How Samaritans Raised £119k From a 57% Smaller Winter Appeal List With Dataro

After years of disparate, oversized segment lists, the Samaritans team trusted Dataro’s rankings to shrink the mailing file, keep income on target, and reduce spend.

Samaritans connects people in crisis with trained volunteers, offering support 24/7 through their helpline, email, and local branches to prevent suicide and provide a listening ear to anyone in distress.

Individual Giving is one of the smallest teams in the organisation, yet it contributes almost 25% of Samaritans’ total income from one-off donations and regular giving. The winter appeal is the team’s biggest fundraising moment of the year and sits at the centre of the team’s direct mail programme.

Multiple inconsistent segments complicated list-building and reporting

When Jade Deeley, Head of Individual Giving, joined Samaritans four years ago, the team had a strong segmentation list with many add-ons. The winter campaign segmentation combined more and more lists each year, with each expansion introducing inconsistency: some segments had only a handful of people, while others had hundreds or thousands. That volume and variety of segments complicated list-building and reporting. “The team couldn’t report on performance effectively because some of the segments would have 10 people and then another one would have 1200,” explained Jade.

The team had to keep checking merge fields, print setup and campaign codes to verify each segment’s accuracy, adding operational burden. And when the appeal performed well, the team could not easily tell which segment logic drove the outcome versus which underperformed.

Trusting Dataro’s rankings instead of topping them up

When Samaritans first partnered with Dataro two years ago, the team used Dataro to expand their mailing file, adding modelled recommendations on top of their own selections.

Once the Dataro-sourced segment performed year over year, the team realised Dataro didn’t just identify the right people to add. It also exposed how many low-propensity donors remained in the file who they shouldn’t be mailing.

For the 2026 winter appeal, the team moved away from a fallback approach and cut the mail file to only Dataro’s predicted high-propensity donors. Instead of mailing around 35,000 people as they had the year before, they reduced to a 15,000-donor file. The goal: keep the right people in front of the right ask and stop mailing donors who were unlikely to respond. “We don’t need to use our segment as a safety net; we needed to trust in Dataro’s predictions,” said Jade.

The shift also simplified collaboration with internal stakeholders. When files needed to be adjusted, the team could de-prioritize the bottom of the rankings instead of re-analyzing a complicated multi-segment structure.

Hitting the winter appeal target with a much smaller file

Samaritans raised £119,692 from the 57% smaller direct mail file against a target of £113,520. By mailing 15,000 donors instead of last year’s 35,000, the team recouped £36,200 in total campaign savings.

“Excluding 20,000 supporters from an appeal can feel drastic, but it doesn't mean we're ignoring them. It means we recognise we need to do better at engaging and inspiring them in different ways,” explained Jade. The Individual Giving team is looking at how they tailor supporter journeys so that less responsive supporters are still well stewarded, with asks that are better timed and paced for them.

Within Dataro’s model, response rates peaked among the highest-ranked donors, as predicted. The top 1,000 ranked donors delivered the highest net return, with the bottom ranking tapering to minimal losses.

With a more predictable, clearer view of campaign performance, the time spent on creative sign-off and data checks dropped. “We know that we’re contacting people that want to support Samaritans, so our team can be a bit more adventurous with the creative. The topics that we go for can push beyond repeating the ‘safe’ message because we know that content will be shown to a captive audience,” explained Jade.

Dataro’s model also made it easier to manage overlap with other fundraising activity. The team can compare audiences for different campaigns and make intelligent trade-offs, in particular prioritizing contacts across channels for parallel campaigns across legacy and major donors.

What’s next: tailored journeys

The team has moved from building ever-larger files to trusting the model to mail fewer donors while increasing income. Looking ahead, the team is working on building tailored journeys for how they use Dataro’s recommendations. For example, adjusting asks for upgrade risk, churn risk and reactivation opportunities in more systematic always-on campaigns.

“Dataro’s platform is all very people-friendly. And I think that human approach has helped introduce predictive insights in a way that fits our business and fundraising experience,” concluded Jade.