A lot of million-dollar donors didn’t start out as obvious candidates. Somewhere in most donor files sits a $25 gift that was actually the first sign of something much bigger.
Who
The Nature Conservancy is the largest environmental nonprofit in the world, working to ensure nature and people can thrive together. Its prospect development team manages a donor base that’s both large and decentralized, spread across causes, geographies, and levels of giving.
The Challenge
As a cause-based organization, The Nature Conservancy’s biggest challenge wasn’t finding donors, it was understanding them: what they actually cared about, and why. A $25 gift doesn’t announce what it might become, but plenty of the organization’s million-dollar donors started out giving just $25. Across a donor base that size, the team risked underinvesting in relationships that had real long-term potential, and giving too little attention to the people who’d eventually matter most.
Why EverTrue
The Nature Conservancy has worked with DonorSearch by EverTrue since close to its earliest days, and what’s kept the relationship going is as much about the people as the product. The team uses DonorSearch CORE’s wealth screening and profile tools, including Gift Search, to understand not just what a donor can give, but what they actually care about. Because people’s giving history tends to reveal their interests, that data has helped the team connect with prospects and donors around the causes that matter most to them.
“DonorSearch CORE’s scoring, and the way that they create those scores, has helped us tremendously in terms of surfacing prospects that we might otherwise disregard, or not focus the right amount of attention on, based upon small gifts.” — The Nature Conservancy
The Results
The Nature Conservancy could now look at its donor file differently. Instead of letting a $25 gift signal a low-priority donor, the team could use DonorSearch CORE to identify the people whose current giving didn’t tell the whole story.
“The value for us is that it typically only takes one or two new donors that we discover in an exercise to more than pay for the investment of the cost into the tool. And so after that, everything else is bonus. To me, that’s where the tremendous ROI comes from.” — The Nature Conservancy
For The Nature Conservancy, the value isn’t simply finding more prospects. It’s finding the prospects worth investing in before their giving history makes their potential obvious.
Sometimes, the donor who eventually gives seven figures starts with $25. DonorSearch helps the team see the possibility sooner.