When 75% of your fundraising staff gets laid off and you’re down to two people making calls, you don’t get to stop asking for donations. You just have to get a lot smarter about who you ask.
Who
The Smith Center for the Performing Arts is one of the only performing arts facilities in the Las Vegas metropolitan area, which means its donor base isn’t built from purchased lists or borrowed names. It’s built entirely from the people who already walk through its doors. Carol Hollatz, Senior Director of Annual Fund & Membership, has been fundraising for nearly two decades, and The Smith Center is the first organization where she’s never had to buy a list or ask anyone for a name to call. But when the pandemic closed the building for 18 months and cut the team down to a handful of people, that built-in advantage wasn’t enough on its own.
The Challenge
When the pandemic hit, 75% of staff got laid off. Just two or three people were left to make solicitation calls, and none of them were a dedicated researcher, nor had the role ever existed on staff. A grant writer could dig into a name here and there if something looked promising, but that was the extent of it. With that few people and that little time, the team needed to know exactly who to prioritize for a monthly gift and where to focus direct mail, without spending hours confirming it by hand.
That’s where DonorSearch Enhanced Core came in. For their customized package, The Smith Center chose the Acquisition, Sustainer, and Upgrade models, plus got the Most Likely to Raise (MLR) model included. The team could now see each model’s score for every donor, matching people to the specific fundraising strategies their team used without needing an analytics expert.
Why EverTrue
Carol met the EverTrue team at an AFP conference right after The Smith Center reopened, and what stuck with her wasn’t a pitch, it was the opposite. EverTrue assessed the size of her team and tailored the recommendation accordingly, rather than proposing a package beyond what a two-person team could realistically manage. That right-sized approach is what convinced Carol to move forward with Enhanced Core.
From there, Carol built a scoring package around exactly how The Smith Center fundraises: sustainer scores to identify monthly giving prospects, acquisition and MLR scores to prioritize who to reach with direct mail, and a screening cadence that runs new donors through DonorSearch every two weeks so the ones with the highest scores land straight into a portfolio for further research.
The Results
The precision showed up almost immediately. When an acquisition score and an MLR score both come back low, Carol shifts that outreach to email instead of mail, keeping the mail budget focused on donors most likely to respond.
The clearest proof came from a single email. The first message The Smith Center sent to its identified monthly-donor prospects generated enough revenue to cover the entire first year of DonorSearch Enhanced Core, on its own.
“This is fantastic. So then to layer on all the other stuff on top of that, it definitely is a great value. And helps us work smarter.” — Carol Hollatz, Senior Director of Annual Fund & Membership, The Smith Center
That foundation is what The Smith Center is building on now: a 15-year anniversary campaign and a new monthly giving program, The 2012 Club, named for the year the venue opened. Upgrade scores go straight to portfolio managers to surface names they might not have considered, and through five different database administrators over the years, the team has never had to rebuild its process from scratch.
As Carol put it, plenty of people still believe in The Smith Center’s mission. DonorSearch Enhanced Core is how a small team keeps finding them.