To say the least, we were thrilled!, said Elise Marquam-Jahns, director of special gifts for Twin Cities Public Television (TPT), upon receiving the results of her custom data modeling from Blackbaud Analytics. Prior to that moment, TPT could only rely on educated guesswork to determine who among their 110,000 current and lapsed members were most likely to make a planned or major gift. "Blackbaud Analytics" predictive modeling has enabled us to pinpoint our very best prospects so we can make far more effective use of our time and resources," she said.

Based in St. Paul, Minnesota, TPT's mission is to promote enlightened and active citizenship and to celebrate the richness and diversity of the region's cultural life by partnering with the community to create and distribute quality television programming and other services that inform, entertain and inspire.

Marquam-Jahns oversees planned giving and believed that there were strong planned giving candidates among their members, who typically join through on-air membership drives, telemarketing and direct mail. Her eagerness to jump-start TPT's planned giving program led her to Blackbaud Analytics.

"We were very intrigued by the predictive, custom modeling approach, especially since we're a public television station, many of our major, annual donors did not necessarily seem to fit the "standard model" of similar donors at other institutions," said Marquam-Jahns.

"We really felt that a system that analyzed our major, annual and planned giving donors would give us much more practical and useable data. And we were very interested to learn that Blackbaud Analytics could develop a model that would not only predict planned giving likelihood, but would also predict the likelihood of the donor giving a particular kind of planned gift," she said.

Using the results from their data modeling, Marquam-Jahns has identified TPT's top 200 prospects in the "planned giving likelihood" category. She and her team have added these individuals to their "important" mailing and event invitation lists and are meeting with these individuals to begin cultivating personal relationships with them.

In addition, Marquam-Jahns is conducting other planned gift marketing appeals based on the information from her Blackbaud Analytics data modeling. "We are also doing a specialized gift annuity mailing to 5,000 prospects," she said. "Half of the people selected for these mailings will include our top "gift annuity likelihood" prospects. We have also analyzed all of our major and mid-level annual giving donors to determine their planned gift likelihood and determine their annual gift dollar range. We are using the annual gift dollar range ranking to determine the amount of our ask in our renewal letters."

TPT's modeling went beyond planned giving prospects. "We have also run lists to find out our top annual giving prospects who are supporting the station but not giving at a major donor level," said Marquam- Jahns. "These people have become some of our key prospects for a large annual gift. Also, we have just completed a feasibility study for a major campaign, and the information on major donor prospects will be very helpful." Marquam-Jahns said a significant benefit of their data modeling is time-savings. "I'm not aware of a single nonprofit that has more resources, time and staff than needed to handle major gifts and planned giving work. With our limited resources and multiple responsibilities, it's essential to use time efficiently and effectively. Since major gift and planned giving work does not yield immediate results, it's even more important to have a way to determine our most likely donors. Blackbaud Analytics, data modeling has given us that way."