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Retention/Acquisition & Appeal Targeting

Northern Illinois University

“Annual Giving - Leveraging Data to Reaquire Lapsed Donors + Acquire New Donors”

Case Study with Northern Illinois University
30 min webinar & PDF

The Challenge


Retaining current donors, re-acquiring lapsed donors, and acquiring new donors is the name of the game in annual giving. The challenge is that the messaging and approaches that work best with one group are often very different from what will work well with another group. The key is to identify each donor’s primary interest area and then deliver messages that connect with that. Do this and prospects are much more likely to give. Push something else at them and they are far less likely to respond.

Predictive model
Predictive Model
Unfortunately, most fundraisers blanket their prospects with a myriad of messages delivered through a variety of media with very little focus. And, given the sheer volume of appeals, untangling what worked and what didn’t can often be a challenging process.

Figuring this out involves accessing large amounts of data, often from different systems, and then scouring it, slicing and dicing it in different ways, to find patterns and trends. Key questions that need to be answered include:

  • Which appeals and messaging worked best to retain current donors? To re-acquire lapsed donors? To acquire new donors?
  • What do our trends for retention, re-acquisition, and acquisition look like?
  • Which events and activities are most effective?
  • Can we use things like newsletter click-throughs to determine our prospects' areas of interest?
  • What are the characteristics of people who have responded with, say, $500+ gifts to our appeals? Who else has the same characteristics?
  • Who are the non-donors? Where are they? In what class? Rated vs. non-rated? Come to events or reunions? What else do we know about them? How can we best appeal to them?

The Solution


ADVIZOR helps your team answer these questions by making all of the data available in an easy to use interface that allows your marketers to easily slice and dice it across a variety of categories, all the while keeping their eyes on what worked and what didn't. Patterns are easily identified, and with predictive analytics the prospect list can be "scored" to find donors who have high probability of positive response to a particular type of appeal.

The Result


ADVIZOR's clients have:
Appeal Touchpoints
Appeal Touchpoints
  • Increased their retention, acquisition, and re-acquisition rates
  • Improved yields on appeals from under 2% to over 7% based on more focused messaging
  • Avoided “harassing” key donors because fewer, and better targeted, appeals were sent
  • Identified additional high potential targets for specific appeals
  • Created a more collaborative and integrated marketing team centered around half a dozen "message segments"

"ADVIZOR allows users to access and analyze patterns and trends that would otherwise be hidden in the complexity of our large data set. This helped us identify and focus our Florida Fund appeals around 5 university initiatives, each oriented towards different segments of our alumni."

University of Florida

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