Name: From Insight to Impact: Maximizing Grateful Patient Data to Drive Donor Acquisition and Engagement
Uploaded: 2025-12-09T19:30:46.344Z
Duration: 52 min 13 s
Description: From Insight to Impact: Maximizing Grateful Patient Data to Drive Donor Acquisition and Engagement

Transcript for "From Insight to Impact: Maximizing Grateful Patient Data to Drive Donor Acquisition and Engagement": for My name is Jennifer Hepler. I'm honored to be here today to share how Assante Foundation has used Blackbaud Analytics to bolster our major gifts program and to launch our grateful patient program. I joined Assante Foundation in 2015, and I have more than thirty years experience in nonprofit operations with two different organizations. I've used Raiser's Edge and RE NXT my entire career, but ResearchPoint was new to me when I joined Assante. I spent eight years in Southern Oregon before moving back to Portland two years ago and continuing to work remotely. In my spare time, I volunteer for a small all volunteer cat rescue serving on their board, coordinating adoptions, and using my database skills and my fundraising knowledge to help the organization grow. Well, thank you so much, Jennifer. And, my name is Carol Belair, and I joined Blackbaud in 2003. And I've been in nonprofit fundraising prospect research and analytics since a long time, 1995. I've served hundreds, if not over a thousand clients in that time, and and I've written papers, blogs, and articles. And I've spoken at several conferences and webinars, so including like BBCon, AHP, and APRA with a focus on co presenting with Blackbaud nonprofit clients, just like I'm doing today. And I just feel so privileged to be in this job and help nonprofit organizations on a day to day basis achieve their goals using our Blackbaud's analytics services and our ResearchPoint software. I live in a suburb of Minneapolis called Savage, Minnesota here, where it's very cold. And I'm with my, with my husband, Tom, and I enjoy singing all types of music and in all kinds of music, just listening to it, do karaoke choirs, things like that. And I enjoy the outdoors, traveling, playing games, and being with friends and family. So first, Jennifer will talk about Assante and the work that she and her colleagues do at the foundation. And then I'm going to briefly talk about our Blackbaud, predictive analytics solutions. And then I'm gonna give it, an overview of the, of Assante Foundation's various analytics services. And then during the next section, Jennifer's gonna talk about how the custom modeling can be used for major donor and portfolio management and to produce a targeted direct mail appeals. And then Jennifer's gonna discuss the Sante Foundation's path to launching a grateful patient program. Just some fantastic, content there. And then I'm gonna, conclude with some recommendations around utilizing time with your analytics strategic consultants, so someone just like me. And then we're gonna end with questions that you may have, and we're gonna have plenty of time. And so please feel free to, put those into the q and a. So now I'm gonna give a brief overview of our analytics solutions here at Blackbaud, which combines comprehensive data insights to build a house of data intelligence for the social good sector. Our decades of investment has allowed us to build an unmatched infrastructure of both licensed and some proprietary data, including multidimensional, highly accurate attributes at both the household level and individual level. Blackbaud's analytics are driven by advanced predictive models that help our nonprofit clients understand who is likely to give specifically to your nonprofit organizations. And then our persona segmentations help nonprofits understand attitudes and motivations towards giving in order to tailor the messaging we're also leveraging cutting edge AI and machine learning to continuously improve our predictive modeling methodology and provide more guided prescriptive experiences to ensure that our data insights are helping drive real fundraising actions and outcomes. To give you some context, let me share a bit about Assante and Assante Foundation. As the largest health care provider in nine counties, Assante provides comprehensive medical care to more than 600,000 people throughout Southern Oregon and Northern California. Our facilities include Ashland Community Hospital, Rogue Regional Medical Center located in Medford, Oregon, Three Rivers Medical Center in Grand Grants Pass, Oregon, two cancer centers, and 30 plus primary care and specialty locations. As the philanthropic arm of Assante, Assante Foundation partners with the community to enhance health care in our region. We currently have a team of 16 staff members. That includes six major and annual gifts officers, a development coordinator, three team members dedicated to donor engagement and event coordination, three in operations, including myself and two staff assistants who perform all of our data entry and acknowledgment tasks, our chief philanthropy officer, Andrea Reeder, and her executive assistant, and the volunteer services manager who oversees the hospital volunteer program at Rogue Regional Medical Center. Okay. So now let's go over the various analytics solutions that Assante has at Blackbaud. So first, we have the grateful patient solution or what will be referred to throughout today's webinar. If you hear GPS, that's grateful patient solution. And that's the ability to screen patient census records to obtain scores that include wealth and philanthropic indicators to help our healthcare nonprofit clients identify from large lists of patient prospects, those for potential grateful patient engagement. And then the foundation also has the integrated NXT analytics that are most helpful on new