Why Fundraising for Hospice is Different: How to Still Exceed Goals
Even if you have worked in healthcare fundraising in your career, you’ve probably felt underprepared starting a job at as a hospice philanthropy professional. Whether real or not, the types of conversations you have at work every day feel different. We don’t often love to acknowledge death as part of life, but we do know that the journey at the end can be more peaceful for the patient and family with good quality hospice care, available to anyone who needs it, and so we press on!
All fundraising should be the same, right? Your experience and skills should translate directly for raising money for hospice? As with most nuance-filled questions, the answer is yes….and no.
Let’s start with what we know to be the same about hospice fundraising and “industry-standard” fundraising (if there is such a thing). There are a ton of similarities, but to focus on 3 key components across sectors…
People give to people: it’s all about relationships. Most of us, especially the more introverted among us, would love to sit behind our desk and raise money. This could be grants, mailings, online giving, social media, even the occasional phone call, but we know those don’t generate consistent gift revenue like going out in the community and having conversations with prospects and donors.
Donors tend to invest where they’ve had personal experience. It’s true that a Grateful Family Program looks a little different at hospice, but donors choosing organizations based on real world experiences they’ve had holds true for our prospective donor demographic.
Major gifts are the key to success. Whether you work in higher ed, community development, or healthcare, the only way to substantially grow your resources and impact are with large gifts. If you don’t have the staff bandwidth for a large development team, focusing in this area or not is the number one predictor of success.
Prioritizing these aspects of giving can keep you focused on hitting and exceed fundraising goals. It can also, however, help us to keep in mind a few unique aspects of hospice fundraising…
We raise money for a service that everyone could need. Not that humane societies and community colleges are not important in our lives, but they may not be significant in EVERYONE’s life. Hospice, on the other hand, is a community service that any of us could need any given year. We don’t like to think about that, but it’s a community asset that we will all be personally thankful for in our lives should we need it.
Our donor base/prospect list always includes those experiencing grief. There is careful consideration of time of life for our donors. We know there is a delicate balance between giving as a way of remembering and honoring and giving space to a family that needs time to process and heal. Constantly balancing these can be tricky and have a wide grey area between maximizing gift revenue and being respectful.
We are often in direct competition with for-profit organizations. This may be true in a few industries, but most communities have identical organizations with shareholders in a for-profit network, battling for marketshare and census. This may give us an edge in fundraising because we can talk about services for those who need it, but down the street there is usually another organization doing the same work with a profit in mind.
Looking at the big picture, we knew fundraising for hospice would be a unique challenge, but if we can remember to stick to our strong philanthropic fundamentals, and work to navigate the nuance of the hospice industry, we can position ourselves to be one of our community’s top charities.
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