Background:

Charitable contributions represent a meaningful percent of revenue for many non profits and hospitals. The fundraising arm of a major hospital was looking to maximize the efficiency of their efforts based on a combination of their historical donor data and publicly available demographic information. Their team was already stretched, and they were looking for help. AAARL team worked directly with the VP of Donations and Analytics, along with various members of the fundraising operations team.

Challenge:

The challenge was to maximize effectiveness of their direct marketing efforts to individual donors.

The Approach:

AAARL worked with the marketing team to gather and synthesize data from donor databases, including transactions, geographic and other demographic data as available.

Donors were categorized based on frequency and amount of donations to calculate lifetime donor value. These findings were further refined by their receptiveness to direct mail campaigns. Following the classification of historical donors, these findings were extrapolated to potential donors for future outbound efforts based on probability of average donation.

The second phase of the analytics project was to conduct a holistic review of donors, their overall engagement with the cause, and degree to which they were influenced by specific Social Media platforms. This has evolved into a continuous approach to maximizing ROI of fundraising with AAARL’s ongoing monthly support.

Results:

The prediction model was built to help decrease cost by 50% in mailing costs without any impact on donations.

AAARL was subsequently retained to provide ongoing analytics and continuous fundraising ROI optimization for the organization as part of their ongoing business practice.

“AAARL is great at translating data into usable recommendations. Has stellar communications skills and they are always well prepared and on schedule".
-Director (Client Organization)