New in Dataro: Predict future giving with AI

Strong donor retention is the key to achieving one of the most important fundraising metrics: high lifetime donor value. Donors that stay with your organization for years, making multiple gifts over time, are some of your most valuable resources. While all donor relationships should be nurtured with thoughtful, personalized outreach, for nonprofits operating with limited resources it can be helpful to prioritize stewardship of the donors who are most likely to have a high lifetime value.

Of course, it isn’t always easy to tell which of your donors are likely to stick around and continue giving for the long-term – that’s where AI-powered fundraising data insights come in. Dataro’s newest donor model, Future Giving, does the work of analyzing donor behavior signals and drawing conclusions for you, so that you’ll be able to see an instant estimate of the total value of each of your donors’ contributions over the next five years.

Future Giving Modeling: How It Works

With the help of AI, we can predict the future with greater accuracy than ever before. Like all of Dataro’s donor propensity models, Future Giving is trained on the Dataro Data Pool, a data set encompassing millions of donors and tens of millions of donation transactions, to detect common donor behavior trends and predict fundraising results before you’ve even begun a campaign.

This model in particular looks 5 years into the future, predicting the likely total value of a donor’s contributions during that time. Donors that are likely to give consistently each year, convert to sustainers, or upgrade to larger gifts will have a higher projected long-term value, while those at risk of lapsing will have a lower value projection.

How To Use Projected Future Giving

Now that you can see into the future, what will you do with this information? Here are a couple of places to start:

Create lookalike audiences for targeted donor acquisition ads

One of our favorite ways to use this model is for creating advertising audiences for donor acquisition. While donor acquisition is a requirement for any sustainable nonprofit, it can be an expensive process. The cost to acquire new donors is often up to double the amount of their first gift, meaning that retaining that donor is a must to even break even. To realize a positive acquisition ROI, nonprofits need to attract donors who will make multiple gifts over time, creating positive revenue for the organization. By using Dataro to identify donors with a higher projected long-term value, you can create a source or seed list for a lookalike audience, and run acquisition campaigns targeted at other people with similar characteristics. Attracting more donors who are also likely to have a high long-term value greatly increases the ROI of your acquisition campaigns.

Build personalized nurture campaigns for high projected value audiences

See donors on your list with a high projection for future giving? Check their other Dataro scoring to identify potential prospects for major giving, mid-level giving, planned giving, and monthly giving and connect them with the right opportunities.

Add low projected value donors to a retention-focused campaign

Like all predictions, Dataro’s future giving projection shows one possible version of a future for each donor, but just because something is likely doesn’t mean that you can’t intervene and change the future. By adding donors with a lower long-term value projection to a retention campaign early, you may be able to deepen their interest and improve their connection with your organization before it is too late.