A two-person development team can’t dedicate one person to major gifts, another to stewardship, and another to direct mail. Every appeal has to do all three jobs at once.
Who
The Acoustic Neuroma Association (ANA) supports patients and families navigating acoustic neuroma, a rare, noncancerous tumor that grows on the nerve connecting the ear to the brain. The organization runs lean: five full-time staff and one part-time, with just two people handling development for a donor base of roughly 700 to 800 people. There’s no dedicated segmentation specialist, no in-house print shop, and no team standing by to hand-personalize outreach. Whatever goes out depends on what those two people can build themselves.
The Challenge
Every appeal ANA sends has to do double duty: raise support and build trust in a small, tight-knit community where donors know the patients, know the board, and can tell a mass-produced, one-size-fits-all appeal from something written for them. With a two-person development shop, there was no capacity to customize outreach to hundreds of donors one at a time, and a generic appeal risked feeling like exactly what ANA isn’t: impersonal and disconnected from the patients whose stories are the reason the organization exists. ANA needed appeals that felt personal at the donor level, without a bigger team, a bigger budget, or a new design for every version.
Why EverTrue
ANA turned to Pledgemine by EverTrue to close that gap. Instead of one generic version of an appeal going out to the full list, Pledgemine let the team vary copy and imagery by who the donor is, without redesigning the piece each time. That meant ANA could keep doing what already worked: putting real board members front and center.
All of ANA’s board members, except for one recent addition brought on for a specific specialty, are acoustic neuroma patients themselves, and they’re willing to lend their names, their photos, and their stories to the organization’s mail. The summer appeal featured a past board president alongside a volunteer and a staff member, photographed together at a patient event. Pledgemine gave ANA a way to get that story into the right donor’s hands, formatted the right way, without the production lift of managing it by hand.
The Results
ANA’s direct mail has posted triple-digit ROI, appeal after appeal:
- Spring solicitation: 847% ROI, 3% response rate
- End-of-year appeal: 685% ROI, 3% response rate
- Summer appeal: 566% ROI within a month of launch, on a 1% response rate
ANA doesn’t even include suggested dollar amounts in its appeals, a tactic many organizations rely on to guide giving, yet the ROI holds anyway. Donors are simply giving, and giving well, because the piece in their hands feels like it was written for them.
“None of us in the office are acoustic neuroma patients, but all of our board members are. They’re very willing to lend their name and their story to what we’re doing.” — Matthew Balte, Development and Fundraising Lead, Acoustic Neuroma Association
For a team of two, that’s not a fluke. It’s proof that a small shop doesn’t need a bigger budget or a bigger staff to make donors feel known. It needs the right mail doing the work.