records created within Raiser's Edge and are updated once a year on all records in the system, as well as having prospect insights, which are analytics that NXT clients can enable within the software to help identify potential major gift donors by providing prescriptive actions. And then they have the prospect point models, and that uses custom modeling statistical analysis to predict and identify prospects on their likelihood to give annual major and planned gifts, specifically to Assante, and then targeted gift ranges over one year. And then there's the Affluence Insight subscription, and that gives them the ability to submit a file, if you like quarterly, to obtain predictive analytics with five scores related to wealth attributes and a philanthropic wealth segment persona group. And then lastly, we have ResearchPoint and that is Blackbaud software that helps manage prospect research and it integrates with Raiser's Edge. ResearchPoint is also also where all the custom modeling and the affluence insight scores and GPS auto loaded prescreening results for patients and prospect research profile data resides for a donor and those patient prospects. The software gives Assante the ability to segment the best prospects as well as sync up data with Raizer's Edge for existing donor records, or you can create new prospect records quickly and really easily should there be a patient prospect, for example, that you want to assign to a gift officer for discovery and prospect relationship management next steps. So in 2019, Assante Foundation launched Assante Forward, the region's most ambitious and significant philanthropic effort to date. The purpose of the campaign was to transform the quality and scope of health care available in Assante's nine county region, providing residents with exceptional medical care in our own community. The campaign focused on a series of capital investments that Assante had committed to complete, including a new inpatient behavioral health unit, a stand alone cancer center in Medford, expansion of the existing cancer center in Grants Pass, and a new six story patient pavilion at Rogue Regional Medical Center. Our goal was 50,000,000. And to date, Assante Foundation has raised more than 60,000,000, far surpassing the goal and in half the time we had anticipated. This investment from the community supported the completion of several major projects. In 2020, Assante opened a new and expanded behavioral health unit. The expansion included an outdoor courtyard, group rooms, and 24 patient rooms, each with a garden view. Assante's behavioral health unit is the only inpatient facility of its kind serving the nine county region in Southern Oregon and Northern California. The expansion of Three Rivers emergency department, also completed in 2020, came at the perfect time. Not only was the department caring for more than 40,000 people annually, that number quickly increased when the pandemic arrived. The Hyman Cancer Center and the expanded Spears Cancer Center opened their doors to patients in January 2022. By January 2025, patients had visited these facilities more than 500,000 times. And in 2024, the new patient pavilion opened at Rogue Regional Medical Center, housing several areas of care, the Olsruhe Family Women's and Children's Hospital, cardiac care, critical care, and advanced surgical services. When we realized we'd surpassed our $50,000,000 fundraising goal, we expanded the campaign to Assante Forward twenty thirty with a new goal of raising $100,000,000. Key initiatives of the campaign include a cardiac care expansion with six new cath labs and a new cardiovascular recovery unit, renovation of the medical oncology unit within the hospital. The current space was part of the original 1958 construction and has not been been refurbished in nearly fifty years. And also doubling the size of our hospitality house in Grants Pass from seven to 14 rooms. The guest residence provides an affordable, supportive, home like setting where patients and their families can stay near the cancer center and the hospital without the physical and emotional strain of long distance travel. To achieve this ambitious goal, we would need to move beyond major gift fundraising and the primarily donor focused direct mail campaigns. Launching our grateful patient program would introduce us to a whole new universe of donor prospects and expand our reach beyond our primary two county region. With Assante forward, we had heavily tapped into major and planned giving donors, many of whom were known in our communities for their philanthropy. Moving forward, our development team would continue to cultivate meaningful, personalized giving opportunities for donors, but we would also expand our reach to grateful patients and building a midlevel giving program to create a sustainable base for annual giving. As part of our contract with Blackbaud, we conduct an annual screening of all living constituents in our razor's edge database. The analytics we capture through this process helps to guide our development team in their portfolio management with ratings and insights that are integrated into RE NXT. This includes estimated wealth rating, income, investments, target gift range, major giving likelihood, annual giving likelihood, planned giving likelihood, also known as MGL, AGL, and PGL. Development officers can use this information to determine the likelihood of receiving a gift from a particular donor, whether they would be a good planned giving prospect or if it makes sense to pursue a donor who hasn't been responsive in the past. How do we use this donut donor how do we use this data to target donors and prospects? Using the target gift range in MGL, AGL, and PGL, I can develop custom ask strings for direct mail appeals, providing