Challenging Imperatives for Challenging Times

Steve Reed
Jan 31, 2024
3 min read

Healthcare philanthropy is at a point of unfortunate mismatch between opportunity and investment.

The Fundraiser Blog • Steve Reed • January 31, 2024

We hear a lot of frustration when interviewing healthcare fundraising leaders these days. We promise anonymity to interviewees, but that’s probably less a factor for them than their level of frustration.

Examples:

“We’re constantly fighting for resources, whether that be time or money. It was bad ten years ago, but it is awful now," said one fundraising leader, echoing a theme being heard throughout the interviews.

Being adequately staffed for success is a significant challenge cited during interviews with leaders from most organizations. “No budget increases. Not even close. The last couple years, we’ve had to cut mid-year,” says a regional vice president for philanthropy.

Another laments, “We are dealing with the reality of post-pandemic exhaustion, we have no principal gift officers and despite being income generating, we cannot ask for the investment we so desperately need.”

The inevitable conclusion, assuming the leaders interviewed to date are representative, is most health systems are leaving very significant sums of money on the table by not investing in—or even actually cutting back—their capabilities to facilitate philanthropy.

But the problem isn’t new. The long-term reason is the healthcare fundraising sector has failed to leverage the potential for—and then deliver—the return-on-investment of which we are capable. But today’s challenging environment in healthcare offers an opportunity—and need— for change.

We propose seven proven imperatives as foundation for a plan to reposition philanthropy as a key player in your hospital or health care system.

If Only …

You know you could be doing more. That you could make a really meaningful financial difference for your organization—

“—if only …”

Fundraising wasn’t seen as only “nice to have” and always an afterthought as the least-understood function within healthcare;

Healthcare leaders didn’t believe philanthropy needs to take its share of the pain just like any other department; and

Operational policies and attitudes didn’t create internal barriers that are big challenges for fundraisers.

Most fundraising organizations are under-staffed, under-resourced and under-performing their potential. Few organizations make adequate investments in fundraising capacity.

Here are the seven imperatives for change. We’ll get into the why, what, and how for each of these in the weeks to follow.

Focus on ROI not CPDR Create a high-performance core capability and leverage it by expanding frontline capacity.
Put the donor first Prioritize relational over transactional modalities.
Commit to The Rule of 75 Focus time and resources where the potential return is highest.
Create a Culture for Philanthropy Gain support for philanthropy’s unique needs.
Build an Integrated Development Team Create a team of very different aptitudes and skill sets, all focused on the relational frontline.
Ensure effective Process Partner teamwork Extend the frontline fundraising team’s reach and effectiveness.
Use a process-based, metric-measured critical path framework Apply management science and performance improvement to double or even triple your production.

We’ll cover each of the seven imperatives in a series of posts. We’ll do it one at a time and in enough depth to help you—as either a fundraising executive or a frontline professional (or both)—articulate a case for philanthropy that demonstrates your potential to make a meaningful difference. Please stay tuned.

- Steve

Our Mantra

Given the resources and freedom to do so, most fundraising shops could dramatically increase revenue, typically at least doubling production. But to do so, organizations will need to change the way they raise money. Fundraisers need to adopt tools, changes in structure, well-defined processes, and supporting technology—with emphasis on personalized individual giving strategies—that create high-performance development organizations. And—most importantly—we need to be willing to challenge the ways we think about, talk about, lead, manage, and do fundraising.

About the author

Steve Reed offers 30 years’ experience fundraising, the last 20 of which include the application of Lean 6-Sigma principles for performance improvement in healthcare and healthcare fundraising. He is president of Engage Performance Advantage (USA) and a partner in Engage Performance Advantage Canada.

About Engage Performance Advantage

We are performance improvement change agents offering nonprofit organizations a way to radically redesign how they raise money, with more emphasis on personalized strategies and larger gifts. Our process-based critical path major gifts framework is paired with supporting technology to help leadership create a top-level fundraising organization. It’s a complete solution that can be rapidly deployed with dramatic gains.

Contact Us

To comment or pose a question: sareed@mpicompanies.com or 269.208.3577