Resuscitating Your Campaign

Couple this with a lack of public education about the difference between for-profit and nonprofit medical facilities, and this challenge becomes even bigger.

The public, on average, might not know that nonprofit healthcare services actually are operating more efficiently than the for-profit health sector. In Why Nonprofits Matter in American Medicine: A Policy Brief, Mark Schlesinger of Yale University and Bradford Gray of the Urban Institute discovered some interesting comparisons between nonprofit and for-profit healthcare organizations. Their brief found that:

• For-profit organizations have larger markups of prices over costs;

• Nonprofit organizations adopt more trustworthy practices;

• Nonprofits serve as incubators for new health services; and

• Nonprofits play a vital role in influencing the practices of their local for-profit competitors but too often have inadequate levels of community involvement and incomplete public accountability.

Fundraising efforts that reach out to healthcare professionals who understand these challenges can be an effective strategy for nonprofit healthcare groups. Bill McGinley is the CEO of the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy of Falls Church, Va., which represents 4,500 fundraising executives in healthcare. He finds today’s busy healthcare workers hard to reach, but not impossible.