Elements that comply with all regulatory requirements

One organization I worked with discovered that while they couldn’t access detailed clinical notes, they could reliably track patient participation in support groups and educational programs. This insight led them to focus their data collection efforts on these engagement points, resulting in more actionable information for gift officers.

Another institution found that their patient satisfaction survey data, while valuable, wasn’t reaching advancement teams within a useful timeframe. They adjusted their processes to fast-track specific satisfaction indicators, dramatically improving their ability to respond to grateful patient expressions.

Your collection plan should include clear protocols for:

• Data access and sharing between departments
• Regular quality assessment and cleanup procedures
• Compliance monitoring and documentation
• Timeline requirements for different types of data

Moving forward: Strategic, focused data collection and utilization

Healthcare philanthropy’s future success depends on our ability to move beyond the data avalanche approach to strategic, focused data collection and utilization. The organizations that thrive will be those that start with the end in mind, analyzing their successful donor relationships to identify truly impactful data points, then building practical, compliant processes to collect and leverage that information.

Remember, the goal isn’t to gather every piece of data possible or create the perfect system. Success comes from identifying and consistently capturing the information that genuinely enhances your ability to build meaningful relationships with constituents. When you align your data strategy with your engagement goals and ensure your collection processes are both practical and maintainable, you create the foundation for transformational fundraising.

The investment in defining your data needs and creating efficient processes will pay dividends in stronger constituent relationships and improved philanthropic outcomes. Most importantly, it will help ensure that those profound moments of gratitude, when patients and families want to give back aren’t lost in an avalanche of data but are transformed into opportunities to advance healthcare through philanthropy.

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Dauwn Houston

Dauwn (Parker) Houston is a Principal Consultant with Precision Partners, a firm that helps higher education and healthcare organizations build advancement operations to achieve transformational philanthropy.