Breaking down silos in healthcare philanthropy — Tips in Ten(ish) Minutes

0:00:06.5 Kirsten Lecky: Well, hello. Thank you for joining us for our monthly Tips in Ten Minutes. We’re so happy to have you both here. We have Tasha and Marti, both from OSU Wexner Medical Center, and I’d like for each of you to introduce yourselves. Marti, you want to go ahead and kick us off?

0:00:21.6 Marti Bledsoe: Sure. Thank you. I’m Marti, and I run point on the advancement communications for the Wexner Medical Center. So, how do we reach donors and then how do we communicate with them after we’ve had a chance to capture their attention and all of everything in between?

0:00:38.2 Kirsten Lecky: Yes. Not an easy job. Thank you for taking time out to chat with us today. How about you, Tasha?

0:00:45.2 Tasha Thomas: Yeah. Tasha Thomas. I am director of individual giving and analytics for the Medical Center Advancement Team. So we are the people responsible for annual giving outreach, getting people to engage with us as donors. We manage that program for the medical center, including our grateful patient population, the James Cancer Hospital, and our six health science colleges.

0:01:06.8 Kirsten Lecky: Well, good. Well, thank you again for joining us. One of the things that Tasha and I were talking about recently is this notion of all of philanthropy or foundations or development within organizations is often very siloed. It’s tough to kind of centralize those efforts when you have annual giving and the grateful patient programs and your own employee initiatives around giving and individual donors and corporate. You guys know more about that world than I do, and you started to share with me some things that you’ve done, both of you have done together within your department to really break down those silos. So, Marti, do you want to talk a little bit about some of the things that you’ve done? Or Tasha, one of you kick us off with that, one or two things in the last year, because I know you’ve been doing things for a while, but what kind of rises to the top is like, these two things have really made a difference in breaking down some of those walls.

0:01:57.3 Marti Bledsoe: I think the first thing for us is really how we’ve come together in our planning stage to be cohesive around audiences instead of around our teams. So teams all have our expertise or our goal. But when we think about someone who might be very passionate about breast cancer research and the impact of that on the disease overall, then we can better think about, they want to hear from us that the donations that come in our door are making an impact on how do we detect, prevent, treat breast cancer innovatively. And then, when they hear from us with an appeal, hopefully they have that impact message or story in the back of their head because we’ve already delivered it. So it’s more about thinking how the audience would make sense of what we’re telling them versus how we would really approach it from our own goals. And so from a fiscal year planning standpoint down to a content calendar standpoint, we’ve brought the teams together to work on it in that capacity instead of in just team by team.

0:03:01.1 Kirsten Lecky: And I’m curious, just as a follow up to that, how do you curate or identify what those interests are? When you think about, we start with the audience in mind, so how do you know what they’re interested in? Is it just based on past behavior, patient encounters? What data are you using to identify that? And maybe Tasha, you have some thoughts about that. You’re in the analytics side, so.

0:03:24.4 Tasha Thomas: Yeah, I can take that both sided to your point. When we’re talking about acquiring new donors, it’s kind of like, where have they been interacting with us throughout the medical center? And that kind of gives us clues to what their interests might be. Where have they been seen, what service areas have they experienced? And then in the donor population, they’ve already told us what their passion is by giving and supporting something. So they’re telling us what they’re passionate about and we want to encourage that and be able to show the impact for their gift. So it’s both sides.

0:03:54.5 Kirsten Lecky: Okay. And then you are able to bring your teams together and organize around these different kind of audience segments and what their interests are. Okay.

0:04:05.2 Tasha Thomas: We’ve kind of broken down the silos to the engagement, the cultivation, the solicitation and the stewardship. And so all of those teams coming together and thinking about an audience and where are we touching them throughout the year and how are we impacting them and how are we ensuring that our communications are timed appropriately to kind of keep that interest level high.

0:04:26.4 Kirsten Lecky: And how that is working? I mean, what kind of data are you looking at to know that it’s making a difference? I mean, I think operationally you might feel that. Right? Internally you’re like, okay, there’s not so much silos, but from a user experience, are you experiencing some benefits?

0:04:41.5 Tasha Thomas: Yeah, better donor numbers, more people renewing and coming back year after year and not seeing declines there, I think is the best indicator that we have.

0:04:50.7 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah, that’s great. So what would you suggest? I mean, knowing that our audience, also our healthcare marketers, many of them are in similar roles as the two of you, what would you suggest or recommend that they can do to move towards a more centralized shared effort like you’ve just described? I mean, even down to like record keeping and collateral keeping and all the initiatives and efforts. How have you guys been able to do that?

0:05:19.2 Tasha Thomas: You want me to start that one? It’s not so much that we’re perfect at it, but we’re taking the steps to get better, sharing our resources and the things that are already being produced. I found in annual giving that other teams are producing wonderful things for donors that I’d never seen before because it’s in the major gift space or in a different area. And somebody had already done all this work and gathered all this information and made this great piece. Well, once that’s been presented to the place that it was made, then can I reuse that and some of that information? So purposefully breaking down those barriers and thinking about other, trying to get other people to think about everybody across the team in their work. And so we don’t just produce something for a one off, but how can this be used three times?

0:06:07.2 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. Published everywhere. Yeah. So in its most simplistic form, how do you do that? Do you guys have a centralized library? How do you get access to these things so that everyone can use them?

