Increasing appeal net returns by 16% with a major disability services provider

Direct mail appeals present a great opportunity to test new fundraising technologies. Earlier this year, Dataro teamed up with a large disability services provider to test whether machine learning could be used to improve the organisation’s Spring appeal. The results once again demonstrated how Dataro’s approach can reliably be used to increase net revenue and reduce appeal mail volumes.

Key results included:

• A huge 16.4% improvement in net revenue from the Dataro campaign;
• An increase in gross revenue despite a much smaller mailing list; and
• A response rate of over 50% from the top 1000 donors identified by Dataro.

Similarly, when donors were broken into ‘bands’ of 1000 based on their Dataro score, it was clear that the donors with the highest scores contributed by far the majority of gifts and the majority of revenue.

Response Rate by Campaign Group (Dataro Rank)

Percentage Revenue by Campaign Group (Dataro Rank)

These results, together with other Dataro case studies, demonstrate how machine learning can be used to more carefully analyse which donors are likely to participate in a direct mail appeal, resulting in better overall performance.

‍