Healthcare

We are proud to support the critical health-improving and life-saving missions of our healthcare clients. We have extensive experience helping healthcare foundations with their software systems and fundraising operations. We also recognize that these organizations face particular challenges and circumstances in their fundraising efforts. Some of the particular needs we keep in mind when working with healthcare clients include:

  • Annual fundraising includes a significant number of honor/memorial gifts and the attendant responsibility to produce “acknowledgee” letters and keep family members informed of the donors and donations to memorial funds.
  • Complying with HIPAA regulations when using patient information as a source of prospects.
  • Special events are very common, both large ones (such as dinners or golf tournaments) and many smaller “friend-raising” events for major donor prospects.
  • Planned giving has a prominent place in long-term major donor cultivation.
  • There are typically many funds to which donors can restrict their gifts. Hospital foundations must track these closely and usually reconcile both between fundraising software and the foundation's general ledger, and with the hospital's accounting department.
  • Extensive tracking of both general payroll deductions and physician giving.

We needed expert guidance on using our Raiser's Edge® better and we got it from the Heller team. They know how technology works for healthcare fundraising – capital campaigns, major gifts, annual fund, and events. With their help we’ve been able to clean up our data, use less paper, and work smarter.

Julie N. Campbell
Director of Individual Giving

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NTC 2012
04/03/2012 - 04/05/2012

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Case Studies

Sutter Health System

Experienced users at a few of the 26 Sutter Health foundations that use Raiser’s Edge recognized that they had many of the same questions about how to best use the software, and that many others likely had those same questions. This core group decided to create an internal user group for the entire health system. Having attended multiple Heller Consulting workshops in the past, and knowing of our work with several of the individual Sutter foundations over the years, they asked us to advise them on how to organize and run their user group.

Their first meeting in February centered on our popular presentation “Maximizing Use of Raiser’s Edge” and was attended by over 60 people. A second meeting, on the relationship between Development and Accounting, took place in June and a third meeting, on Using RE for Major Donor Cultivation, is coming up in September. Feedback from attendees has been very positive and already these meetings have been a catalyst for further developing Raiser’s Edge knowledge and skills across Sutter Health and for sharing best practices. Our expertise with the software and development operations, paired with our deep experience both with Sutter Health foundations and healthcare systems more broadly, have made us a uniquely valuable resource in supporting the users’ efforts to take advantage of the existing skills within the system to meet the goals of the individual foundations and Sutter Health as a whole.

Northwestern Memorial Foundation

Looking for more effective support of fundraising efforts, Northwestern Memorial Foundation, one of the nation's premier academic medical centers, engaged the Heller Consulting team to redesign both their RE7 database and review their development operations. After careful evaluation of their detailed and complex coding scheme, as well as identifying key problem data elements, we worked with staff to design and implement a much more streamlined system. The cleaner database helped restore trust in reports and lists, and allowed us to set up more self-service features of the software. Through training and configuration of individually designed home pages for fundraisers, users are now able to access information quickly and easily. Additionally, after careful review of staffing configuration and fundraising support needs, Heller Consulting was able to recommend process changes and staffing redeployment. We drafted a recommended transition plan, and assisted in the transition to a more efficient staff design. Gift processing was streamlined to allow for reassignment of staff, and management of the better-organized database is now handled with fewer staff. We've since continued to provide strategic advice about their emerging fundraising needs to increase the efficacy of their system.

California Pacific Medical Center Foundation

We have enjoyed a long and trusted relationship with CPMC. In our first project, we conducted an assessment of their Raiser's Edge system (then version 6.4) and made recommendations for streamlining codes and implementing more efficient processes. During the project, the database administrator left and we picked up the responsibilities for producing the complex end-of-year mailings to major donors. Following the fundraising season we then generated the donor listings for the annual report and the lists for the spring mailing, and completed the streamlining project. Over the following two years we provided database support during the busy fundraising season, generating critical mailing lists and reports for both the fundraisers and the accounting department. Most recently, we worked with CPMC's major gifts staff to implement the action and solicitor features to support their major prospect cultivation and solicitation efforts.

National Brain Tumor Society

The National Brain Tumor Foundation (San Francisco, CA), an ongoing client over the years, recently merged with The Brain Tumor Society (Watertown, MA). They engaged Heller Consulting to combine their Raiser’s Edge systems and fundraising operations. After shepherding their data into one system we helped them build business practices and teams to match, including: coordinating their strategic fundraising and communications efforts into single teams with an aligned strategy; developing security practices so users from multiple departments can track key information while still protecting sensitive donor information; and, coordinating their major gift strategy within the structure of their combined fundraising database. The new organization, the National Brain Tumor Society, can now realize the benefits of shared business practices, shared information, and shared strategies, combined with the resources of an expanded team to support their mission.

To review a more detailed case study about our work with the National Brain Tumor Society, click here.