suggested donation amounts that encourage donors to stretch beyond their last gift and make a gift more in line with their actual ability to give. Having that target gift range for each donor gives me the advantage of being able to ask for a higher gift amount without alienating donors who can't give a larger gift. If I have a very large prospect or patient list and I wanna make the best use of resources, I can also target donors with an MGL, AGL, or PGL above a certain number and eliminate any prospects who may be less likely to give. So integrating the model scores and ratings and Affluence Insights back into razor's edge enables our development officers to include these fields in RE NXT, portfolio or donor prospect lists, and also helps to inform portfolio management decisions. These fields are all sortable, so you can sort your donors or prospects based on estimated wealth, likelihood to give, major giving capacity, net worth, or any of the other wealth and ratings fields. A February 2023 advisory board presentation to Assante Foundation board members and key hospital leaders on the importance of grateful patient programs in health care fundraising kick started the launch of our grateful patient program. By bringing our hospital leadership, the administrators, compliance, legal, finance, and IT, and our volunteer leadership together, and bringing in an outside speaker and authority on the subject who could provide data to back up her assertions, we finally had the buy in we needed to launch our own grateful patient program. Prior to integrating grateful patient solution, if our development team wanted to solicit patients who had been discharged from a specific service area, I would submit a request for a patient list from our EPIC team. I might ask for a list of cardiac patients for the past twelve months with positive outcomes, and that request would then go through an approval, a discovery, and a delivery process that often took between two and six months. By the time we received the data, our priorities had shifted or the data was stale and no longer relevant. Our advisory board speaker had shared an important statistic in her presentation. Patients who were contacted within one month of service were twice as likely to donate. If our Assante forward 2030 campaign was to be successful and if we ever wanted to get our grateful patient program off the ground, we needed to implement grateful patient solution, get the data flowing in real time from epic into research point. So when we needed a list of cardiac, cancer, or surgery patients from a for a set time frame, we would have the ability to build a query that gave us just the patients we wanted and export that patient list to Excel to create our email or mailing list. Automating the data flow would also enable us to send monthly acquisition appeals and reach more potential donors. But first, we had to set it up. We needed to determine which custom fields we wanted to capture in ResearchPoint. Fortunately, this was a fairly easy task. Blackbaud had been processing our daily census files using the wealth point on time process since before I had joined the organization. We had already established with hospital compliance the fields that we were authorized to obtain from Epic for fundraising purposes. We just needed to define our additional GPS custom fields to move forward with enhanced grateful patient solution. In addition to the demographic data, the name, the address, the phone, the email, we could also capture date of birth, insurance status, dates of service, whether the patient was an inpatient or an outpatient, general outcome information, the admission location or facility, the department of service, their treating physician, and the general discharge location. Did they go home? Were they moved to a skilled nursing facility or into hospice? I scheduled a meeting with our Blackbaud data analyst to complete the final steps to upgrade from wealth point on time to enhanced grateful patient solution. Once we had established what our desired field layout would be, I submitted what I hoped would be my last epic report request through a streamlined process facilitated by the Assante chief information officer who had who had attended our board retreat. Working with our epic analyst, I added the new GPS custom fields that would be uploaded to research point daily. I also set up a second biweekly report that would capture outpatient visits to the hospitals, cancer, and surgery centers, including the appropriate departments such as radiation oncology, infusion, surgery, and cardiac rehab, and excluding the routine outpatient areas like lab and imaging. We were now able to process daily inpatient and biweekly outpatient files imported directly to ResearchPoint. Each morning, a report is pulled from epic, uploaded via FTP to Blackbaud Server for processing. This all happens through an automated process. The process file is imported into ResearchPoint through a batch process. Additionally, the daily census file is compared against our current donor records, matched, and an Excel file is returned to us. I'll discuss the ways we use that daily census file a little bit later. So next, we needed to build queries to extract the grateful patient donor acquisition list each month. I scheduled time to work with Carol, and we created a query to isolate a list of patients screened in the previous month. Since we see a lot of repeat customers in both inpatient and outpatient services, I needed to run my patient query against a second query that was die designed to eliminate patients who were screened in the previous six months. So, essentially, I'm only including new patients or those who haven't received a mailing in more than six months. During our consulting time, Carol