Markham Stouffville Hospital Foundation: Hospital Fundraising In Emergencies
Fundraising strategies should never be set in stone: we should always stay ready and flexible enough to respond to emergencies or seize opportunities whenever they arise. Especially when it comes to recruiting new donors.
Over the years, we’ve launched many emergency campaigns for our clients. These have included a natural disaster that our international development clients need to move swiftly on, and an appeal to help communities devastated by wildfires. They’ve also sometimes been around economic emergencies — like increased pressure on food banks and hospitals during the pandemic or a bad economy.
For a local food bank, during the early days of COVID, we quickly initiated new projects, raised an extra $1 million (net) for their work, and significantly increased their donor base and monthly file.
And for Markham Stouffville Hospital Foundation (MSH), we developed a new donor acquisition strategy during COVID that gained thousands of new donors while raising incredibly important funds to help the hospital respond to the massive demand on their services.
The case for support we developed for MSH was to help purchase urgently needed ICU equipment. Two years later, we adapted the case to purchase urgently needed surgical equipment, to help surgeons address the crushing backlog caused by the pandemic.
We carefully targeted specific catchment areas near the hospital for each campaign, and acquired a significant number of new donors. The campaign also resulted in significant gifts from existing donors. In total, the campaign gained new donors at an extraordinary net INCOME per new donor.
Each year there has been an urgent situation that MSH has needed new funds to respond to. We’ve dropped a similar themed campaign for the past six years. Even now, the campaign is recruiting new donors for the Foundation at about half the cost per new donor of the Canadian average.
Most importantly, these campaigns have resulted in thousands of new supporters and significant income to help the hospital serve its growing number of patients.
Client: Markham Stouffville Hospital Foundation
Services: Direct Mail
