Annual Fundraising Revenue for Nonprofit Veterinary Clinics Increases by Nearly 30%

Challenge

Emancipet is a non-profit organization that operates veterinary clinics throughout Texas and Philadelphia. The organization provides specialized, affordable veterinary care to low-income pet owners by subsidizing roughly 20% of each pet visit through donor support. 

Despite providing a valuable service due to the rising cost of full-service veterinary care, broad-based fundraising results had been underwhelming. With a goal of using greater insights to understand who was using their services, evolve their messaging and fundraising approach, Emancipet leadership approached our team to reimagine their fundraising program. 

Solution

Emancipet had over 250,000 records in their donor database, but no insights to which ones to target for additional giving. We started with expanding their donor insights through attribute append and analysis to identify target personas. 

By updating their donor data file, we uncovered valuable insights that led to dramatic change to the fundraising strategy previously used. 

The main source of Emancipet’s fundraising revenue was through asking clinic patrons for a low-level gift at point-of-service (POS). Through our data analysis, we discovered that many of the POS donors were giving above the average gift, giving more frequently and they had a much higher capacity to give than the current belief at Emancipet. This knowledge allowed our team to create an entirely different fundraising strategy, audience targets and messaging plans to maximize the ROI of the existing fundraising budget. 

Results

In addition to producing valuable donor audience insights that will benefit all future fundraising efforts, Emancipet gained many other positive results from our efforts:

• Dramatically increased conversion of new POS donors through direct response.
• Increased direct response fundraising revenue by 27% in the first year.
• Guided the client through evolving their appeal messaging from an organizational focus to a more donor-centric approach.