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Covenant House Vancouver

Covenant House Vancouver Uses Target Analytics to Boost Participation in Annual Fund and Discover New Major Giving Prospects

Covenant House Vancouver is a crisis intervention center that provides food, shelter, clothing, and counseling to young people aged 16 – 24 who have either willingly fled physical, emotional, and/or sexual abuse or have been forced from their homes. In response to the enormity and severity of the issues facing youth, Covenant House has developed three core services: Community Support Services, which provides street outreach and a daily, non-residential, drop-in program; a 54-bed, 24-hour crisis shelter; and Rights of Passage, a 6 – 24 month transitional living program. These core services are supported by several in-house programs designed to provide each young person with a “one-stop shop” approach to leaving the streets and achieving independence.

Challenge

During its early years of operation, Covenant House Vancouver was primarily privately funded and relied heavily on the generosity of approximately 7,200 individuals and organizations to support its programs. However, steady growth intensified the need to cultivate more donors.

Although Covenant House Vancouver was already running a capital campaign, it had not invested significant resources in getting to know its constituents. “We had a small development staff and a very large database consisting of 90,000 potential donors whom we didn’t know much about,” said Janice Boyle, director of development and communications. “It was clear that we needed an efficient way to connect with these donors to build stronger relationships and raise more money.”

Solution

In 2005, Covenant House Vancouver chose ProspectPoint, a custom modeling service from Target Analytics, to analyze the donors in its database and provide a targeted plan for cultivating support. One of the key factors in their decision was the fact that ProspectPoint would work seamlessly with the organization’s fundraising software, The Raiser’s Edge.

“We were familiar with The Raiser’s Edge and knew we wanted to purchase the complete solution from Blackbaud,” said Janice. “The ability to combine additional data on donors provided by an outside service with information we already knew was critical.”

Since 2005, Covenant House Vancouver has continued to utilize services from Target Analytics to bolster their giving programs.

Results

For their first project in 2005, Covenant House Vancouver used Target Analytics to augment their efforts in their annual fund and major gift programs. First, Janice’s team used the ProspectPoint to develop a list of top prospects and targeted lapsed donors with an annual fund mailing. The usual response rate from past direct mail campaigns was 1 percent, and the average gift was $35. This time, Janice was able to use the ProspectPoint scores to determine more accurate target gift ranges — raising the response rate to 5.5% and almost doubling the average gift to $67.

Also in 2005, ProspectPoint helped Covenant House Vancouver identify thousands of major gift prospects who were previously unknown to the organization. By prioritizing their efforts, major giving at Covenant House Vancouver has increased by more than 50% in one year — from $374,000 to $525,000.

Lastly in 2005, Covenant House Vancouver discovered that when they sent their annual report to identified individuals who had high giving scores, they converted 26 annual givers into major givers. The giving from this group of supporters grew from $255 in the year before to $75,914 that year. The organization repeated this action in 2006 and converted 14 supporters into major givers. The gifts from the 2006 group grew from $465 to $39,115 the following year.

Since then, Covenant House Vancouver’s database has grown by 60,000 individuals. Janice and her team felt they needed new giving models and scores on everyone in their database. “The very act of using the results from the screening will in fact change the profiles of your donors over time,” said Janice. Since the information was incredibly effective the first time around, and since they had even more data three years later, they wanted a more accurate picture by catching any changes in giving trends over three years. Once again, they turned to Target Analytics and ProspectPoint custom predictive modeling.

Target Analytics helped Covenant House Vancouver develop a monthly giving likelihood model and used the results in May, 2009, to send an appeal to almost 10,000 high-scoring monthly donors. That campaign resulted in a record number of 240 sign-ups and a net growth of about 225 new donors. This equated to a five percent growth in number of donors and a four percent increase in dollars — all in one month.

Next year, Janice and her team plan to complete two conversion mailings and two upgrade mailings based on their ProspectPoint monthly giving scores.

“Investing in Target Analytics custom modeling services once every three years is a ‘no-brainer.’ When you look what you can leverage from the project, the cost is insignificant.”

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Serving the nonprofit, charitable giving, and education communities for more than 35 years, Blackbaud (NASDAQ:BLKB) combines technology solutions and expertise to help organizations achieve their missions. Blackbaud works in over 60 countries to support more than 35,000 customers, including nonprofits, K–12 private and higher education institutions, healthcare organizations, foundations, and other charitable giving entities, and corporations.

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