Revamped Data Strategy For Unsolicited Arc New Member/Donor Appeal

Coarc is the Columbia County chapter of The Arc New York.  The organization does a tremendous, selfless job of serving and supporting Columbia residents with intellectual and developmental disabilities.  To learn more, please visit Coarc’s “Who We Are” page on their website.

As with many such New York State not-for-profit social services entities, to support its essential programming, Coarc must be creative and diligent with securing funding which, comes thankfully, from multiple directions.  Here are some ARC funding examples: the U.S. Government, the State (of New York), the County, private and public foundations, annual events (e.g. golf outings, auctions, galas, etc.), onsite revenue generating enterprises [ref], online retail webstores , auxiliary groups or clubs or churches, and of course, local community support.

Cornerstone assists Coarc with local community support via direct mail.  This outreach is important for two reasons:  first, there’s a direct appeal to the community to create awareness that Coarc is here, supporting citizens in need, and, that help is available.  Second, there’s the prime directive of soliciting new, grassroots donors via the direct membership appeal.

Sending such unsolicited membership appeals is not uncommon for most similarly sized 501(c)(3) organizations, it’s often considered a “crapshoot” because of the nature of unsolicited data.  Abiding by the traditional wisdom, CRST would annually combine both recurring members, select new prospects or tagged records and then include a large, third-party, heavily qualified, sourced dataset of “philanthropically minded” households in Columbia County.  And, this approach worked fine until one year… it didn’t.

We didn’t know exactly why this stopped working — we only knew that the philanthropically tagged households stopped feeling highly charitable.  Perhaps we hit all the households that we could it with this set of criteria.  All we really knew was that the conventional approach now needed something unconventional.  To solicit memberships, we had to try something new.

Our revised strategy was to stop using any third-party data and use our our NYS Real Property data set, setting our own “wealth indicators”, householding, and then vetting and targeting residential properties located in proximity to Coarc facilities.  The datafilter requirements were carefully established, and we reviewed logistics with the real property data and didn’t just draw a 1-mile circle around each Coarc facility.  Ultimately, our sense was that homeowners within these select areas probably were aware of Coarc’s existence so we didn’t have to “sell” them on brand awareness.

Bottom line:  Cornerstone’s own list data for the annual membership appeal performed much better than rented third-party list names and addresses.  Our take-aways are these:  real property data works, and, if you aren’t getting the unsolicited appeal responses you expect, then get creative, but don’t give up.

For more information, please reach us at info@crst.net or call us at (845) 255-5722.