How MAZON Uses AI to Personalize Appeals and Drive Greater Support for Americans Facing Hunger

MAZON: A Jewish Response To Hunger is an American organization fighting to end hunger among people of all faiths and backgrounds. By promoting systemic change through better policies at the federal, state, and local level, MAZON seeks to ensure that elected officials understand and consider the needs of the millions of Americans who struggle with hunger.

Over the past years, their small but powerful development team has endeavored to create more meaningful, relevant, and personalized experiences for their 30,000+ active donors. 

In 2024, they partnered with Dataro to harness the power of AI to create more targeted donor audiences and send increasingly personalized appeals, finding the right donors, with the right message, at the right time. 

In their first campaign with Dataro, MAZON increased appeal revenue by 23% year-over-year while sending 10% fewer letters. Despite reaching out to fewer donors, MAZON’s 2024 appeal saw more donors give and achieved a 21% increase in average gift size compared to previous appeals.

Key results

Using Dataro’s AI audiences and personalized donor insights, MAZON’s first fundraising appeal with Dataro achieved:

• $91,075k in gross appeal 
• 23% increase in appeal revenue*
• 3% increase in donations received*
• 21% increase in average gift size to $130
• 10% decrease in mailing list size*

*YOY comparisons to 2023 appeal

How we did it

Dataro helps nonprofits improve appeal performance and deliver personalized donor experiences by identifying the next best action in a donor’s journey.

In the past, MAZON took a one-size-fits-all approach to fundraising, sending the same email or direct mail piece to their entire donor list. This method was costly and inefficient, often leading to wasted outreach as it overlooked a donor’s giving history, preferences, and interests.

To create more personalized donor experiences, the MAZON team implemented a traditional manual segmentation process to target their fundraising campaigns. 

While this was an improvement, the process took 1-2 days and several spreadsheets to perform and didn’t accurately account for donors’ past interactions with the organization. This led to missed opportunities, such as asking major donors for lower amounts based on their last small tribute gift instead of a more suitable donation.

Dataro’s AI audience-building platform was integrated with MAZON’s Salesforce CRM. The direct mail propensity model was then used to generate propensity scores and ranks for all of the organization’s active donors. These were updated weekly in the Dataro app (and within the Salesforce CRM) and used to identify the best audience for their 2024 High Holiday annual appeal. 

Using Dataro’s audience recommendations, MAZON removed donors with a low propensity to respond to the appeal at that time and effectively reduced their list size by 10%.

Analyzing the results

In their first appeal using Dataro’s personalized AI donor predictions, MAZON’s 2024 High Holiday annual appeal raised more revenue than usual with substantially less outreach. 

By focusing on highly engaged and ready-to-give donors, MAZON increased revenue by 23% year-over-year while reducing wasted outreach to low-propensity supporters. This personalized fundraising approach resulted in a higher appeal response rate, with more donors giving than usual – reversing the decline in active appeal donors since 2021 (not counting an unusual fundraising year in 2022). Through personalized ask amounts and outreach they also increased the average gift size by 21% to an impressive $130.

Using Dataro’s AI personalization platform also streamlined the data selection process for the MAZON team, reducing their mail file preparation from 1-2 days to a few hours.