Promoting Your Hospital’s Foundation and Volunteerism via the Intranet

In the current economic times hospitals are finding that fundraising and volunteerism have become increasingly critical in ensuring that both long term development as well as immediate needs are properly funded. This makes the foundation’s presence on the hospital’s intranet essential to employee involvement in the hospital foundation or hospital volunteer program.

The hospital intranet plays an important role in involving employees in fundraising and volunteerism by keeping the employees informed of the foundation’s activities. The foundation commonly publishes information about:

• Foundation vision and mission statement
• Calendar of events and fundraising drives
• Foundation contact information
• Donation summary information such as displaying donation progress towards a certain goal
• Announcements such as upcoming drives
• Foundation newsletters
• Donate now link
• Employee donation recognition
• Listing of volunteer needs and electronic sign up for volunteer positions

Many hospitals provide secure external access to the hospital intranet from the internet which allows foundation board members to not only see the foundation information published internally to the entire hospital’s staff but also gives secure access to foundation board information that is only to be accessible by the foundation board. In this same way physician involvement in the foundation is encouraged.

Connecting all of these entities in a central location also provides a perfect place to capture data about donors, donations and volunteers. Many hospitals provide an electronic database to capture demographic and donation information that can later be used during various marketing efforts such as mailing campaigns.

The hospital intranet serves as the glue that brings employees, hospital administration, foundation board and physicians together in the common goal of fundraising and encouraging volunteerism.A successful hospital foundation requires that the intranet be the key platform for communicating foundation material throughout the organization and there is no limit to the positive effects of such open and easy communication.