How Save the Children Netherlands Doubled Donor Response Rates

The Partnership: AI Intelligence Meets Strategic Expertise

Save the Children Netherlands (STC NL) is a highly data-driven organisation, with a dedicated internal data team, a robust measurement framework, and deep expertise in donor behaviour.

For their 2025 winter campaign, the team partnered with two specialists to build on that foundation:

• Dataro, to provide AI-driven donor prioritisation and hands-on customer success support.

• Visser & Verhoeven, to embed these insights into a structured donor journey and translate them into a clear, scalable fundraising strategy.

STC NL’s fundraising baseline already centred around data. Now, the team strove to unlock a new level of precision fundraising that treated each donor like an individual—not an average.

The Challenge: Moving from Data-Driven to AI-Enabled

Like many advanced teams, STC NL had reached a ceiling with manual segmentation.

Lists were still built using rules, thresholds, and internal logic. The default, safest option was often to expand the audience rather than risk excluding potential donors.

That came at a cost:

• Unnecessary print and postage spend

• Donor fatigue from low-relevance outreach

• Limited confidence in who actually deserved a place in the campaign

“Efficiency for us means not only better ROIs but also more funds that could be spent on our mission,” explained Tamas, Donorbase Marketer at STC NL.

The next frontier was how to move beyond static segmentation and make more precise decisions about who to contact.

The Strategy: Precision Over Volume

For their end-of-year campaign, one of the most critical moments in their fundraising calendar, STC NL made a deliberate shift.

Instead of asking who should we include?, they focused on a harder question: who should we not mail?

To make that decision confidently, three things had to come together:

1. A reliable way to prioritise donors at an individual level: Dataro’s models ranked every donor by their likelihood to respond, based on giving history, engagement patterns, and behavioural signals.

   
   

2. A clear method for applying those rankings in practice: Visser & Verhoeven defined how model outputs should translate into campaign decisions and how these decisions fit within the broader donor journey, including key use cases.

   
   

3. Internal validation and control: STC NL’s team stress-tested the outputs through:

   1. Backtesting with structured tests using historical data to validate model accuracy before going live.

   2. Sense-checking to adjust thresholds and ensure the parameters aligned with their own knowledge of donor behaviour.

Rather than replacing existing donor segments, the team layered Dataro’s propensity scores on top of their internal framework, amplifying internal expertise.

The result was a measurable shift in strategy:

STC NL reduced their mailing list by 117,000 contacts, a 66% decrease compared to the previous year’s campaign.

This was not a cost-cutting exercise. It was a decision to prioritise relevance over reach and to direct every communication toward donors with a genuine likelihood of responding.

The Results: Record-Breaking Efficiency

The 2025 end-of-year campaign delivered a clear outcome: by reducing volume, performance improved across every key metric.

The campaign demonstrated that fewer messages reached more of the right people.

The selected campaign members found our appeal more relevant, and we could prevent irritation by the excluded members and thus their possible attrition. Least of all, we were able to avoid unnecessary paper waste.

Tamas

Donorbase Marketer @ Save the Children Netherlands

Beyond the Numbers: Long-Term Impact

The impact extended beyond a single campaign. The shift to AI-supported prioritisation changed how STC NL approaches donor engagement across their programme.

Less waste, lower cost, and reduced environmental impact

By excluding 100,000+ donors unlikely to respond, the team significantly reduced print and postage costs and lowered unnecessary paper use.

From reactive to proactive retention

Churn signals are no longer registered after donors disengage. With Dataro’s outputs embedded into Visser & Verhoeven’s workflow, STC NL can identify at-risk donors earlier and take action before lapse occurs.

From one-off use to sustainable AI adoption

Predictive modelling has moved from a tactical campaign tool to a permanent operational standard within Save the Children Netherlands. The organisation is expanding its data capabilities through the rollout of a Win-Back model and other advanced use cases. Together with Visser & Verhoeven, STC Netherlands applies these insights throughout the supporter journey, fostering proactive engagement and more meaningful connections with its audience.

Using AI needs strong control and monitoring. Combine AI with your expertise in fundraising, but do not rely on it completely. You have to identify where it can help, mitigate the risks, and adapt your internal way of working.

Tamas

Donorbase Marketer @ Save the Children Netherlands

Advice for the Sector

For large charities operating in a challenging fundraising environment, STC NL’s experience highlights a pattern:

Manual segmentation, even in advanced teams, has limits. The next level comes from combining internal knowledge with a fundraising intelligence layer and a clear implementation framework.

In this case:

• Dataro provided a ranked, donor-level view of who to prioritise.

• Visser & Verhoeven translated those outputs into a strategy the team could apply.

• STC NL’s internal team validated, adapted, and operationalised the approach.

Each played a distinct role in moving from insight to action, extending existing expertise.

The result: fewer donors contacted; and better outcomes that are easier to explain, measure, and repeat.

AI only creates value when it is embedded in a clear donor journey. By combining Dataro’s predictive insights with a structured fundraising strategy, we help organisations make better decisions across the full supporter lifecycle.

Samuel

Fondsenwerving specialist @ Visser & Verhoeven