What could Grateful Giving be worth to your charity?
Patient and family philanthropy can be difficult to see when you only look at what your charity raises today. I developed the Grateful Giving Calculator to make that opportunity more visible.
Using patient activity, current fundraising performance and evidence-based assumptions about giving, it explores what even modest levels of patient and family giving could mean for an individual health charity.
Health organisations care for very large numbers of people. That means you don't need to assume that every patient will give, or even that a large proportion will. The calculator models different scenarios to explore what could happen if relatively small numbers of patients and families chose to support the organisation that cared for them. It considers both shorter-term giving and the longer-term potential of legacy relationships.
It starts with your organisation
The analysis isn't based on a generic fundraising target. It brings together information about your organisation, including patient activity and existing fundraising performance, and considers that alongside different assumptions about patient and family giving.
The result is a simple way to explore questions such as:
-
How much are we currently raising relative to the number of patients we care for?
-
What could modest growth in patient and family giving look like?
-
What might a stronger pipeline of future legacy supporters mean over time?
-
How does the potential compare with what we raise today?
These are scenarios, not forecasts. Their purpose is to help leaders see the scale of the opportunity and start a more informed conversation about what could be possible.
Grateful Giving isn't about turning patients into fundraising targets. It starts from something much more human: some patients and families already want to give.
The opportunity is to recognise that generosity, understand what giving can mean to the person offering it and make sure your organisation has the confidence, culture and pathways to respond well. Even modest changes in how effectively an organisation does that could have a significant impact over time.
“Gemma helped us find our confidence, engage our patient support group and raise three times as much as we thought we would.”
CLINICAL LEAD OF HAEMATOLOGY
“There was one person I wanted to bring in to inspire my clinical colleagues and show them how fundraising could improve patient care and secure larger gifts.”
PAEDIATRIC ONCOLOGIST AND PROFESSOR OF ONCOLOGY
The example shown here has been anonymised. Every organisation is different, and the potential depends on its patients, current fundraising performance, existing donor relationships and organisational context.
The calculator forms part of Grateful Giving Discovery, where we use evidence, benchmarking and your own organisational context to understand the opportunity and help build a compelling case for change with senior leaders.
Grateful Giving Calculator Creator
The Grateful Giving Calculator and potential analysis were developed by Gemma Downham as part of the Grateful Giving approach. Gemma is a specialist in NHS fundraising and patient and family philanthropy, with 17 years’ experience working in NHS fundraising. During this time, she created the NHS’s first Grateful Patient Programme and led major capital campaigns for new children’s and cancer hospitals.
Today, through Downham Consulting, Gemma works with health organisations, professional bodies and clinical leaders to understand their philanthropic potential and build programmes that patients, clinicians and fundraisers can trust. The scenarios produced by the calculator are designed to illustrate potential rather than predict or guarantee future fundraising income.