Are your patients really grateful?

By Wayne Gurley
President & Creative Director

Recently, an article in the AHP Connect caught my attention -"Why I'm Moving Away from the Term "Grateful Patient,"by Moira K. Connolly.

For decades, the term “Grateful Patient” has come to define all former hospital or clinic patients. It also has ascribed a sense of universally accepted gratitude on their part.

As a former nurse, Connolly approaches the term somewhat differently from a marketer like me, but it was nonetheless compelling.

"Grateful Patient" is misleading.

She argues the term “grateful patient” is misleading and emotionally reductive.

Drawing on her experience, she explains that patient and family giving often comes not from gratitude, but from advocacy, determination, or a desire to create change after harm or trauma.

She says while genuine gratitude can be powerful and transformative, assuming it as the primary motivation oversimplifies deeply personal and complex experiences and can erase the role of families.

Connolly advocates replacing the term with “Patient & Family Giving,” emphasizing that more inclusive language better reflects empathy, honors diverse motivations, and supports more authentic relationships in healthcare philanthropy.

Less than 1% are "grateful."

As a marketer, I’ve always felt the term “grateful” patient misses the mark. Certainly, some are grateful. But when less than 1% respond with a gift, that can hardly be categorized as “grateful.”

And why do rented names - who have NOT been in the hospital - perform better than so-called “Grateful Patients?”

There are reasons for that, which I won’t get into here. But the fact that a non-patient is more responsive than a patient doesn’t make a lot of sense.

It's counter-intuitive, but direct marketing by nature is highly counter-intuitive.

Responses are down, but there are good reasons.

In the last couple of years, responses from grateful patients have been dropping. Recently, I talked to a hospital experiencing a low patient response rate of 0.22%.

When I dug into it, I could see why: The strategy and copy was very weak.

By contrast, we see higher response rates due to the rigid audience selection we use and the kind of copy that generates a better response - on average, 0.7% and higher.

From Former Patients to Grateful Donors

I'd encourage everyone to start using the term “Former Patients” instead of the term “Grateful.” To me, they’re only grateful if they make a gift.

Then you can legitimately call them “Grateful Donors.”

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