Think back to the last time you made a charity donation. How good did it feel to support something you cared about, to know you were making a difference? 

Giving to charity evokes feelings of warmth, connection, and satisfaction. It has the power to lift our spirits. 

But despite this, there is a myth that remains. All too often, fundraisers are told that we can’t ask new patients, who have recently been supported by a charity, for a donation. 

Today, I’ll explain why I want to smash that myth.

I was living in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and my dad was diagnosed with cancer. Shortly after his diagnosis, as we were trying to make sense of this new world we’d been thrown into, we were connected with a charity that offered free support to patients and their families. 

During a very turbulent time, this charity provided a level of care and support we had never anticipated. We knew we wanted to give back as soon as we could – not because we were asked, but because we felt moved to. So, with the support of my family, I signed up to run the Auckland Half Marathon and raise funds for this charity. 

As I was still at university, my network was heavily made up of students. So, I was surprised to reach my ambitious fundraising goal within a week of launching my page. With curiosity getting the better of me, I hopped over to the page to find out who donated so generously and came across names of multiple people I didn’t recognise. 

A little investigating into how these donors found my page led me straight to the source: my dad. He was using his downtime between treatments to share my page with anyone in his network. As someone who had directly benefited from this charity, he wanted to do something to give back, show his gratitude, and ensure more people could benefit from their care and support.

Now, let’s fast forward to 2021…

At this point, I was working for Glaucoma Australia, a charity that provides free education and lifelong support for people with glaucoma. 

It was here that I came across this myth that ‘we can’t ask new patients to donate.’ The rationale for this was simple: our focus had to be on the patient and ensuring they received the care they needed when they came to us. We assumed they wouldn’t want us to ask for donations soon after joining, as they would need to see value in our offering first, before being comfortable donating.

So, we excluded all new patients from appeals or direct asks in their first year with us. 

A little while after I joined the team, we embarked on a new project – a deep dive into our supporter data. We were now a year into using a new CRM (customer relationship management) system, and this opened doors to reporting that were previously closed. We hoped to leverage these new features to gain a deeper understanding of our supporter base and to strengthen how we make data-driven decisions. 

Some questions we set out to answer were: 

1. Who makes up the majority of our donor base? Are they patients, health professionals, or family members?
2. When do patients typically choose to donate? Is it one year after receiving support, two, three, or more? 

The results of this research surprised us all

Our data showed that patients made up the majority of our donor base. This, however, wasn’t the surprising element, as we knew people who access our services are more likely to donate when they can. 

What surprised was seeing how many new patients were donating within the first two months of joining our database and receiving support.

And furthermore, the data you’ll see in the next graph below shows that the longer a patient remained in our database without donating, the less likely they were to respond to future appeals. 

So, the longer we waited to ask, the less likely they were to respond.

These insights shifted our approach to asking new patients to donate

The team tested adding new patients to appeals in 2024, which was a strategic shift that was recognised as one of the reasons Glaucoma Australia achieved its best tax appeal results to date that year.