0:06:22.1 Marti Bledsoe: Well, we’ve tried a few things and we keep trying to figure what is the best tool. We’ve tried, we use Workfront, we use Airtable, we have Trello boards, we have specific Microsoft Teams. We do our fair share of spreadsheets. But people remember stories more than spreadsheets, as you and your team know better than anybody. So one of the things that I have tried to focus on is to think about what do we want our teams to change or do differently internally? If I want everybody to make it a priority to always know the most recent story that’s been published on the Medical Center news site, then I have to think of a way to bring that into our team meetings. Maybe we start with that every time. Or maybe we do a quiz about, anybody read that this week? Or maybe the team each has to take a turn each week presenting to the rest of their teammates what they read and learned on our own site. And it builds in a habit of our teams consuming our own storytelling because there’s too much across Medical Center and all the health science colleges and all of that for any one person to captain our content.

0:07:30.8 Marti Bledsoe: So I think it’s about creating appetite internally. And of course, everything you use to create appetite internally, you can use to create appetite externally.

0:07:39.4 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah, it is. It’s like consuming your own content. I love that. And creating an appetite and a discipline around sharing those stories so that there’s a focus and it’s something that you’re always expecting and you’re always prepared to do and then, consuming that so that you’re prepared to also use it in your own efforts. Those are great examples. And have you found that your team as like, they’ve been able to do this and tap into this, that it’s saving you time? Everyone’s more efficient. Does it create a more like, consistent donor experience because they’re not, maybe not getting the same thing from different people or areas?

0:08:19.2 Tasha Thomas: Yes, I think we’re in the baby stages of that, but we’re seeing positive progress. And so the one example that comes to mind is we have day of giving coming up, university-wide day of giving. And this is what the Medical Center is featuring. And so we on the stewardship side have an impact report ready to go for a certain pipeline, but we’re also featuring that in day of giving. So by sharing the information and each other knowing what we’re doing, we were able to kind of, hey, let’s hold this until after day of giving so we can capture all those new donors and then we have immediate impact ready to go instead of sending it a month before and then be like, asking Marti to go make me something else. So just that timing and thinking of the audiences and where does that natural fit, we just make a tiny adjustment that makes everybody’s lives better.

0:09:03.7 Kirsten Lecky: I think the fact that you guys have identified your internal audience as an audience, that’s what’s really important. Like you were saying, we have to share the stories and the content internally and make sure we’re doing that effectively and frequently. I think that’s a really key learning there. I love that idea. And you said Trello boards and Teams channels or whatever. So you’re using all of them. Is there one that you would suggest to our viewers? Like, this is really what we have found to work best.

0:09:33.4 Tasha Thomas: We created one channel on Teams that we call like our donor story portal.

0:09:38.3 Kirsten Lecky: Okay.

0:09:38.8 Tasha Thomas: And it’s kind of like, when you come across a piece of information or you come across a story or a posting, people just naturally add that there and it creates a natural spreadsheet for us of like, hey, what about this or this? And so it’s just a repository of place to keep things. But then when we need an idea, we can go back to that and kind of scroll through and look, and it’s all there.

0:09:58.8 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah, that’s great. I love that. Oh, yeah. No, I would love to hear what you had to say.

0:10:05.4 Marti Bledsoe: I was just going to say, I think it helps build on the notion of an internal culture of, in our case, but it could be internal culture, whatever your focus is. Right? Because when our audiences across all of our internal groups are hearing consistent and similar emphasis on philanthropy and philanthropic messaging and focus on the impact of what gifts are doing, then they realize it’s not just that email they read two weeks ago or just somebody’s pet project. They realize that it is something they’re hearing consistently. And here we’re, as humans, we’re motivated by what gets rewarded. We pay attention to that. We’re looking to see, well, who gets on stage at the big meetings and who’s being quoted in the blog. And so if those things are set separate from what you want your internal culture to be, then you’re going to have an issue. But if you’re actually highlighting and rewarding the things you’re focusing on, that’s really where it comes together.

0:11:02.9 Kirsten Lecky: No, I think that’s so smart. And it’s so energizing, too. Right? I mean, we’re rallying together. We have a shared interest to advance the institution and we all have the same goals in mind. And the fact that you’re finding ways to build that culture internally and continue to really inspire and create that energy is really cool. What about one other thing, Tasha? And then I think we’re at our 10 minutes, but we had talked a little bit about, you were like, it’s really important that we close the feedback loop. I remember you said something about that, and I want to hear a little bit more about that as our last kind of closing comments. And I think you were talking about how do we share how the effects and outcomes of our work.

0:11:39.4 Tasha Thomas: Yeah, we’ve noticed kind of starting these conversations that we never, as annual giving in particular, we never shared the results back. And so circling back to Marti’s team and being like, hey, you guys worked on this campaign and this is how successful it was. And celebrating across the team, instead of just like, this was an annual giving success, this was actually an advancement team success. So with our internal partners, it’s been huge. Our data science people and business intelligence that help us gather all the audience information and create the lists, they would never see the finished piece of what they were pulling. And so, like, closing that loop, and that has helped culture immensely as well.

0:12:18.0 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. And with your partners, too, like, being able to close the loop with them and have those stories and the work that they’re doing to support that. Well, I love, I think, starting with your audience and finding ways to get really creative about that and do that and create discipline and focus, and that then informs and drives everything else. That sort of internal culture, I think that’s a real good takeaway and being really good about sharing feedback. Then they reinforce what’s working, and let’s do more of that. So I think those are all really great tips, and I really appreciate both of you spending 10 minutes with me and passing those along. And if you’re both open to it, I’ll leave your contact information and when we share this, if anyone has any comments or questions, they can reach out to you both. Sure. All right.

0:13:00.6 Tasha Thomas: Thank you for having us.

0:13:01.6 Kirsten Lecky: Thank you. Take care.