At Memorial Sloan Kettering Giving, Personalized Experiences Put Donors First

// By Jane Weber Brubaker //

If you read any of the 2019 trends articles at the beginning of the year, chances are personalization was one of the “hot trends to watch.” But what exactly does personalization look like in a healthcare organization? If you ask 10 people, you’re likely to get 10 different answers. One thing is certain: It’s more than a web page that says, “Welcome, Jane!”

Digital technologies have given marketers the ability to create beautifully designed responsive websites and populate them with engaging content. But is that it? The digital team within the Office of Development at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center believes it can be much more.

Emily Scher, lead, digital strategy and marketing, Memorial Sloan Kettering Giving

The organization’s development group, MSK Giving, is leading the effort to personalize the donor experience, with help from open-source digital experience agency Phase2 — and the larger organization is taking notice.

Emily Scher leads digital strategy and marketing at MSK Giving. “Online, when you’re talking about personalization, you’re talking about things like, ‘How do we craft the experience this person is going to have based on what we know about them?” she says. “What is it that we know about this person that can make them understand that we’re putting them and their experience first?”

“We’re trying to figure out what makes you feel best about the work, and what inspires you to give to our organization,” says Brandy Reppy, associate director of digital operations for MSK Giving, noting that it’s not about building awareness of the Giving brand. “We want you to have really good feelings about our hospital and the work that the money we raise goes to serve.”

Brandy Reppy, associate director of digital operations, MSK Giving

MSK Giving uses a marketing automation tool, Acquia Lift, to personalize the website experience. “For the website, Acquia is really our center point. It sits on top of our content management system,” Reppy explains. “We create content in our CMS and then Acquia Lift is the layer that parses the data.”

To begin the personalization project, which launched about a year ago, the development team had to come up with some basic assumptions, watch what happened, and make adjustments.

Creating Segments, Producing Content to Go with It

The first step was to segment the audience. “Our audience is this wide swath and so figuring it out is another piece of personalization that we’re trying to get to,” says Reppy. Donors and visitors from the main website, www.mskcc.org, make up the two main segments, and donors are further segmented by recency, frequency, and monetary value.

In the cancer space, there’s a heightened need to approach site visitors thoughtfully. “We want people to donate, but we also know that they probably have a relationship with Memorial Sloan Kettering, and we want to be acutely sensitive to whatever brought them to that journey,” Reppy says.

One challenge the team had to overcome initially was lack of content on the Giving site. “We were building content the same time we signed on with Acquia,” says Reppy.

Scher adds, “We needed to figure out how we could create content that was differentiated from the marketplace, our competitive set. The idea is that inspiring stories is our niche — talking about MSK research breakthroughs and extraordinary patient care from the perspective of our community. So, we created stories based on all kinds of donors — donors that give in different ways and have engaged with our brand in different ways.”

Today, the Giving site features stories about patients, physicians, research, and donors.

MSK Giving’s goal is to create content that resonates with the interests of donors and inspires them to support the organization.

A Different Welcome Mat

Using personalization technology to steer donors to specific content is one tactic of many. “Another distinction about personalization that’s important to highlight is that it doesn’t always have to be macro content,” Reppy says. “The kind of content we’ve been able to tackle a little bit more has been micro content — the first few sentences that you see when you come to a homepage, kind of a different welcome mat we put out for people based on what we know about them.”

Results So Far

The team began by running copy/creative tests on the homepage to understand donor activity. “[The tests] weren’t as decisive as we would expect, but now we’re moving from testing to actually personalizing with a strategy based on giving behavior and website activity that’s more grounded in driving engagement and donations. We’re adjusting our segmentation based on that goal,” Scher says.

“We did not see statistically significant results in the majority of tests,” Scher comments. “It’s been successful in that we have been able to make some decisions based on what we’ve learned.”

She notes that the ability to tie in sophisticated segmentation strategies from other channels such as email to the web would be considered a success.

Ongoing Process

Personalization is not simple, nor does it have an endpoint. “You have to keep it up,” says Reppy. “You want to keep that conversation going. You have to dig into your data and figure out where you’re leaving untapped potential in your house file.”

She sees the value and necessity of setting the right expectations for the organization. “In these beginning stages, it’s really a challenge to say, ‘This one tweak meant a ton of money coming in,’” Reppy says.

Personalization for the Parent Brand

Much of the traffic to the Giving site originates on the organization’s main site. “We obviously partner very closely with the parent brand and their website,” Reppy says. “It’s definitely kind of a crawl-walk-run relationship. It’s forced us to really look at how people traverse between the main site over to the Giving site. If we can show it’s a really important data stream, then we can talk about how we can integrate better.”

Scher adds, “I think that the parent brand is very interested in personalization to further engage their site visitors. They have a lot of content so a lot of opportunity to personalize. And we’ve shared our experience with them.”

Meeting and Managing Expectations

Consumers have grown to expect personalized digital experiences. “We understood it to be kind of the cost of entry if we want to be in the game,” Scher says.

She admits that it’s not an easy task for a nonprofit organization to tackle. “It’s not something that a lot of people have the capacity to do, so we’re in a fortunate position that we can. And we have leadership support.”

She cautions others about the amount of work it takes to launch and manage a digital personalization program. “A lot of newbies think they’re going to just jump into personalization. But you need to spend a lot of time setting up personalization, setting up segments, and then observing,” she says. “I think this is a longer game.”

Kellye Rogers, vice president of product and strategy at Phase2

5 Tips for Digital Transformation

We interviewed Kellye Rogers, vice president of product and strategy at Phase2, to get a broad perspective on what it takes to create great personalized digital experiences. Here, she shares five tips:

1. Recognize that expectations have fundamentally changed. “The thing healthcare is waking up to is that, in people’s minds, you and your brand are your digital tools. You are your digital content. You are your app. Potential patients aren’t going to distinguish that you are separate, and how well these tools work is how well you work as a healthcare provider.”

2. Adopt a holistic view. “I think you have to think about the entire patient journey. If you understand that, every touchpoint is going to be an opportunity to better serve that person.”

3. Ask permission. “Once you build profiles and verify people’s identity, the next piece is to build trust. You need to build into your patient experience constantly asking for consent and making it clear and totally transparent to the patient. Build listening posts as a way to gather feedback about the experience. Every touchpoint is an opportunity for an interaction where you can learn something about them.”

4. Work toward integrating back-end systems. “For large health systems, there’s going to be so many different software platforms, and it’s systems that never really thought of themselves as being part of a coherent patient journey. The ultimate goal is that the patient can move seamlessly when you reduce barriers and burdens to them. Keep orienting toward that end goal.”

5. Work with a knowledgeable team. “I think you need a person or team that owns the product and understands that the number of systems that are going to need to be able to talk to each other in healthcare is fairly massive. They need to understand integrations and APIs and be attuned to how someone experiences interfaces, so a really strong UX strategist. It’s all hands on deck, in my opinion. You’ve got to be thinking about content, copy, and brand voice. It really runs the whole gamut.”

Jane Weber Brubaker is executive editor of Plain-English Health Care, a division of Plain-English Media. She directs editorial content for eHealthcare Strategy & Trends and Strategic Health Care Marketing, and is past chair of the eHealthcare Leadership Awards. Email her at jane@plainenglishmedia.com.