All for One: Internal Collaboration Leads to Increase in Fundraising Revenue, Memberships

CHALLENGE

The Detroit Zoological Society demonstrates extraordinary leadership in conservation, animal welfare, education and environmental sustainability. The organization was actively trying to grow direct donor support for programs by including Zoo members in fundraising appeals, but was not seeing positive results.

The hiccup was a lack of understanding of members’ perspectives regarding the Zoo, when they were most likely to donate and what motivated them to do so. Another issue was a need to identify how to capture and leverage the right emotion with the most-likely-to-give members.

The challenges were compounded based on the fact that departments at the Zoo worked in silos, leading to a lack of collaborative goal-setting that was essential to their efforts to enhance donor support through their membership. 

Our goal was to break down operational silos that separated the Zoo’s membership and fundraising departments and help both groups discover that greater success would come through collaborating beyond their individual audiences, methods, messages, budgets and goals.

SOLUTION

We researched Zoo members on file, which provided insights into membership renewal patterns and when, during a certain time period, members were most excited about the Zoo. In addition, we analyzed past annual fund campaigns, looking at performance by audience segment — one being individual donors and the other being members.

We also reviewed past communications to member and donor audiences and discovered that the messaging did not hone in on these renewal patterns or the philanthropic drivers that led to donations. Through our analysis, we also discovered a distinct moment when members’ commitment to the Zoo tended to drop.

All these insights provided us with a clearer route toward greater success for the membership and fundraising departments in the form of integrated communications that aimed to meet each department’s goals. As a result, fundraising gifts increased, members were more philanthropic about their membership and the donor acquisition funnel was optimized.

RESULTS

Our unified marketing approach brought together the two departments and increased their overall success, generating these transformative and sustainable results:

• More than 8,500 gifts from members were added in the first year. This generated a significant increase in gross fundraising revenue.
• We increased member retention by 10% year over year.
• We addressed key elements of the donor acquisition funnel to provide a reliable and consistent pool of prospective donors that can be accessed and motivated in a cost-efficient manner.
• Expenses related to printing and mailing fundraising communications were reduced by more than 65%.
• We brought together two powerful teams under a single banner with longer-term benefits to the overall member/donor lifecycle, which also increased membership retention and the size of the donor funnel.