Two million donor records, freshly migrated into a new CRM, sitting there. The question wasn’t whether the Wildlife Conservation Society had the data. It was whether anyone could find the donors hiding inside it.
Who
The Wildlife Conservation Society runs four New York City zoos and the New York Aquarium, drawing more than four million visitors a year, and operates conservation programs in 70 countries around the world. Their prospect research lead had used DonorSearch by EverTrue in a previous role and brought the recommendation with them when they joined WCS.
The Challenge
In 2019, WCS migrated its donor data to Salesforce, converting more than two million records in the process. That migration raised an obvious question: with a donor base that size, how many qualified major donor prospects were sitting inside it already, unidentified? The team didn’t have a dedicated tool for screening a database at that scale, and buried in those two million records were lapsed donors and former society members nobody knew to look for.
Why EverTrue
WCS ran a full screening of all two million records through DonorSearch CORE, and the turnaround stood out immediately.
“We did a screening of over 2 million records, and they were terrific in getting those results back to us.” — Wildlife Conservation Society
The screening results flowed directly into Salesforce, so fundraisers could see prospect and donor insight right where they already worked, without a separate system to check. And the results didn’t just point to new names. They gave WCS a clearer read on the supporters already in their file, including lapsed donors and former members worth approaching again.
The Results
Since that first screening, WCS has set a goal of identifying 800 new major donor prospects every year, sourced from data already sitting in their own database, and has consistently hit that number.
“We have found a tremendous amount of value in what we already had in our database… lapsed donors and former members of the Wildlife Conservation Society that we could look to approach again, to bring back into the fold.” — Wildlife Conservation Society
That combination, deep data on prospects already in their universe plus a screening process fast enough to act on, is what turned a routine CRM migration into an ongoing pipeline of major donor prospects. As their team put it, DonorSearch approaches prospect research from a fundraiser’s perspective, built by people who understand what it actually takes to reach a goal.