helped me build a variety of customizable queries that could be adjusted as our needs changed and used to pull lists of patients based on our GPS custom fields or any of the fields stored in the research point database. I was able to use my consulting time with Carol to set up the queries I needed, but but I could also take what I had learned to duplicate an existing query, change the criteria slightly to create a new query for other data needs. To extract the query data and export it to Excel, we needed to build export definitions to define which fields to include in our Excel file. We included all of the contact and demographic information, our GPS custom fields, and model scores and ratings to help determine which patients may have the highest likelihood of making a gift. Again, Carol walked me through this process and helped create a few different export definitions that I could reuse or adjust as needed. We also use research lists to group individuals for efficient prospect research, allowing us to research prospects in batches rather than one by one. You can create a list of potential donors based on specific criteria, such as the wealth indicators, philanthropic giving, or biographical information. And these lists can then be submitted to WealthPoint for well screening, and the resulting model scores and ratings can be synced in a batch to Raiser's Edge. The records can also be exported to Excel for further review by the by the development team. One of the research lists we built during consulting was based on a patient list I had pulled earlier for a direct mail campaign. The original list contained about 1,100 patients, and our development officer wanted to take a closer look at just the top prospects from that initial mailing. The list included patients who lived in the coastal communities within our service area and who would travel to Three Rivers Medical Center for care on or after 12/01/2023. We wanted to exclude anyone who was deceased, of course, as well as patients on Medicaid. We included the specific ZIP codes for those areas of the coast, but we could have also queried by city and state. Finally, to identify just the top prospects, we use the model scores and ratings fields to include patients with a net worth or investments greater than or equal to a million dollars or giving capacity of 250,000 plus or income of a 150,000 or more. We also included the top affluence wealth segmentation attributes, the a ones, a twos, and a threes. Using this criteria, we were left with only the top 200 prospects to screen through WealthPoint and download to an Excel file for further qualification. As with any database import, it can be garbage in, garbage out. When multiple hospital employees are entering data into your epic database, there will be inconsistencies. Some names and addresses will need to be standardized. Duplicates must must be removed and spouse records combined. I cross check all records containing a razor's edge ID using an RE query to make sure that we have removed the do not solicit, the major donors, the recent donors, and the deceased. Patients with an a to c wealth point rating, meaning they have identified assets of 5,000,000 or more, and donors assigned to an active fundraiser are pulled into a separate list to determine if they will receive the standard mailing, be removed from the mailing list, or if they will receive a more personalized communication. I identified the common issues with my exported data files, and I developed a checklist so I don't miss a step in a process that I only do once a month. Because we have designed our program to produce a monthly mailing list and an email list, I am able to manage manual cleanup of the list, which averaged 2,500 patient records. Our November mailing this year included both September and October patients as we were testing out a new letter aimed at end of year giving. That list totaled more than 5,500 records. Still manageable, but I definitely needed to allow more time to prepare the file. There are a couple of administrative tasks that I consider extremely important to keeping the ResearchPoint data as clean as possible. The first is processing your batch import exception files every day. This is another task that your Blackbaud consultant can help you to fully understand. The import of batches to ResearchPoint creates exceptions that will need to be manually processed. These could be potential duplicates where you need to determine if it's a true duplicate or if a new record can be added to the database. They could also be possible address matches where one data point is slightly different, and you need to decide if the address is a match or a new address. And the second, in my opinion, most important task is marking deceased records every month before you export your data for mailings. We receive a monthly list of deceased patients from our hospice team, from the hospitals, and, also, our community is small enough that we can check our local online news sources for obituaries every day. I have the support of our staff assistants for these tasks. They're already updating Raiser's Edge, so it's just one more step to update the records in Research Point or make sure that records of deceased individuals in razors edge have been synced in ResearchPoint. In addition to being imported into ResearchPoint, we also receive the inpatient census files back from GPS daily. These patients have been matched against our razor's edge donor matching file by ZIP code, partial name, and address, and they're returned to us with combined fields that enable us to identify the top donors, the prospects, and the VIPs for further action. This could include sending a basket with fruit and snacks wrapped with an Assante Foundation ribbon and card for the