Capture the Gratitude Window: How Kettering Health Increased End- of-Year Grateful Patient Giving 169% with iWave’s GPP Solution

There is a short window after care when patients feel most grateful — and most likely to give.

Miss that moment, and the opportunity often disappears.

Most healthcare fundraising teams rely on manual screening, disconnected data, and delayed outreach. As a result, high-capacity grateful patients are often identified too late.

In healthcare philanthropy, growth rarely comes from dramatic spikes. It comes from disciplined strategy, smart segmentation, and consistent execution.

Kettering Health applied that approach to its End-of-Year outreach.

By expanding outreach and applying screening-informed segmentation, the team achieved:

• 139% expansion in outreach (7,500 → 17,628 patients)
• 89% increase in total gifts
• 169% growth in total giving
• 42% increase in average gift

Matt Wahrhaftig, Director of Philanthropy at Kettering Health, and Cherian Koshy, VP of Market Insights and author of Neurogiving: The Science of Donor Decision-Making, provided a practical walkthrough of how Kettering scaled its End-of-Year Grateful Patient outreach and how strategy can translate to results in your own program.

In this session, we explored the strategy behind the results, including:

• How Kettering expanded volume without sacrificing discipline
• Where screening fits in the Grateful Patient workflow
• Why attribution between channels is complex—and how to measure holistically
• How to capture the gratitude window.

This session offered a practical look at how a healthcare system increased revenue while maintaining consistent response performance—and what that approach can mean for your own growth strategy.

If you’re looking to expand your Grateful Patient Program without compromising performance, this session will provide a clear roadmap.