95% of health partnerships are started by a patient - from competitor research. sent

I hope you’ve had a good Easter. I just took my boyfriend away on the first ever holiday I’ve  planned using ChatGPT. 

It was recently a milestone birthday of his and I wanted to make it special. But I hate planning holidays. So, I’m hoping when they say it’s the thought that counts, it’s the quality of the thought, not the volume… 🤷In my defence, I knew to ask ChatGPT for a curry house, a coffee based experience, a big walk and a good vegetarian roast dinner - I just didn’t want to spend several hours triangulating. 

They say that a ChatGPT search takes as much carbon as 21 google searches, and I’m pretty sure it would’ve taken me at least 30. And hey, that curry was banging!I will confess though, when my partner repeatedly asked me how I picked Great Malvern, I did eventually crack and tell him that I had used ChatGPT to get the plans started. Of course I did one or two extra google searches to check the recommendations, but the base of the location, a place that could do a walk, a curry house, a coffee experience, did come from ChatGPT.He kept asking 'how did you get started?'. It brought me to one of the questions we get asked at Fireside Fundraising most commonly…

How do corporate partnerships get started?

One of the things we do for charities is competitor research. As we build their corporate partnerships menu, we’re looking at the partnerships (and particularly the price points) of charity partnerships in a similar space.To do that, we look at 5 similar charities, their partnership portfolio and the press releases that go outside it. Within the health charities space, we’ve now researched over 200 corporate charity partnerships and found something astonishing.

We know that warm connections are important in every cause. We talk a huge amount about how a referral makes a difference. But when it comes to health charities 95% of the 200 partnerships we looked at were started by a patient. 

Whether it’s a family member, a patient themselves or a friend of someone who’s gone through an experience, in 95% of the health partnerships that we looked at we saw that direct employee experience was the thing that had convinced the company to go ahead with the partnership. And what this means is, more than ever, we need to look at how we begin our partnership conversations. If you are a health charity, one of the fundamental questions you can be asking yourself is 'How do we get our patients to speak to companies on our behalf?' and 'How do we understand where they work and what they’d like our partnerships to look like?'.

Fireside of course can help you answer these questions - as we've done with a number of health organisations. And if you’re in a social mobility space, a hospice, an environmental cause - even though this stat doesn’t specifically apply to you, it probably creates similar questions of 'How do we get the people who are already interested to help us find money?'.

One of the biggest problems in the sector is that we chase people with money and trying to get them to find interest.What this research shows us is that it is far more effective to go to the people who have interest and ask them to help you find money.

There’s a bunch of other research that we’re working on that we’ll announce in the weeks ahead but we’d love to share our learnings with you soon. If you’d like to look at how we can help you use your supporters or your service users to warm up your pipeline, it’d be great to chat!