patient or their family. Our development officers may conduct patient visits when appropriate, stopping by to check-in and offer the patient a notebook or some personal care items. And we also use the census file to identify our top rated prospects for further qualification after discharge. In the setup process for record matching, you can select up to five custom attributes to help you in identifying and coding your donors. We use the solicit code, the spouse's full name, the assigned solicitor or fundraiser, and a census stewardship attribute that allows us to code constituents who should receive a hospitality basket regardless of their giving level as well as note patients who request privacy while in the hospital. We launched our grateful patient program, including the direct mail and email campaign in January 2024. Looking at our grateful patient direct mail program, you can see the results for 2024 and 2025, which is not yet complete. Patients seen in September and October receive their letters this week. November patients will receive their letter in December. We also have our first grateful patient renewal letter hitting mailboxes soon, and we're anxious to see how many 2024 donors will renew their support. Our response rate of roughly half a percent is lower than we would like, but consistent with other acquisition mailings that we have conducted in the past year. We are most encouraged by the number of new donors we have acquired and the potential for major and planned gifts that goes beyond what we can expect with direct mail. These donors are also a great resource for patient stories, and we encourage patients to share their stories with us to inspire others. Recently, the medical oncology renovation project received a $2,000,000 leadership gift that was directly linked to our grateful patient program. Oregon and Charlotte received our grateful patient mailing in January 2025. Six months later, they picked up a gratitude card in the lobby of the Hyman Cancer Center and called our office to speak with a development officer about making a gift. We had no previous contact with the couple prior to the them being included in our grateful patient mailing. These are the types of gifts that we hope to inspire with this program, and this gift really illustrates the impact that a deliberate monthly grateful patient campaign can have over time. I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge my colleague and thought partner in this daunting effort, Jessica Klinky. Jessica joined Assante Foundation as the manager of donor engagement in August 2023. And it's no coincidence that we were able to launch our grateful patient program four months later. She develops our direct mail, email, and stewardship materials for the grateful patient program as well as our other campaign fundraising materials. And she also provided the support and the direction that I needed to make decisions about how to configure our GPS custom fields and research point to give us the flexibility to target patients based on area of service, location, and other attributes. Going forward, our development team will continue to cultivate meaningful, personalized giving opportunities for major donors, and we will continue our regular cadence of direct mail appeals to grateful patients. Our areas of focus for 2026 will include looking for additional ways to educate and encourage providers to refer grateful patients who express an interest in philanthropy. Additionally, we hope to focus more intentionally on our midlevel giving program to create a sustainable base for annual giving. We will use donor giving history and the in analytics tools available to us in ResearchPoint to find our best donors and prospects for mid level gifts. Well, thank you so much, Jennifer, at your incredibly insightful presentation on how Assante utilized analytics, GPS, research point, everything for your campaign. And and to go through the setup and all the work that you and your team was involved with the grateful patient program. Our nonprofit clients are very lucky to have these insights today. And I wanna spend a few minutes and moments to discuss how your Blackbaud Analytics Services strategic consultant can be helpful in this process. As many nonprofits often really feel quite overwhelmed by the array of analytics solutions at their disposal, and not to mention learning all the functionality available in ResearchPoint. You will find it incredibly beneficial to also have Blackbaud University training resources to begin learning ResearchPoint, and any analytics solutions you are you are or will be using, as well as one to one, strategic consulting sessions that also may be part of your contract. So the first step is, you know, really schedule a meeting and connect with your analytics strategic consultant, so someone just like me. And whether you're you're new to a nonprofit and, you know, the analytics program is now part of your job or your organization is completely new to your analytics solutions, or you wish to maybe reimagine, you know, how you're using your analytics services, simply remember, just learn in a very cadenced manner so that you don't have a case of information overload. And as you schedule time with your consultant via remote sessions, you'll be guided at your pace, you know, really based on your organization's priorities. And it's also a good opportunity to get to know each other, you know, create an onboarding schedule for each solution, as well as each area of fundraising, you know, major, annual, planned, mid level, etcetera. You can also ask your consultant for their recommended links to Blackbaud University's, you know, the on demand courses we have as well as in instructor led courses. And as well as those resources such as Blackbaud