Before tactics comes
strategy.

They hired us to grow the donor base. Our first recommendation had nothing to do with fundraising.

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 something else entirely.

Their data couldn’t be trusted. Records were incomplete, duplicated, in some cases 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 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 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 moved the brand out of a dated institutional register into the present.

What the reading produced
  • 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.

Nobody had misread the donors. Nobody had read them at all, because the file made it impossible.

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