Donor Intelligence for Healthcare Organizations
By Sarah Landman, Executive Vice President, Insightful
Philanthropy plays an increasingly pivotal role in healthcare, especially as clinical revenues recover from plummeting operating margins in recent years. In an industry with decreasing revenues and increasing expenses, fundraising delivers a lifeline to the organizations that need it most. In fact, every $1 invested in healthcare philanthropy returns $5.41, on average.
If healthcare fundraising is so important, how can industry leaders integrate it into their operational workflows? Enter Insightful Philanthropy: A solution built to deliver donor insights at a glance, so fundraisers can make informed decisions when engaging donors.
The State of Healthcare Fundraising
According to Giving USA, healthcare organizations saw a 4.4% increase in donations last year (adjusted for inflation), reflecting the continuation of a positive giving trend in the health subsector. Much of this growth comes from individual major gifts, underscoring the need for prospect research and cultivation.
However, while a 50% donor retention rate is considered average across most sectors, healthcare organizations lag at 40%. Underperformance in this area suggests that successful fundraising requires more than simply researching potential major donors and acquiring gifts from them. Developing strong, authentic donor relationships is critical to long-lasting support.
The Power of Donor Intelligence
Healthcare donors have uniquely emotional and personal connections to your organization, as you’ve likely been instrumental in their care or the care of someone they love. Whether you’re looking for grateful patient program participants or major donors for an upcoming campaign, donor intelligence is critical to deeply understanding and strengthening those connections.
The Association for Healthcare Philanthropy’s Digital Fundraising Benchmark Report further illustrates this point, highlighting a few key insights about the ways donor intelligence can transform healthcare fundraising:
Personalize Outreach
For more than 60% of healthcare organizations, personalized communications yield increased revenue from existing donors. The more you know about your donors, the better equipped you’ll be to send messages tailored to their preferences and motivations.
Improve Engagement
Healthcare organizations that report revenue increases are three times more likely to send segmented stewardship communications. By using donor data to surface shared characteristics and group constituents accordingly, your organization can send the right message to the right people at the right time.
Upgrade Giving
79% of organizations reported increased revenue year-over-year (YOY) when their annual and major giving programs were “very well integrated.” Structured campaigns supported by data insights are key components of a high-performing fundraising strategy.
How Insightful Philanthropy Supports Healthcare Organizations
Insightful pulls information from over 14,000 sources worldwide (including more than 40 years of historical data) and delivers relevant insights that inform healthcare organizations’ engagement strategies.
Our platform provides timely notifications that help healthcare organizations keep up with fast-paced fundraising needs.
Explore the following features to see how Insightful supports healthcare organizations like yours.
Real Time Media Monitoring
Our prospect research software tracks high-quality news and delivers tailored alerts directly to your organization. With the right insights into your patient population, the broader community, and the industry as a whole, your organization can forge stronger donor relationships.
Obituary Alerts
Monitoring data from more than 27,000 U.S. funeral homes, Insightful’s platform notifies healthcare organizations as soon as new obituaries are posted for individuals connected to the organization. Use obituary data to inform thoughtful outreach that goes beyond a fundraising appeal.
Automated Prospect Matching
Insightful’s platform compares your prospect list to its vast repository of news and media mentions, instantly matching potential donors. This way, you can reach out at the perfect moment with meaningful conversations and cultivate genuine relationships with your organization’s supporters.
See It In Action: Nuvance Health’s Donor Research Strategy
Nuvance Health is a seven-hospital healthcare system with a fundraising team led by a single prospect researcher. The team needed a reliable and efficient tool for researching prospects and deepening donor engagement—that’s why they turned to Insightful Philanthropy.
Before, Nuvance Health’s fundraising team used a combination of free tools like Google Alerts to track important donor information, which they stored in their Raiser's Edge CRM. After seamlessly integrating Insightful with their CRM, our platform handled the rest.
Here’s a quick snapshot of their results:
Before implementing Insightful, Nuvance Health:
- Manually pursued overwhelming alerts from multiple sources
- Got irrelevant hits, paywalled articles, and missed information
- Avoided prospect research due to difficulty
- Reactive fundraising led to missed opportunities
After implementing Insightful, their team:
- Received an automated, centralized feed in one platform
- Accessed vetted, relevant news with no paywalls
- Integrated prospect research into a daily, productive workflow
- Found proactive, timely reasons to connect
“It won’t be your biggest investment, but it might be one of your smartest,” says Tami Pearson, Prospect Research Analyst at Nuvance Health. “It gives you and your gift officers real-time information that can lead to stronger connections and better timing. That alone makes it valuable.”
Takeaways
At Insightful Philanthropy, we believe that the more you know, the more you can raise. That’s why we equip healthcare fundraisers with the ability to access critical data and transform it into smarter outreach, stronger connections, and sustainable growth.
If your healthcare organization is ready to drive ROI with data-backed relationships, it’s time to start developing personalized, well-timed interactions. In the end, you’ll be able to use donor intelligence to strengthen the pipeline for transformational gifts.
