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In 2023, our client, a US-based nonprofit organization, engaged Slalom to help them enhance their ability to raise funds that would allow them to better serve and represent their community with performing arts. The organization’s main goal was to deploy increased and improved data analytics and research funding to expand their pipeline in terms of volume, prospects and diversity of donors. Historically donor screenings were static, acting only as a fixed snapshot in a moment of time leading to outdated information and data inaccuracies. 

After a ten-week partnership, Slalom helped our client develop a customized scoring model for propensity to donate - a system of prospect scoring that gave the organization a clear picture of their current donors’ capacity, helps them uncover new prospects from tens of thousands of first-time ticket buyers, and helps them effectively prioritize those donors and prospects for leadership and front-line fundraising teams.   

At the conclusion of the engagement, the Slalom team successfully designed and deployed a machine-learning model built on AWS that assigns a score ranging from 1 to 10. This score predicts the likelihood that an individual will make a ‘major’ donation. The model considers various factors, including demographic data, behavioral patterns, and historical contributions, donations, and interactions with our client.  

The data was analyzed in RedShift and then loaded into Tessiture, yielding the following results:  

• Over 1,500 constituents were classified as ‘major donors’ with a score of 5-10.  

• Over 1,000 of these donors were net new prospects, having never donated $15K or more in the past.  

These 1.8K+ prospects became the focus for the organization’s front-line fundraising team, with priority given to those with higher scores.  

While it’s still early, frontline fundraisers are actively managing their prospects and currently, fewer than 15% of these plans remain in the qualification/unacquainted stage, while over 150 are in an active stage. The organization has successfully disqualified over 125 prospects, either temporarily or permanently. Among the 73 fundraising plans with specified goal amounts, the total reaches $3.77 million, with more than 80% listed at or above the $25K level and in Q2 of 2024, the organization made the first five score-based donation requests, totaling over $70,000. 

Interested in learning how your organization solve business challenges with Amazon Web Services? Looking for a trusted partner to help you along the way? Reach out to Slalom to learn more today.