Most donors don’t leave because they had a bad experience. They leave because they stopped having any experience at all, no call, no note, nothing between the initial ask and the next one.
Who
Planned Parenthood North Central States (PPNCS) covers a five-state region across the Midwest: Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa, and the Dakotas. Its mid-level giving program serves donors giving between $1,000 and $10,000 a year, a group the organization calls its Friends for Good community, roughly 2,500 donors split across four gift officers. The program has been through a real shift over the past two years. Just months before adopting Signal by EverTrue, the team moved off a single shared spreadsheet that all four gift officers worked out of, and into individual portfolios for the first time.
The Challenge
Portfolios of 500 to 700 donors per gift officer meant a lot of mental math: who needs a next step, and when, without a system to check that against reality. People got missed. And most of the contact donors did get was purely solicitation-driven. Ask for a gift, thank them for it, then silence until the next ask. That pattern was hardest to break precisely when the team could least afford it, during a stretch of heavy turnover when PPNCS covered a full year-end cycle with just four people, and two of them were only six months into the job.
Why EverTrue
Signal gave PPNCS a way to build real, individualized paths for donors instead of running everyone through the same touch pattern. Outreach cadences meant every donor in a portfolio could be tracked against an actual plan, and managers could filter for anyone missing one and close the gap in seconds. That structure also let the team treat distinct donor segments differently for the first time. Donors with only a mailing address on file, no phone or email, were pulled out of PPNCS’s standard reactivation and stewardship cadences and given a track built specifically for them. Saved templates cut down on the copy-paste-and-edit routine gift officers used to run through their database.
The Results
- One veteran gift officer doubled the number of donor touches she completed in the first six months of the fiscal year compared to the same stretch the year before, even while the team covered year-end short-staffed. Revenue in her portfolio grew alongside the added touches.
- The first-ever mail-only donor stewardship cadence brought in gifts PPNCS hadn’t been chasing before, including a $50,000 reactivation from a donor who’d been lapsed for two to three years.
- Gifts made within 120 days of a Signal touchpoint were up 144.8% year to date over the same point the prior fiscal year, even before the year closed.
“We really have used Signal to completely reorient the work of our team, so much so that that’s basically just how we talk about our work now, and how we’re tracking all of our metrics.” — Kathryn Southard, Director of Leadership Annual Giving, Planned Parenthood North Central States
Portfolios that once lived in a shared spreadsheet, split across four people, now run on a plan built for each donor individually. And gift officers who used to spend their week just keeping up are starting to have something new: time to actually build the relationship, not just maintain it.