• System office founded in 2019

Following a rigorous campaign planning process across all markets, Baptist Health Foundation worked with Accordant and market leadership to identify, recruit, and train clinician partners that practice within clinical service lines aligned with campaign funding priorities.

Initial efforts over the six months following clinician training saw some success with the following results:

• 175 leaders, physician, clinician, and nursing partners engaged

• 100+ physicians, clinicians, and nurses trained in gratitude

• 130 1:1 meetings between Baptist Health Philanthropy Officers and physician and clinician partners

• 78 grateful patient referrals

• 10 gifts

Commencing grateful engagement at Baptist Health helped Baptist Health Foundation engage leaders, physicians, and clinicians across the system, align with and support the campaign and begin embedding philanthropy into the culture at Baptist Health. However, several factors provided Baptist Health the opportunity to find deeper success with grateful engagement. COVID-19 made it difficult for Baptist Health market leadership to participate in a meaningful way, which made it difficult to engage some key, influential physician leaders. Some recruited physician partners lost interest due to a lack of a real relationship with their assigned philanthropy officer and lack of true understanding of philanthropy at Baptist Health. Ultimately, Baptist Health Foundation knew that to build true, lasting, mutually beneficial partnerships with physicians and clinicians, an enhanced strategy and approach would be needed.

Building True Partnerships

Several strategies were employed to build deeper grateful engagement clinician partnerships.

Leadership activation | Baptist Health Foundation activated leadership through recruiting Grateful Engagement Executive Sponsors in larger Baptist Health markets to champion grateful engagement and partnered with system service line vice presidents to personally invite key physician leaders to participate through hosting dinners and staying involved until the foundation built strong relationships with the physicians.

Coaching and mentorship for philanthropy officers | Conversation guides, progress report templates, and extensive bi-weekly, 1:1 coaching and support were provided to philanthropy officers managing clinician relationships to help guide their efforts to build true partnerships with service line leaders and clinician partners in their assigned service lines. Philanthropy officers were encouraged to take time to build relationships first with clinician partners before asking for referrals.

Physician feature events | In a switch from solely focusing on receiving grateful patient referrals from clinician partners, philanthropy leaders and officers invited physician partners to share their expertise and experience to small groups of prospective grateful patients and family donors at physician feature events. This highly effective strategy exponentially boosted referrals through physician’s collaborating with the foundation to personally invite their own grateful patients to the events, and the physician’s embraced the opportunity to passionately speak about the impact their work has on the community. This garnered significant interest for philanthropic investment to Baptist Health from many patients and families who had never engaged before.

The Critical Importance of Strategic Internal Ally Engagement

An internal study examining two years of solicitations from Baptist Health’s highest producing philanthropy officers proved that when allies like board members, C-Suite, or clinicians support the philanthropy officer through introducing the prospect or participating in the cultivation, solicitation, or stewardship of the donor, the solicitation and gift amount of the prospect is exponentially higher than when the philanthropy officer works alone.

This data, coupled with increasingly complex circumstances for navigating hospitals due to COVID-19 and the fact that many Baptist Health Foundation philanthropy officers started their roles working from home during the pandemic, made building important relationships with internal allies challenging for many Baptist Health Foundation philanthropy officers.

This data represents Baptist Health Foundation solicitations that equaled $10,000 or more from six high performing Baptist Health Foundation philanthropy officers between July 1, 2020, through March 1, 2022. Any solicitation where a board member, C-Suite, or clinician ally introduced the prospect to the philanthropy officer and supported the cultivation, solicitation, and/or stewardship of the donor is counted as having ally support.

This study also proved that involving the ally directly in the philanthropic process proves more impactful than receiving the referral alone.

data represents Baptist Health Foundation solicitations equaled $10,000 or more from six high performing Health Foundation philanthropy officers between July through March 1, 2022. Any solicitation where a board member, C-Suite, or clinician ally introduced the prospect to philanthropy officer and supported the cultivation, solicitation, and/or stewardship of the donor is counted as ally support.

AVERAGE GIFT WITH NO REFERRAL OR ALLY SUPPORT $20,029

AVERAGE GIFT WITH A REFERRAL $95,584

AVERAGE GIFT WITH ALLY SUPPORT $143,902

This data represents the average gift for gifts $1,000+ closed by nine high performing Baptist Health philanthropy officers between July 1, 2020, through August 31, 2022.

To encourage philanthropy officers to embrace the strategic engagement of internal allies within the hospital, training and parameters were provided to encourage philanthropy officers to engage internal allies on a formal and informal basis. Philanthropy officers were encouraged to informally engage allies within their assigned service lines on a weekly basis through rounding, attending huddles, and department meetings. Philanthropy officers were encouraged to conduct formal ally engagement on a monthly and quarterly basis with service line leaders and clinician partners through 1:1 interactions and strategy meetings.

