How The Epilepsy Society surfaced a £25k major gift with Dataro

The Epilepsy Society is the UK’s leading charity transforming the lives of people with epilepsy through research, advocacy and care. For the Society’s Individual Giving Team, the challenge was finding a faster and more reliable way to determine the best database prospects to receive appeals.

Before Dataro, the team relied on donor recency and gift frequency to build appeal audiences—starting with supporters active in the last 3 to 5 years, working through large exports, and manually checking to ensure the right records were ready to mail. “It took a good three or four hours for me to pull the initial data,” described Lorraine Hill, Individual Giving and Philanthropy Manager, “followed by significant manual checking which took the team most of an additional day.”

“We wanted a better understanding of the donors in our database, including propensity to donate and support across other income streams,” said Lorraine. The bigger goal was not just efficiency, but better decisions.

Partnering with Dataro across 3 years

The Epilepsy Society initiated their partnership with Dataro using the regular giving and appeal module. Once accuracy and outcomes were proven over the first year, the approach was rolled out more broadly. Over time, Dataro became part of how they planned campaigns, selected audiences, and thought about future supporter journeys.

What used to take hours can now be done in minutes. Pulling a list now takes approximately 15 minutes, compared with the multi-hour manual process before. The team still double-checks exclusions and address data, but Dataro does the heavy lifting. “Campaign lists are quicker to build, as is the selection of legacy and major donors for stewardship. We’re exporting less, and it’s cleaner data,” said Lorraine. “The new additions for segmentation and matching to our fields in RENXT are game changers.”

December 2025: a record-setting Christmas appeal

The Epilepsy Society’s 2025 December appeal with Dataro set a new record for Christmas income. They raised £55k against a £45k target, and about £6k more than the previous year.

“Our Christmas Appeal last year was our biggest-ever response for a Christmas Appeal. That was primarily using Dataro rankings, but we did still backfill the list with some additional donors.”

The Christmas result helped prove that Dataro not only made lists easier to produce, it also improved them. The team could move faster and trust their direct mail audience was the right one.

Spring 2026: a major gift win

The year-on-year growth in appeal return across 3 years working with Dataro gave the team confidence to rely more fully on predicted selections.

During the Spring 2026 appeal, the team relied solely on Dataro’s results for the first time. The result: Dataro’s #1 major-giving prediction ultimately gave £25,000. On the database, the donor had been marked as inactive and would have been excluded under the Charity’s previous  approach. “This year being the first year that we’ve relied solely on Dataro’s results, I think it’s really proven its worth. This has been our spring appeal best result by far, we are all very pleased indeed.”

The wider Spring 2026 appeal overshot the target by 64%. Even excluding the major donor gift, Dataro’s top-ranked donors generated the most responses (with the best net revenue and ROI), the second cohort followed, and even the lower-ranked groups behaved as expected—confirming that Dataro’s predictive approach mapped to real outcomes.

“Being able to prove that we are contacting the right people based on Dataro’s predictions has meant that other areas have been considered and that we now use Dataro across the team,” concluded Lorraine.