For Web-savvy hospital marketing departments, online fundraising holds extraordinary potential for new donors. Admittedly, many of the kinks of doing business online need to be worked out, especially where consumer comfort levels and security issues are concerned.
But for the handful of online companies that are doing healthcare fundraising on the Net, the possibilities hold exciting appeal to special project development marketers. This is an area where the surface has just begun to be scratched for uncovering new donor targets and extending communications to existing charitable givers.
But Jeff Hallett, chairman of NMP, Inc. a Web consulting company based in Falls Church, Va., quickly concedes that a virtual fundraising effort should be considered only if the healthcare organization has a reasonably significant presence on the Web (regularly updating its site.) "Online fundraising has to be taken seriously; the development [marketers] need to sit down with their Webmasters and talk through strategy, making sure that the fundraising element is a good fit for the site."
The typical online donor is a baby boomer who is not shy about using his or her credit card online, according to Hallett, citing that in the last year, charitable giving with credit cards has increased by more than 50 percent.
Hallett, who has done online fundraising campaigns for non-profit causes like CancerCare, and UNICEF, says that donor prospecting on the Web should be looked at as an investment that might take a few years to develop before seeing some real results. He likens the investment to what is usually spent on the more traditional fund-raising methods of direct mail and telemar-keting, which is about $10 to $20/lead.
But with the Web, fundraising campaigns can be spontaneous and reactionary. Used as a shrewd outreach tool, hospitals can generate immediate donations around catastrophic events like floods, research campaigns for serious illnesses and diseases, and annual charitable causes.
Surfers Catch the Big One
For Children's Hospital of Boston, which raises $10 million to $12 million annually and has a fairly mature Internet site (www.childshope.org), a "Web Fishing" game became its entre into online fundraising.
Although the game is definitely an attention-getter, Elizabeth Hill, assistant director of development at Children's Hospital, still questions how effective it is as a viable fundraising engine and is in a wait-and-see mode. "Online technology is still at a bleeding edge. It can be great for PR, educational purposes; but I still question whether it's great for raising money."
In fact, the game has not yet been promoted by the hospital's PR team. All of the promotions thus far are being handled by the partnering software systems companies, which have donated the site.
The brainchild of Barry Wadman, a hospital volunteer and advocate who runs his own Web consulting company (C-Systems in Concord, Mass.), the site prompts surfers to make a credit card donation of $5 to $750 for the hospital and then attempt to catch the "big one." Wadman, along with developers at ObjectSoft, interactive kiosk designers (New York), Microsoft Corp. and Hewlett Packard, designed the game pro bono.
"We wanted to have a little bit of fun and make giving donations more interesting," said George Febish, ObjectSoft's president.
The game was promoted on the hospital site as well as on Microsoft's site (www.microsoft.com), which donated software as prize incentives for playing the game. It will also get plugs on Object Soft's six interactive kiosks located throughout New York city.
(NMP,Inc. 703/351-5666; ObjectSoft, 201/343-0067; Children's Hospital, 617/355-6420)