SSM Health is a multi-state, nonprofit healthcare system supported by a network of 10 local hospital Foundations. A few years ago, these Foundations—which include both large, highly staffed offices and teams of just one or two people—were all using different email tools, or had no email software at all.
Today they operate from a single Emma parent account and tiered subaccounts, with shared templates, centralized brand governance, and one internal champion who keeps the whole program moving. The shift to Emma gave every Foundation, regardless of size or staffing capacity, a professional email channel to reach their donors, patients, and employees.
Foundations, one Emma account
Email campaigns sent in one year
Raised from a single campaign
“If you have multiple entities that you’re working with, Emma is your best bet. It’s really nice having that parent account level, so you can maintain consistent messaging and brand recognition while giving each Foundation room to send their own emails.”
Marketing Program Manager
Nationally recognized for quality and innovation, SSM Health is a Catholic, not-for-profit, fully integrated health system. With care delivery sites in Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin, the organization’s footprint spans hospitals, physician offices, outpatient and virtual care, senior care, home care and hospice, a pharmacy benefit company, a health insurance company, and an accountable care organization. More than 40,000 team members and over 15,000 providers work in service of the organization’s mission to deliver exceptional, community-based health care services. The heartbeat behind that hard work is a network of local hospital Foundations, each raising funds for its respective community.
SSM Health’s Foundations have a central philanthropy team that supports the marketing and annual giving efforts for each hospital Foundation, including direct mail appeals to patients and donors, as well as the donor database behind them. Email follow-ups were a natural extension of those appeals, but the tools didn’t exist in any consistent form.
Only five of the Foundations were using an email platform, and each had landed on something different. One used Mailchimp, one used Constant Contact, another relied on the email function built into its Blackbaud database, and two were using obsolete or highly limited systems. The remaining Foundations didn’t have an email platform at all. For those Foundations running on a one- or two-person team and a tight budget, the process of finding, funding, and learning a new tool independently wasn’t realistic, so many simply went without.
That left the central philanthropy team without a shared way to help Foundations reach their donors, without a way to ensure consistent branding across the charitable Foundations, and little visibility into what was being communicated via email. It also duplicated the work of the Foundations multiple times instead of streamlining the communications process and donor experience.
SSM Health brought its Foundations onto Emma using a tiered account structure: a top-level parent account that the central philanthropy team manages, with individual subaccounts for each Foundation. That structure is the reason a program stretched across multiple systems could come together under one digital roof.
Keeping 10 Foundations on-brand could easily become a bottleneck, but brand consistency is built into Emma’s parent-account structure. The central philanthropy team can build appeal follow-up templates at the parent level that align with the messaging of each direct mail appeal—such as a Doctors’ Day or Nurse’s Day appreciation letter—and then share them with the Foundation subaccounts.
From there, each Foundation updates only what should be local: the signer, usually their Foundation director, their own Foundation logo, contact information, and donation links that point to their own online giving pages. Global fonts and colors are set at the parent level, so the brand look is maintained no matter who’s sending the email. In practice, the Foundations get a clear boundary to work within, along with the autonomy to write and send their own emails—like event updates and newsletters—while the central philanthropy team has visibility into what is distributed without using unnecessary bandwidth.
The SSM Health central philanthropy team concentrated email expertise in one place instead of leaving each Foundation to climb the learning curve on its own. A single administrator fields questions from Foundation users, runs training sessions, and in some cases logs into subaccounts to help make edits and schedule email sends for teams that need the extra help. When a Foundation using a previous email platform joined Emma, the central philanthropy team planned a full day of hands-on training for the marketing and annual giving director. For the smaller Foundations, that type of support is often what makes using an email program feasible at all.
With the Foundations settling in, the program had room to get more sophisticated. Three Foundations have an automated, five-email new donor welcome series in place, and the central philanthropy team plans to roll it out across all of the Foundations. For monthly patient acquisition emails, the team also leans on Emma’s smart recommendations feature for optimal send times and subject lines, as well as split testing to find the most effective versions of their messaging.
Support has been steady throughout SSM Health’s Emma journey. The team’s customer success manager answers day-to-day questions, routing them to the right place. For the central philanthropy team, it means knowing someone is dedicated to the success and growth of their program.
Pairing direct mail appeals with email follow-ups has given SSM Health’s Foundations a low-cost way to extend each campaign. Alongside the traditional annual giving program of four to six direct mail campaigns a year, the Foundations now layer in timely email communications through Emma. In the past six months, and alongside other fundraising efforts, Emma has been part of a broader push that has brought in more than $75,000 from 220-plus gifts. The central philanthropy team credits Emma as the added point of contact that supports each appeal and helps bring donors back.
In the past year, SSM Health’s Foundations sent 210 email campaigns—a 556% increase over the year before—and are sending emails daily as new donor welcome series and campaigns continue to roll out across locations. Emma gives each Foundation a consistent, low-cost way to communicate with donors, patients, and employees—and ultimately helps SSM Health continue to provide quality healthcare services to their communities.
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