Elevating Philanthropy: The Role of Analytics in Personalizing Donor Journeys and Maximizing Giving

Why Is an Incentives Program Important?

Incentives are a way to encourage consumers to increase their engagement in making healthy lifestyle choices. Members and patients who are offered an incentive are more likely to complete a wellness visit, maintain a healthy lifestyle, or manage their conditions.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has developed guidelines on Rewards and Incentives Programs (RI Programs) due to their increased use and positive correlation to improved health outcomes. These guidelines are applicable today and enable Medicare Advantage Organizations (MAOs) and other organizations to offer health-driven incentives programs that may be applied to an expanded list of health-related services and activities. A popular incentives program is offering gift cards to members upon completion of certain activities.

Using Analytics to Increase Giving

Analytics allow organizations to be strategic with their outreach. Rather than soliciting gifts from a large, nondescript group of people, they can use data to identify people most likely to donate. Then, they can strategically focus donor outreach efforts on those cohorts.

The Texas A&M Foundation used this approach and screened 62,000 prospective donors using a predictive model, which identified one-third of the donors as good candidates. Using this model, the Foundation was able to strategically target their campaign, yielding a seven-figure gift amount.

This ability to screen donors prior to outreach can help organizations allocate resources in a more strategic way and ensure that efforts are focused on donors with a higher likelihood to respond, which yields a higher return.

This is especially beneficial for organizations in:

• Education (for alumni, faculty and staff, and current donors)
• Healthcare (for patients, current donors, employees, and community members)
• Nonprofit (for current donors and community members)

Predictive models can also be applied to new groups to identify unknown value from people who haven’t been reached in the past. According to Rapid Insight, the Whitney Museum of American Art used this approach to generate a $10,000 gift from a donor who they otherwise would not have contacted.

Without analytics, organizations allocate unnecessary time and resources to uncover valuable targets within a population, with no true forecast of their potential value.

Using Analytics to Personalize Donor Journeys

Analytics also enable organizations to use specific materials and channels when soliciting gifts across different populations. In the past, entire populations received the same type of solicitation letter, with a single option for responding. This doesn’t consider differences in content and channel preferences among members of the same population.

Now, for individual donors or prospects, organizations can identify the most successful style of content, design, and the channel it is delivered. They can then use these insights to deliver donor-specific material through a relevant platform.

Analytics can also help organizations plan the timing of their outreach. By identifying seasonality trends in gifts, campaign timelines can be adjusted to launch during times that are historically most profitable. This can be done at the individual donor level or full campaign level, based on the scope.

Who Is Graphcom?

Graphcom is an unconventional marketing firm: equal parts creative studio and production powerhouse. We help tell stories that change markets, minds, and behaviors— and we do it all in-house, from strategy and branding, to content, design, printing, distribution, and data analytics.

We work with many healthcare, education, and nonprofit organizations on donor acquisition, and we have the appropriate HIPAA/HITECH-compliance measures in place that guarantee data security.

We use the Cross Industry Standards for Data Mining (CRISP-DM) methodology when approaching all analytics projects.