How Victor Chang helped existing donors keep heart

Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute saved an estimated 296 donors from churning over 3 months using Dataro’s software. With Dataro’s AI-powered donor scores, VCCRI was able to identify which regular givers were most ‘at risk’ of churn and funnel them into a rolling fortnightly telemarketing program to thank them for their support. Assuming each retained donor gave 6 further gifts, the program raised an estimated $57,311 and counting.

Key Results

• 296 estimated regular givers saved
• $57,311 estimated campaign return
• 3.19 estimated campaign ROI

Donors at high risk of churn who received ‘thank you’ calls from VCCRI churned at a much lower rate than similar donors who did not receive a call. This graph shows how donors who did not receive the calls (black line) churned at the predicted rates. The donors who received the calls (orange line) had much better retention rates.

How We Did It

Dataro used machine learning to generate ‘propensity scores’ for all of VCCRI’s active regular givers. These scores told VCCRI how likely each donor was to miss three gifts in a row in the next 6 months. This broad definition captures both active churn (donors calling up to cancel) and passive churn (missed payments).

Dataro loaded the donor scores and ranks directly into VCCRI’s CRM (Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT) using our CRM integration.. This allowed VCCRI to select about 200 regular givers to call each fortnight, based on those who were the most at risk of churning. 

Some donors with high churn scores were excluded. For example, if they were marked Do Not Call or had received another call recently they were removed from the campaign. This gave us a de facto control group. Dataro’s predictions turned out to be highly accurate. By comparing donors who received the calls with excluded donors that had a similar propensity to churn, we calculated that VCCRI ‘saved’ 296 donors over three months.

Find out more about working with Dataro