General relationship

Informal Ally Engagement

Can be in a group setting 1 per week

Must be strategic/within assigned service lines/ clinical areas

Find a rounding partner/ guide

1:1 engagement

1 touch per month; 1 meeting per quarter

Formal Ally Engagement

Informal Ally Engagement

General relationship building

Primary goal is to elicit

Can be in a group setting 1 per week

Approach with a “moves management” mindset donor cultivation

Must be strategic/within assigned service lines/ clinical areas

All activity should “move” the relationship along and elicit action

Find a rounding partner/ guide

1:1 engagement

1 touch per month; 1 meeting per quarter

Formal Ally Engagement

Primary goal is to elicit action Approach with a “moves management” mindset in donor cultivation

All activity should “move” the relationship along and elicit action

General relationship building

Can be in a group setting

1 per week

Must be strategic/within assigned service lines/ clinical areas

Steadfast focus on the engagement of internal allies and involving allies in the philanthropic process proved to be impactful. Total giving with ally support increased from over $2.5 million in FY 2021 to over $6 million in FY 2022.

Find a rounding partner/ guide

Informal Ally Engagement

1 per week

Must be strategic/within assigned service clinical areas

Overall, through advancing grateful engagement at Baptist Health, giving from grateful patients and families increased exponentially by 1,160% at Baptist Health from $188,250 in FY 2021 to $2,375,211 in FY 2022.

Lessons Learned

Find a rounding guide

1:1 engagement

1 touch per month; 1 meeting per quarter

1:1 engagement

1 touch per month;

1 meeting per quarter

Primary goal is to elicit action

Approach with a “moves management” mindset in donor cultivation

All activity should “move” the relationship along and elicit action

Clinician referrals increased 70% from 78 in year one to 133 in year two.

This data represents Baptist Health Foundation solicitations that equaled $10,000 or more from six high performing Baptist Health Foundation philanthropy officers between July 1, 2020, through March 1, 2022. Any solicitation where a board member, C-Suite, or clinician ally introduced the prospect to the philanthropy officer and supported the cultivation, solicitation, and/or stewardship of the donor is counted as having ally support. TOTAL

Active leadership participation

Formal Ally Engagement

Verbal support from leadership is not enough. The active participation of leadership in inviting physician and clinician partners must occur to encourage clinician partners to meaningfully participate.

Primary goal is to Approach with a management” mindset donor cultivation

All activity should the relationship and elicit action

Relationships come first

Relationships must be built with clinician partners first before ever asking for a referral to build true partnerships.

Find the physician’s passion

There are many ways for clinician partners to engage with the foundation beyond just making referrals. Asking the physician to speak on behalf of the foundation about their work, knowledge, and experiences can ignite the physician’s passion for partnering with the foundation.

Focusing on internal Ally Engagement is a must

Do not assume that philanthropy officers who started with the organization during the COVID-19 pandemic know the importance of or know how to navigate the hospital to build important internal relationships. Ample training, guidance, and parameters are needed to help support philanthropy officers in building relationships with strategic internal partners to strengthen the philanthropic process.

When an organization prioritizes building relationships first with physician partners and sees value in the partnership beyond asking for grateful patient and family referrals, transformational culture change occurs that results in more dollars raised. Doing this at Baptist Health has transformed the way that physicians participate in the philanthropy process, resulting in elevated status of the foundation across the system and in the communities we serve, and has exponentially increased the number of patients and families the foundation has been able to engage to support our mission of expanding healthcare in our communities.

Lora Croley, MBA, CFRE Lora serves as the System Director of Donor Relations for Baptist Health system in Kentucky and southern Indiana. She leads annual giving, communications, stewardship, and grateful patient engagement strategies for the ninehospital system philanthropy program.

In recent years, Lora has demonstrated success in leading annual and major gift programs as well as capital campaign efforts in healthcare philanthropy. With nearly 20 years of healthcare experience, she specializes in developing and executing strategic initiatives that focus on building market awareness and acquiring philanthropic support.

Erin Stitzel, FAHP, CFRE

Endnotes

1 https://www.ahp.org/docs/default-source/ resource-center/healthcare-philanthropy-journal/fall2010ahpjournalfinal.pdf?sfvrsn=15960673_2

2 https://www.accordanthealth.com/post/ beyond-the-referral-developing-true-partnerships-with-physicians-at-baptist-healtha-case-study

Erin is a leader in creating and implementing grateful patient and clinician partnership strategies. She has worked in over 65 hospitals across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom to implement comprehensive grateful patient engagement and clinician partnership strategies including partnering with hundreds of physicians, clinicians, and nurses in philanthropy. She has a proven track record of success in helping organizations substantially increase giving from grateful patients and families and building robust, service-line based clinician partnerships to increase grateful patient referrals. Erin is a Fellow of the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy (FAHP), the highest level of certification that can be obtained in healthcare philanthropy and a member of the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy’s inaugural 40 Under 40 class. She is a frequent speaker at local and international healthcare philanthropy conferences and webinars and has published numerous papers on grateful patient engagement and clinician partnership strategies, including being published by the American Hospital Association, the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy, and Blackbaud.