Sorting donors by gallery visits, concert tickets, or membership level may give you clean, easy categories. But this can also hide a donor who is quietly engaged across all three, and whose full relationship is worth more than a single label can suggest.
Who
The Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) is a global museum celebrating musical traditions and instruments from cultures around the world. In addition to vast galleries with hundreds of exhibits, MIM features a music theater presenting over 350 concerts each year. The MIM team pulled roughly 100,000 constituents from its database to analyze donors who connect with the museum in different ways: as gallery visitors, families who participate in educational programs, or concertgoers to the MIM Music Theater including those who are members of MIM’s Producer’s Circle. For years, MIM’s fundraising team treated each of those touchpoints as its own identity, with little sense of how they connected to each other.
The Challenge
That assumption played out differently in each campaign. In the fall appeal, it meant splitting donors into museum visitors and concert attendees based on manual review of past results, not a full view of behavior across the whole donor base. That review could describe what had already happened. It couldn’t show who was quietly engaged in a channel the segmentation wasn’t built to see. In the Producer’s Circle campaign, it meant treating theater support as the whole relationship, with no established way to show these donors how their giving connected to anything beyond the stage, including the education programs it also helped fund.
Two different campaigns, one shared problem: MIM couldn’t tell if the one way they knew a donor was the whole relationship, or just part of it.
Why EverTrue
MIM ran two separate tests of that idea, once with data, once with outreach.
With DonorSearch by EverTrue, the team structured four years of appeal data into a single model, layered in donor screening and giving ratings, and let predictive scoring rank the full constituent base by likelihood to give, replacing the old visitor/attendee split with one unified appeal centered on the museum’s Artist Residency program, an educational program that takes place in the MIM Music Theater
With ThankView by EverTrue, they applied the same thinking to the Producer’s Circle, whose relationship with the museum had centered on theater support. The team broke from the standard playbook: a longer, speech-free video of photography and music, no ask included, built specifically to show these donors what their support was funding beyond typical evening concerts. ThankView’s Salesforce integration automatically logged every open, view, and click back to the donor’s Contact or Lead record, so gift officers could see high engagement the moment it happened and act on it right away.
The Results
The 2025 fall appeal, rebuilt on predictive modeling instead of assumption, delivered:
- 94% increase in revenue
- 59% increase in gifts
- 18% increase in average gift size
- $20,000 largest gift
- Roughly 25,000 constituents ranked by likelihood to give
The Producer’s Circle Jazz Stewardship campaign, sent through ThankView to 226 high-value constituents with no ask attached, delivered:
- 83% open rate
- 82% average view percentage
- ~28% click-through rate
- 22% of recipients watched the video in full
The model’s most valuable discovery wasn’t a number, it was an assumption it broke. MIM had always marketed frequent concertgoers as theater patrons first. The model showed the opposite: concert ticket history predicted giving more strongly than membership level, proof this audience was already invested beyond the stage. That same shift let the team include higher-level donors they’d historically held back, assuming a mass mailing wouldn’t resonate. One of them gave the largest gift the fall appeal has ever generated: $20,000.
“I was so nervous, holding my breath, but it was really exciting to see the data speak for itself, resulting in our most successful fall appeal.” — Megan Bevill, Senior Philanthropy Specialist, Musical Instrument Museum
That’s the answer to the question both efforts were asking, run separately, aimed at different audiences, but pointed at the same thing: the entry point was never the whole donor. When MIM stopped treating it that way, in the data and in the outreach, the generosity that was already there finally had a way to show up.