Opt Out Process - Healthcare Patients

David Terek:

Are there any clients in the Healthcare arena that have a process in place to Opt Out patients from solicitations?   We would appreciate any information via the forum or any contact info to call and have a conversation.    Thank you!

When a new patient record is created on the hospital side (Admitting), to my knowledge, there is not an opt out option in place. When we then use our hospital list for mailing and are contacted by the patient that they do not want any further mailings, we then mark the constituent record in Raiser's Edge with their opt out request. We use an attribute of No Solicitations or No Mail depending on if they just don't want solicitations or if they don't want ANY mail (invitations, birthday cards, updates, our magazine or solicitations) and on the comment field, we state that it is an opt out. Because there are times that a mailing will go out from other lists that are not constituents in our database, we may get requests to opt out of mailings from people that we have no consituent record for. Unfortunately with those cases, we add a new record to our database as a No Mail record, just to prevent them from receiving any future mail from our institution. Then whenever any mailing goes out from our Marketing department or the Foundation, a list is provided from our database of deceased people as well as people who are marked as No Mail/No Solicitations.

Kathy Hannon:

When I worked in Healthcare with RE - the hospital IT department created a field on the admission record on soliitations - the patient was asked if they were ok with receiving material from the hospital. The foundation would get a daily printout of admissions from the previous day which included "Yes" or "No" in the solicitation column.  The hospital IT also set up a VIP coding on the Medical Record that we could enter if the patient was a Major Gift donor which would prompt the Admitting staff to thank the individual for their support - it impressed our donors!!

With the appeal mailings, we did a monthly "grateful" patient mailing, there was wording that indicated to mail back the letter in the SASE with "Remove from Mailing List" if the prospect didn't want further solicitation. This was a backup if Admission forgot to ask about solicitations.

I am never a fan of an opt in process where upfront you ask the prospect if they want to get mail. it is too likely they will say no and never realize they missed opportunities to support the organization. "Don't ask a question you do not want to know the answer to." somone once said.

Once people begin to receive mail and are presented with opting out far fewer will do this than will say no when asked. I know it can seem to save you costs in not mailing to those people who say they do not want it. What people say and what they do are often different things and a creative, well done appeal with a well articuated cause can surprise people - even those who would have said no to mail if asked the question.