Institute studies, community blogs, they really can be a great resource for you on the latest in in the industry. And as Jennifer described today, in my role as their strategic consultant, I really worked with the team to strategize using both the predictive analytics and research point, you know, on their current razor's edge donor base. And then we worked on strategic strategies in using the grateful patient solution. So each time we'd meet, we'd we'd discuss the next area of focus and how each solution was gonna help them get there. So always be upfront with your consultant on what, you know, what are your goals, so that they can facilitate the learning and strategy based on your current circumstances. In other words, we really wanna meet you where you're at, right, and and then flush out over time where you wanna go from point a to point b. In particular, BlackWAD's GPS, grateful patient solution, that's utilized in a really unique manner in my estimation of many years I've been doing this. It's really dependent on each healthcare organization's staff size and the status and the health of your database and of course your specific objectives. So, I work with each GPS client to incrementally move towards desired outcomes. I mean, then we adjust the approach and process over months and many times over years. We might start with identifying, for instance, patients for an upcoming capital campaign, building upon new or established major gifts or planned giving programs, or maybe build a patient to donor conversion program via direct mail or email or both, or a combination of everything, all those objectives at once. And I do really high highly encourage you to schedule ongoing meetings with your consultant to ensure continual utilization of the tools that you have at your disposal. I'm a really strong advocate for this approach as any and all of my clients can attest to. And always remember to run the race that your organization's on. Right? Simply begin the starting line at a place that really works best for you. And, there's, you know, really best practices that our consulting team does draw upon and shares with our clients, but there is simply not a one size fits all strategy. So since the very beginning in working with Jennifer and Jessica Klinky and other colleagues at Assante, we made sure that they had the ability to learn, digest, and really manage all the data and as well as learning all the pertinent functionality necessary in ResearchPoint. Assante was very smartly focused, I have to say, on how they approach their analytics contract with Blackbaud, you know, starting off learning ResearchPoint, then using their annual modeling project, and then over time utilizing grateful patient solution. So, you know, take the approach that works best for you at your organization. So in conclusion, I just I really wanna thank Jennifer again, just sharing how Assante just did such a fantastic job employing all these solutions to really reach their specific objectives, and they continue doing so each and every day. Wanna thank everyone for attending the webinar today. I hope what I've shared, is helpful to you and your work. And I see that we've got a few questions, so please feel free to put any questions in the in the q and a, and we will go through those as much as we can. So Catalina asks, in reference to the monthly checklist, what tools do you use to perform the database crosschecks? So what I do, I export everything into Excel, and I manipulated I do most of my cleanup and manipulation in Excel. And then, in ResearchPoint, we have the ResearchPoint ID. And if that is a an ID that matches to our NXT or our our razor's edge, the database version, then I'm able to copy and paste those into a query. And I can then run that query and see, you know, who are our major donors, who has recently made a donation, who currently has a pledge. So we don't wanna send them another letter. And so, basically, I'm just using my ResearchPoint database, my razor's edge and NXT database, and Excel for, manipulating the the data. Do we import the patients into Razor's Edge NXT or keep them in Research Point? We keep them in Research Point until they, make a donation or, have some other interaction with us that would, cause us to go ahead and create a record. So we we usually, we're not uploading tons and tons and tons of records into into razor's edge and bogging up our razor's edge database. And and, Jennifer, I just wanna add on to that. Totally agree a 100% with the strategy that they do at Assante. I have clients who, you know, do a variety of things, and Raiser's Edge is really your your donor or real, you know, top prospect database of people who may not be donors. So, you know, you wanna be able to leverage Raiser's Edge as your donor base. And then you can use ResearchPoint. I mean, it's software, and there's a lot of ways to track things in ResearchPoint to a certain extent on people that you aren't ready to sort of, you know, import into Raiser's Edge for an official CRM record. But, you know and you're you're managing your prospect management in NXT. That's really where your focus should be. But but ResearchPoint can be a good repository for managing some patients that are, you know, sort of ready to be razor's edge records. So if you import everybody into razor's edge, then, you know, you also increase the number of records you have in razor's edge too. So, just all great things to consider, and I just love the way that Assante does does it. So I highly recommended going that route. Just wanted to add that. Yeah. Thank you. So Pat asks, how much time monthly do I put in to get my data in ResearchPoint ready to use? So we do a little bit each day, of course, because we're going in. We're processing our exception batches, and