We Understand Your World

In academic medicine and healthcare, fundraising is both essential and increasingly complex. With decades of experience serving this distinctive sector, GG+A understands the forces at play.

We understand the emotional bonds that patients and families form with their doctors in times of crisis, the desire to give back to an institution that served them well, the passion for funding research to treat or cure devastating illnesses. We also understand institutional pressures: The investments required to attract top medical school faculty and students. The skyrocketing cost of top-tier research. The escalating insurance premiums and declining reimbursements.

Most important, we know how to bring philanthropically reliant institutions and philanthropically inclined people together for mutual benefit.

Challenges & Solutions

At GG+A, we have led diverse academic medicine and healthcare clients through the intricate process of optimizing their advancement programs, often with transformational results.

Activities include surveying stakeholders to uncover interests, perceptions, motivations, and concerns. Helping medical school deans, hospital CEOs, and other leaders determine, prioritize, and communicate fundraising objectives. Screening patient demographic information for indicators of financial capacity and institutional affinity. Identifying high-value unassigned prospects and low-value assigned prospects. Engaging physicians, research scientists, and medical faculty and staff in the fundraising process. And pulling everything together for maximum effect, whether the goal is to establish a sustainable high-performance grateful-patient program or to create and implement a comprehensive campaign strategy.

Our Services

GG+A offers an incomparable combination of experience, perspective, and know-how to its clients in the academic medicine/healthcare sector. Services include:

Analytical Assessments of Advancement Programs

An assessment of the development operation that provides recommendations on the optimal organizational structure and deployment of staff and resources, as well as an evaluation of overall culture, environment, and level of readiness to support sustainable increases in fundraising. Typically focuses on management and organization, resources and budgets, prospect management, communications, and constituent engagement.

Annual Giving Acceleration

A sophisticated segmentation approach to maximizing donor growth, retention, and overall annual fund yield. Explores the relationship and demographic indicators of each prospect and identifies individuals with philanthropic propensity toward your organization. Allows for a tailored approach to acquire, retain, and upgrade annual giving donors. Learn more.

Best-practice Training for Development Officers in Academic Medicine and Healthcare Philanthropy

At GG+A, consultants with extensive development-leadership experience coach clients in the core competencies of major-gift fundraising: qualifying and planning, cultivating, asking, negotiating, and stewardship. Learn more.

Campaign Readiness Assessments and Planning Studies

Provides the insights and data needed to make critical decisions about a proposed campaign’s structure, objectives, and implementation, offering an objective review of strengths and weaknesses relevant to the proposed campaign. Fundamental activities include briefing lead prospects and volunteers on the campaign’s goals, soliciting feedback on the case for support, and face-to-face conversations that explore the perceptions and gift potential of key constituents. Includes an analysis of internal resources available to support the effort and evidence-based recommendations for strategies, investments, and reallocations that will help support an ambitious and achievable campaign.

Comprehensive Campaign Strategies

Flexible configurations of customized, one-on-one support, ranging from several hours per month to several days per week. Strategic and campaign counsel commonly includes advising leadership on internal and external positioning for philanthropy, providing direction on cultivation and solicitation strategies, effective uses for staff and volunteer resources, and the structure and role of volunteer committees. Counsel at the interim-management level may include hands-on time reviewing the prospect pool and targets, advising on the development of a prospect management system and accompanying reports, or evaluating gift capacities and identifying ask amounts.

Development Program Benchmarking

Provides valuable insight into the relationship between investment in staff and programs and long-term fundraising performance. Uncovers opportunities for new strategic investment or changes to existing resource allocations at the institutional or unit level through comparison with peer institutions in program areas such as alumni engagement, communications, annual fund, or overall advancement.

Tailored Donor Screening for Medicine and Healthcare

Deepens understanding of prospect potential by matching individual prospect data to a total of 25 of the most respected and highly accurate national public databases, providing actionable insights on wealth, affiliation, and political and charitable contribution data. Flexible interface allows both individual lookups and batch uploads. Optional fully automated frequent screening delivers results to development staff within hours, providing the greatest opportunities for cultivation and stewardship of new constituents, such as patients and families and performing arts patrons.

Engagement of Physicians and Stakeholders in Effective Fundraising practices

At GG+A, consultants with extensive development-leadership experience coach clients in the core competencies of major-gift fundraising: qualifying and planning, cultivating, asking, negotiating, and stewardship. Learn more.

Gift Officer Metrics Management

We provide development leaders and gift officer managers with a dashboard of the metrics necessary to hire, train, coach, mentor, and manage their teams.  These tools are developed from proven practices and benchmarked against high performance gift teams.

Major-Gift Optimization

Identifies high-value unassigned prospects and low-value assigned prospects, resulting in recommendations for realigning gift officer portfolios. Helps ensure that the best prospects receive appropriate focus and stewardship. Are your best major gift prospects receiving the attention they deserve?  Using metrics, analytics, and data, we help your gift officers evaluate their prospect portfolios in order to improve both short and long-term portfolio yield performance.

Principal and Major Gift Prospect Strategies

Assesses the strength of gift officer portfolios and reviews the current assignment of prospects relative to performance goals and metrics. Provides recommendations on the optimal distribution of prospects and deployment of resources, based on a value assessment of prospect portfolios at the individual gift officer level, segmented by pipeline stages, and an analysis that compares managed and unmanaged prospect populations by assignment and prospect gift capacity.

Strategic Communications

We understand that communications tactics must flow from strategic goals and objectives. Learn more.

Surveys

An efficient and cost-effective way to better understand key stakeholders’ developing interests and attitudes toward philanthropic giving. Uncover constituents’ interests, perceptions, opinions, motivations, and concerns. Understand facets of propsect behavior and engagement, knowledge invaluable to practitioners in development, communications, and donor stewardship. May be customized to target a particular program area, audience segment, donor profile, or fundraising initiative.

The value of quality care is immeasurable to a patient. To deliver the level of care patients expect and deserve requires a continuous effort to stay ahead of medical technology and research.

Rush University Medical Center
Read Success story

Our Clients

Over the past half-century, GG+A has served hundreds of medical schools, academic medical centers, basic and medical science research institutes, community hospitals, hospices, specialty facilities, voluntary health associations, and allied entities such as schools of nursing and public health. Here is a sampling:

  • American Heart Association
  • Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago
  • Association of American Medical Colleges
  • Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh
  • The Cleveland Clinic
  • The Fund for Johns Hopkins Medicine
  • Hoag Hospital Foundation
  • Houston Methodist Hospital Foundation
  • Mayo Clinic, Rochester
  • Regional One Health
  • Temple Health
  • University of California, Los Angeles Health Sciences
  • Yale-New Haven Hospital