Royal Flying Doctor Service Victoria found a $5,000 major gift hiding in its tax appeal file

Royal Flying Doctor Service Victoria was sending the same appeal to every donor, with no clear way to tell who was likely to give or who could give at major gift levels. The 2020 Tax Appeal needed a sharper approach.

Working with Dataro, RFDS Victoria moved from blanket outreach to ranked decisions. Instead of mailing everyone the same way, the team trimmed low-likelihood donors from Wave 2 and added high-likelihood donors from elsewhere in the file. Same appeal. Smaller, better-chosen audience. More net revenue.

Key results

• $34,491 increase in net revenue

• 14 extra gifts over $500

• One extra gift over $5,000

• 13.8x ROI on the Dataro investment

Three decisions that changed the appeal

Who to focus on. Dataro scored every donor on their likelihood to give to the appeal. A score of 0.5 meant a donor was roughly 50% likely to respond. That gave RFDS Victoria a clear, ranked view of the file before any decisions about audience size or cost.

Who to engage right now. Wave 1 stayed broad. In Wave 2, the team cut the least likely givers and replaced them with higher-likelihood donors Dataro surfaced from elsewhere in the database. Audience size came down. Mailing costs came down with it. Net revenue went up.

What to do next. Dataro's scores closely matched actual response rates in the appeal. Donors ranked higher gave the majority of campaign revenue, which gave the team confidence to apply the same approach across future waves and programs.

Why it worked

RFM and other backward-looking methods tell you what donors did. Propensity scores tell you what donors are likely to do next. That shift, from habit-based segmentation to ranked decisions by likelihood, is what turned a routine tax appeal into one of the team's best results.

Precision wasn't about sending more. It was about sending less to the wrong people and more to the right ones.