making sure that, you know, we're matching up any records that this the database isn't real isn't, completely sure. Is this a duplicate, or is this not a duplicate? So we wanna make those matches. So that's probably, Shauna probably spends ten, fifteen minutes a day doing that. And then, of course, we wanna mark all of our records deceased when we get those lists in each month. And then, as far as my prep for the file, for a regular monthly file, I probably spend maybe four hours. I'll usually do it in two days. So I'll spend two hours one day, cleaning up the addresses, getting everything ready, step away from it because that's a lot of a lot of time to be working in a database, you know, continuously, and then come back to it the following day and finish it up, doing my crosschecks into razor's edge. That's a really good question. And, you know, I I do have to say one of the things I really like that Assante is doing is marking those deceased records. So when you do integrate Raiser's Edge records back to ResearchPoint and you have your grateful patient and Raiser's Edge record all in one and ResearchPoint, you know, you sync that up and somebody is deceased, that will update in ResearchPoint and you can add them, you can ask your consultant to help you add to your query that deceased is equal to no. Because we do only want it to be for sure sending any kind of direct mail or communicating with individuals who are, you know, not deceased. So that could be added. I have other clients who will use grateful patient solution. If somebody, you know, was passed away while they were in one of their facilities, they do send them one more day in the grateful patient solution in one of their custom fields is that they're deceased while in service. So that could also be incorporated. So you could use your razor's edge deceased indicator, if you know about that, for a razor's edge record that's combined into ResearchPoint with a grateful patient record. And then you can also and you can revise your layout. You just have to work with Blackbaud to do that with your data analyst, but you can then also incorporate that piece the next day, if you have somebody who was on the previous day's grateful patient file, now they're deceased. That's an important step, you know, being able to, again, just keep your deceased records up to date in ResearchPoint. So when you're pulling files like Jennifer is every month, that you're not including, you you know, individuals who passed away. That's a really important thing. And I love that you're doing that, like, do not contact stuff. I mean, that is just or do not solicit. That is huge. That's a really important step. Working those batch exceptions, keeping your records up to date if you have the bandwidth to do that, especially if you're doing daily imports into Research Point from grateful patient, it really is a way to keep up with things and not have like hundreds and hundreds of records to do the exception batches once a month. Just do them every day. If you're doing a daily import, as much as you can every day, keeping your data in ResearchPoint as up to date as possible, being able to see that they're, you know, coming in as a regular patient, being able to see, you know, that, that if it isn't a duplicate, that that record isn't just sitting there as a possible duplicate, not being created as a new record, now you might be missing out on that on that prospect. And and one of the things in the batch exception is that, it doesn't allow you to really segment on the results in the sort of exception batch area, in the uncommitted batch area, but but you can look it does sort it by well point ratings. And Jennifer talked earlier about, you know, well point ratings, A, B, and C, 5,000,000 or more. You know, you could, whatever your numbers are like, you could prioritize maybe those with the highest well point ratings, make sure you work those in the batch exception process. So there's there's just lots of ways that you can attack it and, you know, you certainly wanna work with, you know, your team internally like Jennifer, Jessica, and everybody's done so brilliantly at the foundation. And then, you know, and then also with your consultant to figure out the best approach because every all my clients are doing things a little differently. And, you know, there is no right or wrong. It's just what you're able to do and move forward with. You just don't wanna get caught in inertia and not doing anything. Right, Jennifer? I mean, that's that's the that's that's the best way to get a grateful patient program moving forward. Yeah. It's really it's really true. It seems like, an insurmountable mountain when you first start thinking about it and planning for it, and you kinda just have to jump in and get started. And then you work out the bugs as you go. You know, we. had a lot of my my my checklist alone, you know, was a constantly changing document that you know, to figure out, you know, who do I include and who do I not include? And, oops, we included someone we shouldn't have, so now let's go and revise that. So it really does it takes time to to figure out, you know, where all those little, escape hatches are and and, make sure you've plugged all the holes before you, really launch into it. But we did some we we did kind of a slow rollout. We did, I think our first, two grateful patient mailings. We just didn't go to all the patients. We did a smaller batch of cardiac patients. We did a a doctor's day, solicitation. So we we started slow, and then have, you know, just gained momentum as we've gone along. Yeah. You can always be reimagining things and and, you know, thinking of ways of tweaking it. And even if you get something rolling that's working really well, Take, you know, take one