MaineHealth spent a full fiscal year integrating ten previously independent databases and accounting structures into a single system. That number alone tells you the scale of the challenge, but it undersells what the work actually involved. Behind those ten systems sat thousands of restricted funds, each carrying a donor's intent, stewardship obligations, and naming conventions that made sense only to the organization that created them years, or even decades, earlier.
This is a challenge more healthcare organizations are facing every day. As health systems continue to grow through mergers and acquisitions, they're not just bringing together hospitals, clinics, and staff. They're combining distinct fundraising operations, donor records, fund structures, and stewardship commitments. While clinical and financial integration often take center stage, the work of reconciling restricted funds and honoring donor intent across newly combined organizations is critical to maintain donor trust.
MaineHealth's experience, shared by Meghan Metzger, Director of Centralized Donor Relations, and Jan Weinberg-Wood, Senior Managing Vice President for Campaign and Fundraising Strategy at BWF Zuri, offers five lessons for organizations navigating the same complexity. MaineHealth worked in partnership with FundMiner and BWF Zuri to bring together their operations, data, and processes for a better donor and staff experience.
They shared this experience in a recent FundMiner Webinar – available in full here – and talked about five key lessons for any organization on this journey.
MaineHealth's fund audit began as an attempt to answer a basic question: "what funds do we actually have?" The team needed to produce impact reports and quickly discovered they could not confirm what a given fund was officially called, who stewarded it, or whether finance and donor relations even used the same name for it. Restriction language, written years earlier by hand sometimes amounted to one incomplete sentence standing in for a donor's full intent. That challenge reflects what happens when several independent hospitals, each with its own donor relationships, accounting platform, and habits for recording fund details, get combined without anyone owning the translation between them.
MaineHealth calls its fund audit a living, breathing document, not a project with a finish line. Two years in, the audit has grown from roughly 300 funds under review to 1,400 and is a continual process. While a one-time cleanup ahead of a system launch tends to decay, building lasting infrastructure keeps paying off well past the initial project. It's a distinction we've written about before: see The Operational Shift Separating High-Performing Fund Management Teams in 2026 for more on what separates teams that treat fund management as infrastructure from those still treating it as a one-time cleanup.
Partnerships are critical to building the right teams to solve complex challenges. For MaineHealth, this combination included BWF Zuri and FundMiner. MaineHealth sets the destination and the priorities, BWF Zuri builds the strategic roadmap, and FundMiner proides the technology infrastructure that powers the operations. Each of these three roles is important, and necessary, for a successful program.
BWF Zuri's team ran one-on-one interviews across MaineHealth's departments, brought pattern recognition from other health systems they'd guided through similar consolidations, and pushed a consistent principle: look at root causes, not symptoms. FundMiner's role picked up where that groundwork left off. Once a fund clears MaineHealth's audit and lands in Raiser's Edge NXT, FundMiner is what makes that record usable day to day: the same fund data becomes visible to finance, philanthropy, and frontline fundraisers at the same time, without asking any of them to leave the system they already use. That's what let MaineHealth generate its first impact reports this year while the rest of the audit kept running in parallel, rather than waiting for the whole dataset to be perfect before anyone could see any of it.
Resource: If a full audit feels like a long way off, FundMiner's Fund Management Maturity Assessment is a quick way to see where your program gaps might exist.
One detail from MaineHealth's experience is easy to overlook: Aligning on shared vocabulary is key to making sure the technology works for everybody. It's a good place to start even before any platform decision are made.
At MaineHealth, BWF Zuri sat down with finance and with philanthropy separately to understand what a given term meant on each side, because the two groups were routinely using the same words to mean different things.
Advancement services and gift processing staff are usually the ones fielding requests that cross department lines: finance wants a fund balance reconciled, a fundraiser wants to know if a restriction still applies, a new hire wants to know why three systems have three different names for what appears to be the same endowment. Every one of those requests currently routes through a person, because no shared system exists to answer it directly. Naming where a fund's data actually lives today, who owns each system, and where the same term means two different things across departments creates the map that later technology work depends on, and it is what eventually frees that team from being the manual connection between systems that should be talking to each other.
Health systems will keep consolidating, and each one will keep inheriting someone else's fund ledger, donor list, and half-documented restrictions. The organizations that treat fund governance as connective infrastructure, built with clear roles for strategy and for technology, are the ones that will not be starting this work from scratch the next time it happens.
FundMiner is the technology layer in stories like this one: the connective layer between the CRM your fundraisers use and the finance system your accountants trust, giving every team the same fund record without replacing either system. See how it works.