The First Recommendation Wasn’t Marketing

They hired us to grow the donor base. Our first recommendation had nothing to do with fundraising. Their data couldn’t be trusted, and no strategy built on it would hold.

A national non-profit brought us in twelve years ago with a clear mandate: grow the donor base. We ran the analysis and came back with a first recommendation that had nothing to do with fundraising.

Their data couldn’t be trusted. Records were incomplete, duplicated, and in some cases even years behind reality. Any strategy built on that foundation would have been guesswork wearing the guise of analysis, and the organization would have spent a year executing and wasting money before anyone knew.

So we built the foundation first: a CRM that tracked donor behavior in real time. Unglamorous work, and not what they initially hired us for. But once real data started flowing, we could finally see who their donors actually were, what moved them, and when.

From there, the work was straightforward because it was informed. Strategy, tactics, and marketing programs aimed at the donors the data revealed rather than the ones the organization assumed it had. Along the way we rebuilt the website and rebranded the organization’s look, moving it out of a dated institutional register into the present.

One idea from that reading deserves its own mention: a Sustainer Membership, offered to the donors the data showed were most committed. It doubled the average gift.

Donor count has grown at double digits over the years. They remain a client today.

The lesson: you cannot read a customer through bad data. Fix the seeing before you fix the strategy.

We find the breaks. Fix them. Then move on.