Strengthening Community Investment

Direct community investment is a powerful tool for hospitals seeking to address health disparities and improve population health. Accordant works shoulder-to-shoulder with health organizations to create best-in-class community benefit grant programs and optimize outbound philanthropy. Our firm’s deep focus on health care and health care philanthropy brings understanding of the field’s many complexities, pressure points, and opportunities. Accordant has had the privilege to serve more than 100 health care organizations representing over 400 hospitals as well as community clinics, hospices, and funder collaboratives.

Accordant’s approach to community investment is deeply collaborative and centered on equity and impact. Our method is iterative, deliberate, and fast-paced, balancing urgency and longer-term success. We ground our work in insights from within and outside of your organization. Our primary and secondary research allows you to better understand the landscape of opportunity and prioritize investments. We help health organizations implement sustainable processes so that the important work of community health can continue long after the engagement’s end.

Advancing the Conversation

At Accordant, we strive to continually be in conversation with the field. Please check out our Thought Leadership Web Page and our You Tube Channel. Some of our pieces relating to community health impact include:

Direct community investment is a powerful tool for hospitals seeking to address health disparities and improve population health.

What We Do

  • Co-design comprehensive grantmaking strategies and support implementation
  • Help (re)launch charitable sponsorship programs
  • Educate and engage leadership (Board, C-Suite, Clinicians, Development)
  • Design and manage requests for proposals (RFPs) for community grants
  • Research landscape for specific issue sets (e.g., behavioral health, housing, safety)
  • Facilitate design sessions
  • Develop robust policies and procedures
  • Offer infrastructure assessments and recommendations for sustainable, agile giving
  • Co-create internal and external communications

Best-in-Class Community Health Investing

At Accordant, we strive to meet each health funder—and each community—where it is. Every engagement is customized to match your community health aspirations and to be good stewards of organizational resources.

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Leadership Visioning

High-impact community investment requires clear vision and thoughtful prioritization. Accordant convenes health organization leaders with different perspectives on community well-being and identifies promising areas that would most benefit from targeted investment. Together, we set processes and outcome goals through mechanisms such as those below.

  • Facilitated Vision and Strategy Session with Leadership
  • CHNA and Hospital Strategy Assessment

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Research-Informed Priority-Setting

Most priorities uncovered by Community Health Needs Assessments (CHNAs) are too complex for one organization to address. Accordant’s research helps identify potential grant recipients and other funders working in the space. We also assess how prospective investment areas align with your organization’s key strategic priorities through:

  • Landscape Assessment
  • Key Stakeholder Interviews
  • Insights for Grantmaking Strategy Design

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RFP Design and Management

Hospitals and health systems are unique funders. Their clinical expertise provides a useful window into health interventions. At the same time, many are working on accelerated time frames and lack the experience to develop community-facing RFPs, or need additional bandwidth to manage the process from end-to-end. Accordant’s experienced team offers both comprehensive and à la carte RFP services through these major components:

  • RFP Application and Materials Design
  • Theory of Change Co-Development
  • Application Logistics and Review Management
  • Proposal Review
  • Application Decision-Making Facilitation and Process Implementation

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Stakeholder Education

While most health care systems are embracing community health as core to their missions and margins, specific stakeholders often have very different understandings of this new orientation. Lack of a common understanding can hamper the meaningful collaboration required for hospitals to take real action. Accordant facilitates sessions to highlight the opportunities present in community health and the power of community investment.

  • Health Care C-suite Education
  • Board Education
  • Development Education

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Charitable Sponsorship Programs

Many hospitals are surprised to discover that they are spending six or seven figures on charitable event sponsorships for other nonprofits. Supporting nonprofit partners is important—but current practice is typically counterproductive. Lacking a good approval process or sponsorship policy means hospitals are too often wasting executives’ time, failing to respond to nonprofit partners in a fast and equitable way, sowing brand confusion, and missing opportunities to collect good data. Accordant works with your organization to create a streamlined, consistent approach that will reduce inefficiency and promote better community partnerships.

  • Comprehensive Sponsorship Program Development
  • Policy Creation

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Infrastructure

Supporting an agile yet sustainable grantmaking enterprise requires clear roles, processes, policies and technology. Accordant can help you to optimize your current teams and resources and advise a path for future growth.

  • Infrastructure Need Assessment
  • Growth Strategy Recommendations

Investment

We welcome the opportunity to provide a custom proposal to address your unique community health and grantmaking needs and objectives. Proposals include considerations of:

  • Scope of Work
  • Location of Work (on-site, in-office or virtual)
  • Time and Resource Requirements
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