Your donor pipeline; their donor journey

Your donors all want experiences with you that understand and respect who they are and thus ask for the right amounts for the right things in the right ways. In short, they want a customized donor journey, although they would likely not use this term.

Your development team wants pipelines for mid-level, major, monthly, and planned giving donors that make sense and have the most likely prospects for each of these in them. Moreover, they want to make sure that people aren't getting every possible mixed message: watching a monthly giving programmatic ad while opening a single-gift email and a planned giving mail piece.

This is one of those wonderful times when your goals and your donors' goals align perfectly—everyone wants better journeys. And yet we still sometimes are using only transaction data (e.g., $250+ gifts put you in the mid-level cultivation stream) or wealth data (you must be at least this wealthy to ride this major donor ride) to fill pipelines and guide donors' journeys.

The ideal approach is 1) modeling that accounts for transactions and attitudes and behaviors, and demographics and all the wonderful weirdnesses that make us unique humans and 2) marketing that reflects that knowledge and ties what makes the donor special to what would make their gift special.

That's what we have the honor of presenting with Children's Hospital of Philadelphia at the NACCDO/PAMN Conference on April 27th at 4:30 PM. We hope you'll be able to join us there to see how their data-driven donor journeys are also driving both satisfaction and revenue.

In a nutshell, the modeling that Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) has done has surfaced some transactional factors like recency and amount of giving, but also demographic factors like education and whether they have a business address, behavioral factors like volunteering history and leadership, and more.

From that, Moore, SimioCloud, and CHOP were able to fold in additional factors like home value, charitable giving history, and recency of credit card use. But the goal was not to have a model — it was to have different models for planned giving, major gifts, direct mail and digital responsiveness, etc. In short, it was to see things the way the donor would most likely want to be seen and customize the journey for them.

And because the model is constantly learning, every response helps guide and improve future selection and marketing.

How is it working? Tests in mass marketing have increased direct mail response rate by 85%, increased mail average gift, and increased planned giving response by 50%.

CHOP has also been able to double its major donor pipeline. Which, as you know from the beginning of this, also means better and more positive experiences and journeys for donors. Hope to see you at NACCDO/PAMN and thanks to our friends at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia for sharing their results!