State Children's Hospital Case Study
Membership Renewal
What We Did: We worked with a State Children's Hospital Foundation (SCH) that is a private, nonprofit institution, and the only pediatric medical center in their home state and also of the largest nationwide. We worked with SCH to increase their year-end appeal results through live outbound fundraising calls.
Due to the poor quality and results they experienced with past vendors, we tailored a result-driven plan which included our breakeven guarantee to ensure that they would not lose a dime. Our program with them ran for only one quarter so they could pull the plug if they received the same number of complaints as they did with their other vendor.
How We Did It: We ran four live outbound fundraising projects; an active in-state project, and an out-of-state project along with two lapsed donor projects.
We worked with SCH to craft a persuasive message based on the services they provide, their needs, special projects and programs. In addition, we incorporated our company’s best practices that have yielded results for clients in the past.
We accepted pledges with a solid commitment to a gift amount, and noted donors who were interested in contributing but did not want to commit to an amount over the telephone. For those interested donors who had not yet pledged, we sent an informational letter with a reply envelope. Because SCH was sensitive to low quality call complaints based on their previous experience, we made this change to our standard operation to make donors feel more comfortable and avoid agents being too aggressive while trying to secure pledges.
Results: We made more than 15,000 completed calls for the organization, and we received less than ten complaints which is a significant improvement from their previous vendor. We were also able to re-engage lapsed donors from as far back as 2002! The client was complimentary on our agents tone and the fact that we were sensitive to accents interfering with script delivery. (Example: we do not use southern agents to run a Midwest program and vice versa).
Between the four projects we ran, there was over $110,000 pledged from donors and 1,160 mail pieces were sent out to folks who were interested in giving. The in-state active donors had a pledge rate of over 26% with an average gift of $60 (compared to $40 in 2009).
Although the final fulfillment numbers are still pending, we conservatively expect SCH to gross over $90,000 as a result of our live outbound fundraising calls; which was above the original goal we projected of $30,000.
In the end, the client elected to move forward with our services again in the spring due to our success and ability to deliver results without offending their donor base.