thing and do that. Maybe it's direct mail, maybe it's email or both. And then you're assigning gift, you know, to gift officers specific prospects, especially your donors. Right? When they come in, that's a really important thing that I love that Jennifer is doing is that donor matching file and, you know, making sure if one of your donors is a patient, that there's some process in place for recognizing that and maybe a different track there. Right? That that's a better approach. I love that approach. So that's excellent. Are there other questions? Because, you know, we have we wanted to sometimes we run out of time for this portion of the webinars, and we wanted to make sure that, you know, people felt free to ask questions. There are only good questions. There's such nuance with grateful patient solution and any kind of program like this. So do you have anything else, Jennifer, too that you you have just so much wisdom to share? No. I think that's I mean, I it's it's baby steps. It's doing what you can do. You know, I've talked to some people who've taken a lot of different approaches, and, you know, it just depends on how much, bandwidth you have and how much staffing you have to to be able to manage it. But you can you can start small. You really can. Excellent. Amy asked a really good question. Hi, Amy. Do we customize our letters to specialty area? Cheers. Not the not the general grateful patient letter, but we we do have the opportunity now to, if we're if we're fundraising for a specific initiative to create, you know, customized polls that are based on the area of service that that patient was in. So, for example, when we, start raising when we're raising money for the family house, which is our hospitality house, in Grants Pass, I was able to, to pull a list of patients who come in from the coast, which is one and a half to two hours away, and we could target it to to those patients in those counties in those areas. If we're doing something to cardiac, similarly, I can pull all the cardiac patients. But, no, our general grateful patient letter does not specify any specific department. Excellent. Jennifer. We're tracking mailings, emails, and pay Jennifer Farnham asked if I understand correctly, you're tracking mailings, emails, and paper based within raise ResearchPoint. We're not actually tracking it, the appeals in ResearchPoint. We're actually using another tool. This is kinda funny because this is not this is not a Blackbaud tool. It's a different tool. It's through Omatik Software. And Omatik is a company that, I believe was founded by people who worked at Blackbaud many years ago, and they have a product called list management. And list management is, I guess, what you would call an API type add on to our razor's edge. And so we can actually take our mailing list, import it into, list management, and mark them as, mark the appeal that they received in list management. And then from within razor's edge, we can promote that person into a full razor's edge record. So do your research. Go look at O Matic list management, and and you'll see what I'm what I'm talking about. Or contact me directly, and and I'd be happy to talk with you about it. It's a really good question. We have we have, you know, a lot of clients who use that type of service like Omatic has. So for list management, that's that's great. basically a a holding tank a holding tank for your, for your non constituent records, which can be used for all sorts of purposes, not just not just data coming from research point, but from anywhere. And re ResearchPoint is not meant to be a list management. It's a it has it's a database and it can be incredibly helpful, but, you know, you might you could miss things, you know, if you're just using ResearchPoint to not be able to bump it up against all the other areas of software that you have. So whether it be Illuminate, right, or NXT and things like that, if you're not using a way to manage the same Carol Bel Air and all these different desperate databases together. And then like Jennifer was saying, put them into NXT at a at a point where maybe they give a gift or whatever the different levels of, okay, now we create an NXT record. I mean, that that a tool like that can be incredibly helpful, to make sure that. you're not missing anything. Right? You know? Yes. Absolutely. Yep. Makes life a little bit easier too. Absolutely. Well, it looks looks like there's no more questions. And, you know, we have our our emails there. We have our LinkedIn information. Please connect with us on LinkedIn. The community, I'm up in the Blackbaud community. Jennifer, are you in the community? I'm trying to remember. I think I have an account. I have maybe not been in there for a little bit. I have any I I go on there and do blogs, but, yeah, I'm trying to get better about going in there because there's so many great resources in the community. I love reading that. So, I try to read some of the top posts every single month. So there's a lot of good information there, but feel free to connect with us. And and, you know, I just wanna thank again, Jennifer and the team there. It's just amazing the work that you're doing and that you're sharing your story today. It's really gonna help a lot of our, our clients. And, and, you know, you should be getting a link, to the to today's session, in in your email. So if you want to share it with your colleagues and have them watch it or rewatch certain sections of this, it will be available on demand. So with that, Jennifer, do you have any other parting comments? No. I just wanna thank you, Carol, for inviting me to to speak today. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you everybody. I wish you a very happy holiday season and a very happy new year. Go 2026. Thanks.