Donor Trust: Communications Governance and the Institutional Voice

Through the Healthcare lens

Trust in a hospital foundation is inseparable from a family's trust in their own medical care, which raises the stakes on every item in this module's transparency standard, and a data breach involving donor information carries the added weight of potentially touching protected health information, a compliance layer beyond what the module's general crisis protocol names. The institutional voice matters enormously here because a hospital's donor communications compete with the medical system's own clinical crisis communications, and donors need to hear from the foundation in a voice distinct from, but consistent with, what the system itself is saying. Calling leadership donors personally before the public statement is especially important for grateful-patient donors tied to a specific department, since they feel any crisis there more personally than a typical major donor would.