Fundraising revenue dramatically increases for the Holy Cross Services nonprofit organization

CHALLENGE:

Holy Cross Services (HCS) is a nonprofit organization with a diverse mission that provides individual support for foster care, homelessness, substance abuse and mental health. The organization contacted our team to broaden its base of individual donor support. The group historically used events and direct mail to fundraise, but with the cancellation of events due to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, HCS needed new ways to replace that revenue.

SOLUTION:

To craft effective direct response strategies, our team needed to develop a better understanding of HCS’s donor audience. We started with a database analysis to gain insights into the organization’s individual and corporate donors and related affinity groups. Utilizing our insights, we:

• Discovered clear audience segments which had unique affinities to the organization.
• Developed distinct messages for each segment using emotional triggers based on what we learned about the donor’s specific affinity for the HCS mission.
• Targeted donors and prospects more likely to respond, which reduced Holy Cross Services’ direct mail cost by more than 70%.
• Incorporated strategies across HCS’s direct mail, email and social media to increase and diversify touchpoints to target audience groups while engaging new and lapsed donors.

RESULTS:

Our Authentic Marketing approach generated these transformative and sustainable results:

• 2.3x increase in gross revenue compared to five-year average for this campaign.
• 5.4x higher online revenue in just four months compared to all of 2019.
• More than 6x return on investment for year-end direct mail appeal.
• Email and social media tactics led to nearly $23,000 in online gifts from existing and new donors. (These channels weren’t being used in conjunction with HCS’s direct mail campaign.)
• $150 increase in average gift amount from five-year average gift amount.
• Donor audience insights continue to provide benefits to future fundraising efforts by allowing us to efficiently target fundraising communications.

“We have been very pleased with your team. They took time to learn about our agency, analyzed our data, and put together a well-thought-out strategy that works. They are very informative and included us in the entire process and we have been very pleased with the results. They are true partners in that every person we have worked with is genuinely invested in our mission and they want us to succeed overall.”

- Kassie Kretzschmar, Chief Marketing & Development Officer