Art therapy, marketing and fundraising: cost and revenue patterns in U.S. hospital foundations

Purpose—Hospital foundations provide art therapy thanks to multiple stakeholders marketing, fundraising, and investing. This paper discusses art therapy in connection with revenue diversification and costs. Method—This paper includes multiple regression analysis (‘Remove’) of the accounting data of the 100 largest U.S. hospital foundations in 2023. It is estimated how much total costs depend on art therapy, personnel expenses, and managerial expenses, as well as revenue diversification among program service revenue, contributions, and investment income. Art therapy is indexed as an increasing sum of services according to an analysis of their websites. Findings—The results provide valuable insights into strategies and performances of foundations that embrace art therapy and revenue diversification from a cooperating and partnering society, whose financing roles can alleviate the need for resources in a context of diminishing public grants. Art therapy is correlated with diminishing total costs, which are covered by revenue diversification. A positive coefficient was tested for personnel expenses and a negative one for managerial expenses. Practical implications – Hospitals should estimate the importance of art therapy with an index. They should support it thanks to revenue diversification, considering it as a cocreation opportunity thanks to multiple stakeholders, and at decreasing total costs. Originality—To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to investigate the supply side of U.S. hospital foundations revenue diversification connected with marketing, fundraising, investing, and costs of personnel and boards for cocreating art therapy.