Digital Strategy Report: National Doctors’ Day Campaigns Prioritize Interactive Messaging

For nonprofits serving the health care and hospital community, National Doctors’ Day is an important opportunity to recognize and support the exceptional physicians and researchers whose work saves and transforms lives every day. We were honored to partner with some of the most impactful nonprofit organizations in this community and were thrilled to support their campaigns to recognize doctors.

Doctors’ Day is a major tentpole moment for health care nonprofits – oftentimes the highest-raising campaign outside of year-end. That’s why this year, we’re excited to share some of the top strategies that moved the needle for nonprofits on Doctors’ Day – from the extra creative touches that deepened supporters’ connections with their organizations to the insights that will help continue to drive response.

To check out our top five creative and strategic takeaways from Doctors’ Day 2025, read on!

Doctors’ Day fell on a Sunday this year, shifting the timing of appeals and results.

When major giving days fall over the weekend, organizations often see a softening of results on the day itself – especially over email. Since Doctors’ Day fell on a Sunday in 2025, next-day lift notes and extensions hitting inboxes on Monday morning saw strong results and helped to make up the difference.

For some organizations, priming messages sent out earlier in the month helped prepare donors for upcoming appeals and secure some of their response and revenue early. For one of our health care partners, focusing the entire month’s messaging around Doctors’ Day helped to strengthen results overall and build anticipation for the day itself.

Engagement messages like sign-the-card campaigns performed best with an extra creative touch.

On a day of appreciation like National Doctors’ Day, engagement messages that ask supporters to sign a card or message wall are a central part of many campaigns. This year, health organizations that added a thoughtful extra layer of design to create a campaign that felt less institutional saw their messages stand out.

For our partners at MD Anderson Cancer Center, a few creative touches added an interactive element to their engaging sign-the-card campaign. By designing a virtual card and adding animation, they used graphics and movement to highlight the CTA of signing the card. And, by using our proprietary Sign For Good tool to take supporters through a custom flow, they were able to optimize supporters’ experience and create a seamless flow to a donation ask.

With our partners at Mount Sinai Health System, we team up every year with Givelaunch to invite supporters to sign a virtual message wall for Doctors’ Day. Asking supporters to share their own stories in an interactive way, using Givelaunch’s beautiful design and personalization options, makes this campaign unique and memorable – and a top performer when it comes to results.

Stories of individual doctors helped celebrate their work and deepen supporters’ connections.

Across nonprofit verticals, highlighting the unique stories of the individuals within a community an organization supports is a powerful way to humanize a campaign and connect supporters directly to the sort of work their donation makes possible. On Doctors’ Day, spotlights on doctors who’ve changed patients’ lives or gone above and beyond is an impactful way to center the people at the heart of this giving day and offer real-world examples of their lifesaving work.

We worked with our partners at Brigham and Women’s Hospital to tell the story of one doctor’s life-changing work with a patient and the historic surgery that connected them. Full of warm and engaging photos, creative illustrations and the compelling story of the impact one doctor’s care and expertise had on his patient, this email campaign illustrated the kind of work their organization supports, connecting readers directly with their community.

As a part of their Doctors’ Day campaign, Mount Sinai also featured three spotlights on individual doctors within their practice, including photos, quotes and bios for each and a longer profile on one neurosurgeon and his gratitude for patients and supporters on Doctors’ Day. To maximize the reach of these stories, they also featured these spotlights in an interactive user flow through Sign For Good. Individual stories like these are a powerful way to put real faces to the giving day and illustrate the impact that doctors are making in their communities.

Follow-up messages and thank-yous add one more valuable touchpoint in a donor’s experience.

Campaigns that prioritize a donor’s journey with the mission, work and impact of an organization can make a lasting impression and avoid making donors feel like they are being treated as ATMs. For interactive campaigns on major giving days like Doctors’ Day, many hospital organizations prioritized follow-up messaging to engage donors and help them feel the impact of their signature or gift.

Using powerful messages shared on their Givelaunch wall, Mount Sinai created a powerful video that captured the impact that donors’ messages have on doctors, staff and patients every year. By highlighting Mount Sinai doctors reading and reacting to the moving thank-yous sent by their community, they created the opportunity for supporters to see the impact of their words of gratitude firsthand.

Major giving days like Doctors’ Day are a key opportunity to leverage testing ahead of end of year.

Tentpole moments like Doctors’ Day are important opportunities for testing because they offer a wealth of data – engagement and conversions are up, and organizations tend to send more messages and try more creative techniques. By approaching Doctors’ Day like a mini Giving Tuesday, our partners are able to identify the best practices they’ll want to lean into the next time they approach their audiences with a major campaign. We encourage our partners to run head-to-head tests that will offer them specific insights into the kinds of messaging and creative that their audience is most likely to respond to.

At MissionWired, we love to take every opportunity possible to highlight the incredible creative and storytelling of our partners and share the strategies that make them successful. To access more top-performing creative, check out Building Your 2025 Creative Toolkit. For a look at how we leveraged testing to optimize creative and drive response, give our case study with Friends of the Earth a read.