I think we’d all agree that sustainers are great. Having a group of donors that have committed to giving every month is like money in the bank.
And, not surprisingly, a lot of organizations are careful to limit additional appeals to this group so not to alienate any of them. This viewpoint leans towards the idea that appeals are “junk mail” that will drive donors away.
But what if there was a third way? What if there was a way to identify the sustainer donors who are most likely to give to a normal appeal and thus minimize the risk of alienating sustainer donors?
Last year, we took on such a project. One of our clients asked us to build a predictive model to identify those sustainer donors who were most likely to respond to a normal appeal.
Honestly, we were a bit hesitant. We’d never tried that before . . . we didn’t know if it would work. But we followed our own advice: sometimes you just need to try new things and we built the model.
And guess what . . . the model worked! Sustainers identified by the model were twice as likely to respond as the control group.
Not only is this a big win the for client, but it also should be an encouragement to us all to test new ideas.
What’s something you want to try?
Image by dooder on Freepik