A recurring giving conversion call can’t rely on guesswork when team capacity is tight. Wilderness Society needed a repeatable way to choose who to call each month, and a simple workflow their team could run without adding operational drag.

Wilderness Society needed a safer way to pick which cash donors to call

The team wanted to grow regular giving, but broad call lists made results unpredictable.

Internally, it created uncertainty about whether the team was spending limited calling time on the right people.

Philosophically, it’s hard to justify donor outreach that feels like a gamble when every hour needs to count.

The team chose to use a ranked conversion score to focus each month’s outreach

Instead of selecting larger batches twice a year, Wilderness Society shifted to a monthly approach.

They used a conversion propensity score to identify the donors most likely to respond to a regular giving ask.

The workflow lived inside the CRM so the team could run it every month

Where it lives: inside Wilderness Society’s Blackbaud CRM.

What it produces: a ranked list of the top 250 active cash donors to prioritize for outreach.

How the team acts: Supporter Engagement specialists call the list each month to thank donors, share impact, and invite them to become a regular giver.

A smaller, more frequent call list helped conversions and kept ROI defensible

Over 5 months, Wilderness Society converted 48 new regular givers.

Across the monthly calling cadence, the regular giving conversion response rate increased from 6% to 11% on average.

Based on an assumption of 18 monthly gifts per new regular giver, the program was estimated to generate $14,172 in net income from monthly gifts.

The cost per acquisition for new regular givers was $137, and the estimated campaign ROI was 2.2x.