Kathleen Contrino knew that her client had a problem on his hands. She was meeting with the director
of development for a $9 million human services organization that provided assistance with home
heating to low-income households. He explained to Contrino that his organization was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on direct mail, but getting very few responses. In fact, their most recent mailing to 1.2 million prospects yielded a response rate of only 0.3%.

Contrino, owner and founder of Contrino Direct Marketing, Inc., a full-service marketing communications firm specializing in nonprofit direct mail fundraising, had an idea. She advised the director of development to consider custom modeling as a way to identify the best prospects from their database of 1.2 million. “I’m a firm advocate of data modeling and knew that it would help this organization,” said Contrino.

In the past, the $9 million human services organization had received demographic profiling from a vendor, but it only yielded aggregate financial indicators by ZIP code — there was no estimate of an individual’s likelihood to make a donation. After learning more, the client was convinced that custom modeling was the best approach for identifying prospects both likely and capable of giving.

Contrino assisted the client in researching his options. “We were quite thorough in interviewing
numerous companies that perform prospect screening,” said Contrino. “It was after a face-to-face meeting with Lawrence Henze that we chose Blackbaud Analytics.” A former director of development, Henze was now the managing director of Blackbaud Analytics and brought over a decade of experience in nonprofit analytics to the table. “He was much more of a hands-on expert about the prospect screening process and communicated better than the others I spoke with.”

Blackbaud Analytics built a custom model, unique to the human services organization, and the results
pointed to 200,000 prospects with a high propensity and capacity to respond to an annual appeal. Based on the donor characteristics identified by Blackbaud Analytics, Contrino Direct Marketing designed a new, customized appeal.

The client took a calculated risk by mailing to 1 million fewer households than before, but his bold
move paid off. Contrino reported that mailing to only 200,000 top prospects generated over 10,000 new donations, versus the 3,000 donations received from a mass mailing to over 1.2 million prospects! As a result of the smaller, targeted mailing, the organization raised over $1 million, which was four times its costs (including postage, printing, creative services and Blackbaud Analytics fees), and was able to acquire valuable new donors.

According to Contrino, “Data modeling is a worthwhile investment for many nonprofits. I find the work Blackbaud Analytics does to be exceptional, and I recommend their service to my clients.”